AT LAST - A VIBRATOR FOR MEN. DON’T LET THE GIRLS HAVE ALL THE FUN!

The latest figures show that men are finally getting into sex toys. Richard Grainger asks if a vibrator for your man is the perfect gift for Valentine’s Day, or is a male adult product still a little bit grubby.

We’ve all heard about boys’ toys - fast cars, performance motorbikes, and the latest communications gadgets, but male sex toys are rapidly becoming another massive market designed to give men outstanding pleasure in a variety of ways.

Stephen Hackett is a former bank manager turned website designer – nothing too sensational there. However, Hackett’s internet prowess, coupled with a repressed entrepreneurial spirit, led to the launch of Venus Sales Ltd., trading as Temptations Direct, on online supplier of adult products.

Founded in 2002, Temptations Direct started off as a small family enterprise operating out of a spare bedroom. The company now has an annual turnover of £400,000 and employs four members of staff at its new base in the Imex Centre, Redditch, Worcestershire.

Who framed Roger Rabbit?

Sales of sex toys for women have soared over the past decade, as they have increasingly become more comfortable talking openly about their use. The infamous episode from Sex and the City – referred to as The Turtle and the Hare - wherein Roger the rabbit vibrator received much exposure, challenged Ann Summers and other adult retail outlets to meet the demand for this new urge.

Depending on where you look, figures suggest that anywhere between one in three women up to as many as 90 per cent of women, own at least one sex toy.

Hackett believes that the huge growth in sales that the industry has seen in recent years, has actually been helped by the recession. “People are now making different choices”, says Hackett. “Instead of going out for a meal and a few drinks, they stay in with a bottle of wine, dress up, or whatever takes their fancy and experiment sexually with some of the terrific products that are on the market. It’s a very exciting trend, and demand is massive at the moment.”

However it was through the anonymity of the web, which permits the purchaser to sidestep the embarrassment of a shop purchase, that the market for adult products boomed.

In addition to market-leader Ann Summers, companies such as Temptations Direct, Passion8, and LoveHoney have enjoyed a year-on-year hike in sales for toys that appeal to women, couples and the new growth market – men.

However, while sex toys for women have historically aroused a respectable level of curiosity, products for men have always been considered as, well… rather grubby.

According to Nel Johnson, a sex therapist from Pembroke Dock, there is still a perception that a woman will use a toy to satisfy her needs impersonally and without the need to resort to an extra-marital affair. A man, on the other hand (pardon the pun) is perceived as using a toy because he cannot persuade a woman to have sex with him.

Men are reluctant to talk about sex toys, “Just try asking a bunch of blokes down the pub what’s their favourite masturbator and see what reaction you get”, says Johnson, “The silence will be deafening”.

So I did - but to be fair - not in South Wales where I feared the answer to this question, if indeed there was one, may involve sheep.

Instead, I held an impromptu and informal focus group in my local pub. Most of the men I surveyed denied any knowledge of their existence, although Marcus, an accountant from Macclesfield, admitted to tickling his scrotum with his wife’s vibrator on one occasion, when she was at the bridge club.

The Autoblow Blast - thumbs up from Bob, aged 74.

I was about to conclude that Johnson was right when Bob, from the Bramhall butcher’s shop, cleared his throat and quietly said, “I'm not a young guy at 74, and at my age it's difficult to get women to have sex -believe it or not. I read some Autoblow Blast reviews, and decided to buy one. I've had better blowjobs – that's for sure – but none given to me by a machine!”

Johnson was right about one thing – the silence was deafening.

I decided to find out what sort of devices were on offer to tempt men to put their toe in the water (so to speak) and had a look on the web. Here I found a veritable Pandora’s box of male toys to get him off and products to get him on.

A young Master Bator

From masturbators to sophisticated blowjob machines - such as the one endorsed by Bob; from authentic artificial vaginas such as the SnatchLite or the Seamen’s Penis Pump, to simpler devices such as cock rings, butt plugs, and sensual lubes. I even found The Fun Factory Cobre Libre - a vibrator designed for men, billed as the perfect gift for Valentine’s Day. And in keeping with other trends in the manufacturing economy, it’s no surprise that 70 per cent of these products are manufactured in China.

Still in the dark? - Well here's a Fleshlight - but don't try to
find your way home with it!

According to Hackett, male toys are no longer a taboo subject; they are imaginative, creative, and incredibly sensual. Male toy technology continues to advance rapidly as more money is pumped (literally) into a $15 billion market growing by 30 per cent each year.

