Exhibit A

This is my second post for Smutathon 2018! Eight of us are spending 12 hours today furiously writing erotica, blogging about sex, taking filthy photos, and generally producing smut in all its glorious forms, to raise money for the Abortion Support Network. To find out more, to enter our sex toy raffle, and most importantly to donate to an excellent cause, click here!

Given the right set of circumstances, I am very enthusiastic about spanking people. It doesn’t turn me on, exactly, but it’s a fun, physically vigorous, and often surprisingly sociable activity, which creates all sorts of interesting sounds and skin marking. More to the point, people who volunteer (or ask) to be spanked tend to have very strong feelings on the subject – and respond in a vocally appreciative way when you hit the right spots.

I don’t have the same natural enthusiasm when it comes to face-slapping. Even though they’re essentially the same activity, looking someone in the eye before sharply slapping their cheek feels more personal and much more intimate than hitting them on the arse with a hand or paddle. In part, that’s because they often produce very different responses. You can see the tears forming after each stinging slap, and the thinner, more sensitive skin ensures that most people’s facial pain threshold is much lower, meaning that I naturally feel more tentative and cautious about hitting them there.

This is my first post for Smutathon 2018! Eight of us are spending 12 hours today furiously writing erotica, blogging about sex, taking filthy photos, and generally producing smut in all its glorious forms, to raise money for the Abortion Support Network. To find out more, to enter our sex toy raffle, and most importantly to donate to an excellent cause, click here!

When I was 14, I had a huge crush on a girl at school. I had the same huge crush on that same girl at 16 and 17 too, by which time we were also very close friends. Vanessa was that teen-nerd kryptonite blend of attractive, approachable, smart, cool, and kind; the more time we spent together, the higher the pedestal I mentally placed her upon.

It’s one of the core features of most people’s teenage experience to moon (and lust) after someone who feels tantalisingly out-of-reach. We’re still finding ourselves at that point in life; our bodies and feelings aren’t always aligned, as one leaps in front of the other and waits patiently for it to catch up. Many of us have to learn to love ourselves, which is doubly disconcerting when you’ve spent your entire childhood doing that unthinkingly. Feeling like you’re good enough at that point to catch the eye of someone you’ve already decided is a vision sent from some far-off heaven is…challenging.

So apparently it’s #AnalAugust! There seems something a little masochistic (sadistic?) about devoting a whole month to the celebration of anal sex at what is generally the hottest, sweatiest time of the year (in the Northern Hemisphere, anyway), but maybe that’s the point. Anal is meant to be sweaty. It’s meant to be filthy and dirty and take-your-breath-away intense – to leave you rolling away afterwards into sheets soaked from the exertion of two bodies locked together in something unavoidably primal.

On Thursday, I read this article by Kinkly, which offered a pretty useful guide to some of the best positions for penetrative anal sex. Unfortunately, despite taking care to use non-gendered language in the text, and to make no assumptions about either combinations of people or their respective roles, the article was illustrated with six images of masc. people penetrating femme ones. To their credit, Kinkly acknowledged that they could’ve done better with this, and I imagine at some point the pictures will get changed, but it got me reflecting on all the things I enjoy about receiving anal.

And yeah. It turned out that there were quite a lot. Perhaps unsurprisingly.

Last month I published two very enthusiastic reviews of the Satisfyer Pro G-Spot Rabbit, written by winners of my April sex toy fiesta.  Today it’s the turn of the Satisfyer Pro Traveler to step into the spotlight. I gave away four of these little pocket vibes in April, though at the time of writing I’ve only received three of the reviews – maybe the fourth person passed out from too many orgasms and hasn’t come round yet, who knows.

As with the Rabbit, all the vibes were won and tested by people who’ve never written about sex toys before. In fact, none of the three here are sex bloggers, which is one of the things that makes these perspectives so fresh and interesting; each one approached this with an open, curious mind, and I think their reviews reflect that.

Two months ago, I launched the Big Exhibit A Fucktoy Fiesta, in which I gave away a selection of Satisfyer vibrators to 1o lucky readers. I’ve run contests and prize draws before, but this one dwarfed them all in terms of interest and scale – 50 people put their names in the hat, all keen to get their hands on some top-quality swag, and I ended up mailing out over £600-worth of sex toys, thanks to the lovely folks at Satisfyer.

Entry into the draw was open to everyone…except for bloggers who already reviewed sex toys. That’s because the one thing I asked of the 10 winners was that they each write me a short piece about the toy, covering their experience of using it and giving an overall verdict on performance, quality, etc.

The idea was to gather a whole bunch of fresh perspectives on the Satisfyer range, but also to open up what can occasionally feel like a saturated and formulaic toy review market to some different voices. Several of the contest winners had no experience of vibrators beyond the Ann Summers rabbit, and hardly any of them were habitual sex toy users – getting their take on Satisfyer and its ‘cutting edge’ sex technology was always going to be a fun (and valuable) exercise.