Revisiting Reviews

While adding some links to older reviews into a recent post, I started skimming back through them to refresh my memory. As I did this, I came to realize that over the years as things have changed – biologically and mentally – my love or hate for a couple of my toys has changed as well. These changes are inevitable I think, and I don’t want to just delete the old posts and redo them entirely, because I believe them to still be an honest response to how that toy made me feel at that time, in that body – not having that body now or any other changes that I’ve undergone do not invalidate that experience, and it could still be helpful to those who relate to that “past me.”

It does however get a little confusing when I’m talking now about my favorite or most-used toys, and I wind up linking to a post that describes me having been deeply unsatisfied with it at first. Conversely, some toys I was over the moon about almost a decade ago (good lord) I don’t even remember the last time I charged, thats how infrequently I even consider them.

So, here I want to take some space to refresh some old reviews. Part of me is always plagued with wanting to completely re-do my entire blog as my writing style evolves, but that would be too much of an undertaking, so let’s stick with just the major edits. I don’t want to write entire new 1000+ word pieces on them so in the same style as my Mini Review Round-Up, they’ll just each have little excerpts below.

Let’s start with the Womanizer Pro40 since it’s probably my biggest flip-flop. I started testing out air-pulse toys at a weird time for my body – I was struggling with traditional vibrators, my go-tos in that department weren’t pulling their weight anymore, and I was becoming really frustrated. Looking back, that frustration was fuelling and being fuelled by a big relationship/sex life/self-image issue (which unsurprisingly, doesn’t arouse me) and I was really becoming impacted by a worsening of pelvic pain and dysorgasmia – which fed back into poor self-image and sexual frustrations. One big circle of ugh. It’s a little bit of a miracle that anything could get me off at this time…

A lot of folks describe air-pulse toys as forcing out orgasms (and for some, thats a reason to dislike them) and while I didn’t feel like the Pro40 ripped an orgasm I was unwilling to give straight out of my body like a soul-snatcher – I still have to at least try to be having an orgasm – it did work when my other toys wouldn’t. I begrudgingly admitted this is in my original review, but made sure to note I did not like it.

Fast forward and it’s the first toy I reach for multiple nights a week, and I’m not pissed off about it anymore. It took a good long while mind you, but the Pro40 grew on me. Maybe I warmed up to it or maybe I just stopped trying to use anything else for so long that my body had forgotten that it ever even liked regular vibrators to begin with – I’ve lost what I was comparing it to – so I can’t be indignant over it anymore. Either way, the Pro40 is now my favorite. If you ask me what my most-used toy is, it’s that one. When other toys I’m trying to use aren’t getting me to the goal post, I pull out the Pro40. What’s more, almost every other air-pulse toy I’ve tried has failed to wow me in the same way the Pro40 eventually did, so it wasn’t a complete change-over from vibrators to this style of toy, it’s something very specific about the Pro40.

Is my mental state currently improved? Yes, and that being a contributing factor to how easily, quickly, or reliably I can climax when I want to is certainly a possibility. My libido stays high through thick and thin – it could be Armageddon and I’ll have decided that I’d like to go out with one last bang – but not being able to shut down my brain saying mean things to me in the middle of masturbating does indeed make things more difficult, so having that lessened is definitely going to have an affect. Is that the only thing that was making me dislike the Pro40 to begin with though? No, the issues I started having with pelvic pain have only worsened with time, and I still deal with a lot of negative self-talk and body-loathing in that arena. Throw in the loneliness of the pandemic and your run-of-the-mill depression and anxiety and I am still very not well… so I think things have just….changed. Bodies are weird, and they change over time. Which is fine. Me and the Pro40 are unlikely besties now.

My first real love was the Eroscillator. This toy carried me through probably a decade of near daily use, it was a true workhorse, and when I dropped my old one on the tile floor and busted the plastic housing I didn’t hesitate for a moment to replace it.

And then I basically didn’t use it ever again? I’m not entirely sure why – maybe I preferred something that didn’t need to be plugged in, or something of a smaller size I could shove under the covers easier. Maybe I just got in a rut of being too used to it and needed to shake things up – I did go from the most back-to-back orgasms I’ve ever had to struggling for just one. Whatever it was, the Eroscillator slowly sank lower and lower in bedside-drawer pile. I pulled it out a few months ago for the first time in literal years just to see what it was like again – it was fine, but not as mind-blowing as I used to find it so long ago. I’d still highly recommend it to anyone who inquired, it’s just no longer at the tippy-top of my own list.

Along with the Eroscillator, is the other big fave of the sex toy world (and many other worlds) – the Hitachi. I didn’t really rave about it so much as just explain it in my review, but I mentioned in other places that I was using it a lot and I used it to compare other toys to. When I first tried the original, before I even began reviewing, I wasn’t a huge fan of it – it was loud, cumbersome, and totally lacking in any nuance, like using a bulldozer for the job a hammer would do. I didn’t find it overpowering like some folks do, I just found it annoying. Later on I came around to it (when I had one in my possession and I figured why the hell not) and then bought the Rechargeable hoping that the upgraded features (cordless, more settings) would make me like it more. Those, and the differently-shaped head did help and I used it pretty frequently for a while, before it eventually dropped back off. I also pulled this out again a few weeks ago just to see what it was like now, and had less success than I did with the Eroscillator. I’m definitely not getting rid of it, but it’s no longer in any of my top spots.

So far these are my big three for drastic opinion changes. I’m hoping there won’t be too many more to come, but you never know!