Temptations Direct (www.temptationsdirect.co.uk) have published their top ten bestsellers for December 2011 and this year, for the first time, their best selling product was a toy aimed at men: The Animal Handy Vagina – three words that I would not have expected to have seen placed together in that order.

The rabbit vibrator, which over the years has won more pole positions than Michael Schumacher, was relegated to fourth place.

The full top ten is as follows:

The Animal Handy Vagina

1.         The Animal Handy Vagina

2.         ID Sensual Glide Lubricant

3.         Soft Bondage Set

4.         Jessica Rabbit Vibrator

5.         Sparkle Sex Toy Cleaner

6.         Multispeed Bully Boy Vibrator

7.         Screaming O RingO

8.         Super Slik Lub

9.         Bondage Tape

10.       Vibrating Oro Stimulator

"We've known for a long time that men enjoy using sex toys,” says Hackett, “the problem is getting them to admit to it. There still seems to be a shame element associated with a man owning and using such a toy."

Lubricants and toy cleaner were other unexpected top sellers for the Christmas period. Hackett explains, "The popularity of the lubricants doesn't entirely surprise me. We have been bestowing the virtues of a good quality lubricant for some time and it seems that our customers are taking on board our advice. Keeping your toy clean can help the toy to last longer and in these days of financial difficulties customers are looking to ensure their purchase lasts as long as possible. So it makes sense for our customers to buy toy cleaner".

Ah well, you can take the man out of the bank, but you can’t entirely take the bank out of the man.

Timeline

Time line:
This is a very quick example of a timeline...Time Line

COWBOYS AND INDIANS

RICHARD GRAINGER READS FROM HIS FORTHCOMING NOVEL:

COWBOYS AND INDIANS

Cowboys and Indians is a black comedy set in South Armagh during the Troubles. Double agent "Fishknife" has one final assignment to escape his past and pocket £5.5m

John Harris has unique skills. Aged 17 and disaffected with life, he opts for a career as an IRA terrorist. 

Diffident and cold, he soon becomes the perfect killing machine. Then he meets Ellen, the niece of the head of the PIRA and falls in love her. He is led to believe that she - and their child - were assassinated by Special Branch.

But when he finds out that he has been used and lied to, he becomes a double agent working for the MI6 sanctioned Force Research Unit.

Given the codename “Fishknife”; he becomes the harbinger for death and destruction across the province in a British Government sanctioned blood-fest.

But the Good Friday Agreement makes him redundant. He passes his time working as a Life Coach for former terrorists, writing erotic fiction under a pseudonym and his Saturday nights as a ‘70s disco DJ.

And then he receives the phone call he has been waiting for.

To claim the £5.5 million in a Gibraltar bank account, he must assassinate Sir John Stephenson, whose report is about to reveal who he is and expose the depths to which the British Government sunk during The Troubles.

Before, that is, they can assassinate him.

cowboys and indians by maverick writer

INDUSTRIAL ACTION SURVEY

The Public Sector industrial action has polarised the country in a manner not seen since Scargill and Thatcher locked horns in '84.


Should people with jobs and pensions go on strike to protect their own interests when there are millions who have neither a job nor a pension? We are facing maybe 10 years of austerity - where is the money going to come from? Have your say on the strike action.

Last Wednesday Jeremy Clarkson ruffled a few feathers on The One Show. What did you think of his comments? Please click on the link below (I finally managed to load it to my blog, but Word Press is still stubbornly resisting; it would have been quicker to hand write the survey 22 times and post it to each of you, but that's technology for you).

Thanks very much for doing this.

Yea right...


Thanks very much to all of the five of yis who contributed to this survey! And very little thanks to the rest of yis who couldn't be arsed! No Christmas pressies for you lot!


Anyway, enough of the vitriol; I mean haven't we all get enough to do with coursework, partying, buying Christmas pressies without filling in some silly feckin' survey that takes about 2 nano feckin'  seconds to do?


So here's a chart showing what the five of yis thought about hisself's comments on The One Show, and what yis think about the strikers themselves. Not very representative, mind, but at least it's job done.


Have a good one, and don't bother asking me to fill in yer feckin' survey next time!


By the way, this counts as a Christmas card, so don't expect to get another one.


PS. This post will probably fail me the course, but I've had to have some light relief after four feckin' hours of trying to get my voice onto the internet.

A thief in the night…

I unlock the front door to find a diminutive but devastatingly beautiful uniformed Crime Scene Investigator dangling her identity badge for me to inspect.

