I awoke to read Susie Bright’s Substack Electricity: Sex and Sparks, which posed a question of whether Susie had “ever experienced electricity during sex?”
It’s an interesting question and being the toy slut that I am, it is something I have a story about. I have used electric sex toys, however, the electric sex that I imagine has never been able to be attained… at least not that I know of, and this is that story…
Once upon a time, Eldorado Distribution, just having picked up the Tantus line, invited me to set up my wares and to unveil them to their wholesale customers. In the early Fall of 2002, I drove my chartreuse convertible Karmen Ghia packed with two big boxes of product from our warehouse in Colorado Springs to my first distribution warehouse show in Boulder, Colorado.
Choosing to work with distribution was a risky choice. We hadn’t known the "discounts" when we set up our pricing structure, so we really didn’t have the margins they expected. In addition, on top of margins, distributors expected you to drop even more points for sales. Distributors wanted to charge for pages in their catalog that showed your wares, and pay for being in their booths at trade events. These guidelines kept us in crisis for years; but if our mission was to mainstream silicone, we needed these partnerships. So we bit the bullet, bought plastic packages for big box stores and the distributors, which meant more cost, and in 2002 AMNE (Adult Manufactures of Novelties Expo), I opened our sales up. The very first distributor that brought us into their mix was Eldorado. Being that no one making silicone had sold in the channel before. We were taking a huge gamble.
Selling to the distributors clients was not like selling to well educated feminist boutiques as I was used to, and I was networking almost more with my sex toy making peers and Eldorado employees than I was with Eldorado’s customers. Connie, Eldorado’s Director of Sales back then, and Stephanie brought their customers to me, walked them by the products, but you could feel it, that we were the future, not the now. They weren’t used to spending that much money for a toy that didn’t have vibration.
The booths were lined up in a U shape configuration inside the warehouse, and I was on the tail end, right next to Duke who repped different small company’s goods. He had just picked up a new client and the owner of that company was debuting at the warehouse also . It was the lube company System Jo. Solomon, System Jo’s owner, was straight out of a corporate board room with his tailored suit. He was touting the size and weight of pallets of each of his products. If I felt awkward, I can only imagine what and how he felt pitching pallets to mom and pop stores.
It was in Boulder, at Eldorado’s Warehouse Sale, that I hit it off with Tom Stewart, who was CEO of Sportsheets. We’d been neighbors at the tradeshow before, but never spent much time talking. Boulder was a game changer for our relationship. Evenings in the bar and daytime in the warehouse. On the third day, the day after the late-night soiree, the day where everyone slept in except those vending, Tom and I got a chance to really walk the warehouse together and kibitz about sex toys.
I am a big sex toy fan. I love looking at toys and analyzing what the designers got right and what they got wrong. On plugs this is easy… most don’t have necks long enough to stay in because the designer doesn’t know about sphincter muscle bands. On other toys you quickly realize what the bad ideas are, but the good ones aren’t always as obvious and sometimes there are hidden gems that no one sees. Tom and I were having a looksee, sex toy designer to sex toy designer.
I don’t know what E-Stim products we were looking at, there weren’t many being distributed at the time, but I remember it was Tom who said “Electric sex— that’s the future.” Or something like that. And I cocked my head and wondered— was it? It seemed so cutting edge in a distributors warehouse where all the old school products were forward facing on the isle caps— tried and true sellers, boring disposables.
I came home after that show and thought a lot. I thought so much about Electric Stimulation that I started a file, an old school file in a manilla folder and on the folders label I wrote: I Sing the Body Electric. I reread Walt Whitman before labeling it to make certain my corrupting his title wouldn’t be offensive. I sat with the poetry and decided Whitman wouldn’t roll over in his grave. The words Whitman used to glorify the body shined
.
At my grandmother’s house growing up, every once in a while, she’d dig out her mother’s (d.1925) Violet Wand and give herself, and me, a scalp massage. My Great Grandmother Pauline had had cancer and the Violet Wand was a curative, made by US Violet Ray in San Francisco on Polk Street (formerly 710 Polk, but moved to 1038 Polk as was mentioned several times in their pamphlet).
I have the wand now and while I don’t plug in the cloth cord, which always reeked of ozone when you did, it is still a glorious family heirloom. Because I don’t plug it in, I really just enjoy its ambiance and the torn paper catalog of heads available prior to 1925: Rake Comb Electrode, Throat Internal Electrode, Rectal Electrode, Vaginal Electrode, Urethral Electrode, Throat External Electrode, Spinal Electrode, Vaginal Perforated Electrode, Single Eye Electrode, Double Eye Electrode, Cautery Electrode, Prostatic Electrode… the list goes on.
While not designed as a sex toy, there were so many insertable heads. While Pauline’s only came with 6 fairly generic heads, well one metal head that would make you go giddy-up, but 5 others that are mild, I can only imagine what the insertable heads looked like, and how they were used/ misused. If you can think of something sexually, you know someone else has done it.
But I had never seen or heard of the sex toy I imagined, I still haven’t.
Tens units got me thinking. I had one of those from a medical trade show I’d attended. They’d been for sale so I picked one up. The Ten’s unit was small and portable, it had wires you put pads on and then attached to your skin and when you turned it on, electrical pulses would surge gently, or not, depending on the setting. What if… I thought… what if a dildo had sensors and with each thrust soft or hard it could relay that pulse down to a pad on a harness against my groin so I could feel everything as I pegged someone. I get hot now just thinking of it.
How many times had I been strapping on, usually doggie style and as I held hips, my dick slipped out of it’s intended hole. I Sing the Body Electric would be a game changer… and not because someone wouldn’t have to clear their throat and tell me I had gotten carried away. I would feel EVERYTHING.
I would feel the tease, the stroking, the blowjobs, soft entrances, the hard pounding. All those currents, those electrical pulses, would build getting me juicier and juicier, higher and higher until mind blowing orgasm after orgasm would set me free. Except after I had stopped, I’d still have to withdrawal my member and oh the after orgasms residuals… YUM.
It would be a revolution.
All these years dildonics has been the next big thing for 20 some odd years now, but year after year it’s always aimed at vanilla sex. Men getting off to porn or women to the sound of their distant lover. The Body Electric Strap-on lives on in my dreams, a technology I could image but couldn’t conceive in a way that would be safe, or that I could produce cost effectively— if you can do it I’ll take a prototype… and maybe a couple percentage for the idea.
When you see a Sportsheets harness or buy a Bend Over Beginner Kit from Tantus you can think back to this story, cause this is where the relationships happened that brought those products to fruition. And the electrode strap-on lives on in my desires.
Read some incredible smart sexiness from Susie Bright.
Bottom’s up.