“I’d better check that”, I say, “you’re way too pretty to be a copper”. She smiles at me, as I usher her in.

Actually I don’t and she doesn’t – but I think it, and that at least means a valve for something approaching humour is loosening the anger I’ve lived with for the past 14 hours, since my life was turned upside down.

It only takes her a minute to conclude that there’s no point in dusting the place for prints or looking for smoldering cigarette butts or whatever forensic people do. It may be a crime scene, but as crime scenes go, it’s not worth circling the wagons for.

I tell her that her colleague, when he had called for my statement last night had told me to be very careful not to touch any door handles until they had been dusted. And how, when he left, he had grabbed the outer handle and pulled the front door shut behind him. She roars with laughter revealing a mouthful of metal fillings. I wonder if they’re copper.

Now, here’s a challenge for my Uclan cohort: let’s see how many crimes you can name that I was the victim of last night. And for a bonus point, add the recommended custodial sentence for each. First correct answer sent via Twitter, Facebook or email wins you a bottle of champagne.

I’d returned to my flat at around seven, having eaten my first solid meal for three days; spaghetti bolognaise, cooked by my girlfriend, Jane – delicious. I’m much too old to have a girlfriend, but partner…well, I don’t know…it just doesn’t sound right; makes us sound like a couple of raddled old queers.

Anyway, I digress.

I was in for the night, and so I lock the front door, finish a piece I was writing for Rugby World and was enjoying Dirty Harry and a hot chocolate when Jane rings. She was on the way back from her writing group and wanted to call in for a glass of wine. That’d be nice, I say, and when she arrives at 9.30, I unlock the door to let her in.

If she’d been intending to stay for any length of time, I’d have locked it behind her, but for reasons that I won’t bore you with, I knew that her visit would be brief.

We enter the living room, off the landing at the top of the stairs. I pour her a glass of wine and reluctantly swap Clint and his .44 Magnum  (…“I know what you're thinking. "Did he fire six shots or only five?" Well, to tell you the truth, in all this excitement I kind of lost track myself. But being as this is a .44 Magnum, the most powerful handgun in the world, and would blow your head clean off, you've got to ask yourself one question: Do I feel lucky? Well, do ya, punk?”  - again I digress) for Jeremy Paxman and University Challenge.

It’s a bit cold, so I go to the kitchen, which is next to the living room, turn the heating on and close the living room door – something I rarely do.

Mid-way through University Challenge we both hear a noise – or think we do. Being old, my hearing isn’t terrific - although there still are enough instances where I wish it was worse. I link my television to the stereo, and with a large speaker on either side of the room it throws sound about a bit, so naturally we attributed the curious noise we had noticed to the stereo.

Around 11.15, Jane goes to leave so I accompany her down the stairs and open the door.

“Where’s your car?” she asks.

My middle-aged toy - off to Eastern Europe

It’s a simple enough question but it my eyes won’t tell my brain that no amount of goggling will bring it back.

It has gone.

“Did you leave the keys in it?”

“No – I’m not stupid.”

“Sure?”

“Sure I’m sure or sure I’m not stupid?”

“Sure you’re sure?”

“Sure…”

“Did you leave them on the ledge inside the door?”

“No!”

Ditto the above sequence of questions.

We look in my bedroom; the key’s not there, and neither is my wallet. For a moment I think I may have left my wallet in the glove compartment but then remember I’d used my debit card to book a hotel room, replacing the wallet on the dresser beside my car keys and my watch…

“Shit! They’ve taken my fucking watch too…”

“You mean my fucking watch…”

Either way, the Georg Jensen £1000 silver watch has gone along with my keys and wallet.

I call the police and we stand and pathetically try to find some sort of logical explanation for what’s happened.

I mean, surely, someone didn’t walk in the front door, climb the stairs, go into my bedroom and help themselves to my car keys, wallet and watch. Her watch, Jane points out.

Shit! What if I’d opened the living room door as they were coming out of the bedroom? I would have been between them and the stairs, cutting off their escape route? What if they’d been carrying a knife or a gun? I mean, they must be pretty fucking desperate to have the balls to walk straight onto someone’s house, when they knew there were at least two people in the living room?

Maybe they were high on drugs? What if they had a knife or a gun and were high on drugs? Fuck me! One of us would have been killed, and it wouldn’t have been me I say bravely, now that the intruder’s gone.

We were lucky!

Or were we?

No…not lucky. I’m angry – mainly angry at myself for leaving the door unlocked and for being so fucking stupid as to fail to recognize that I was inviting a thief in the night to come in, enter my bedroom, heap themselves to my stuff and make off in my car.

I certainly won’t be making that mistake again!

THERE’S NO JOB LIKE A SNOW JOB

THERE’S NO JOB LIKE A SNOW JOB

Within 24 hours, I’ve had my dreams of being a successful magazine journalist shattered.

It’s nothing to do with efficacy; I believe I’ll get there in the end. It’s just the realization of what I’ll have to do to get there.

Now before you say that I’m much too old, too chunky (I refuse to call myself fat) and too dull to sleep my way to the top, that isn’t exactly what I mean.

This dissonance began with a visiting speaker at Uclan on Wednesday. Alumni of the university, Rob Crossan is now a successful freelancer specializing in travel writing. He had four years at Front magazine but managed to wean himself off “lads mags” and regularly gets features in the broadsheets.
Sounds great – if he can do it then so can I. Then what’s the problem?

The problem is that to be a travel writer you have to sell your soul to the devil. It works like this:
You come up with an idea for a story, which is finding a “peg” to visit some exotic location where you fancy a holiday; anywhere, really, other than Scotland or Wales. You then think of a really clever angle – or better still, six or seven clever angles so that you can sell your feature to six or seven different publications. Nothing wrong so far, is there?

Next, you get a commissioning editor to say: “Great – that would sit really well in our travel section!” You will, of course, somehow have to put those words into his mouth.

So off you go to that exotic location to research and write your commissioned piece at the publication’s expense? Wrong.

Very, very few publications will consider paying your expenses. Ever. Not even your bus fare home from their offices.

And your piece, brilliant though it may be, will earn you anywhere from £130 (e.g. TNT magazine) to £750 (e.g. The Times or Telegraph) so that’s not going to cover a fortnight in Cape Town.

To fund your trip, you will have to beg. You will have to go cap in hand to airlines, travel PR companies, tourist boards and blag the bits and pieces that will make your trip feasible without causing insolvency.

And in return for that, the airlines, resorts, restaurants, tourist guides, theme parks and anyone else who opens their doors to you free of charge, will expect you to write something about them; something nice about them.

The simplest way to do this is to add them to the “how to get there” footnote part of your piece. That’s works well for airlines, as it draws attention to a destination that travellers may not know about, and may open up a new market for them.

However, the problem is that if you say in your piece that the destination was awful and really no one should go there in a fair, objective and balanced manner, no one will buy a seat on the plane bound for your destination.
Furthermore, you
will seriously piss off the PR people, the country or region’s tourist board and anyone who felt the fallout of your wholly unbiased feature.

Let TripAdvisor do that, if you want to be a successful travel journalist – and by that I mean one who gets to go places at other people’s expense – you have to write what us referred to in the trade as a “snow job”. That is, to say how wonderful everything was and why everyone should spend their lives’ savings to go there.

So that’s travel writing out, then – I just can’t do that. I actually like to find things that are rubbish and write about them.  If I have a meal in a restaurant that is inedible and they service is dreadful, I cannot bring myself to praise it.

Well that’s part one of my disillusionment.

Now, for no better reason than I have to put it somewhere, I’m going to add a video clip of me grumpily reading some news.

I have to do this for the Digital Content part of my MA so it might as well go here as anywhere.
Please ignore the fact that it has absolutely no relevance to this blog and enjoy it for what it is – a very amateurish piece of multi-media.

Part two of my disillusionment tale will be coming right up. Enjoy.

Ricky Gervias. Love him or hate him.

Ricky Gervias. Love him or hate him.

Here are a few recent quotes from Ricky’s website:

“I love how me using "mong" to mean "div" or "gimp" (and explaining that 20 times) has become...” …become what, Ricky, a bit like Brucey’s ‘…nice to see you, to see you…nice’? A bit like Sir Bob imploring us to ‘…get yer f**king money out?’

‘"Ricky Gervais abuses Down's Syndrome children.’ Ha ha. Why children?”

Why indeed Ricky? You put the thought out there; you’d probably call it “the mong elephant in the room…or perhaps, the elephant in the mong room”.

‘Also a tweet that wasn't even mine is suddenly one of my "sick jokes"’. Did anyone laugh, Ricky? ‘Cos it certainly can’t have been one of yours if they did.

“I also love how everyone is trying to get in on it too. We'll definitely see some comedians on daytime telly discussing how terrible I am, then mentioning their upcoming gig that's not selling. Good luck to them though.” Ah, there’s no such thing as bad publicity, is there, Ricky? But they’re right about one thing – you are terrible, so anyone discussing you can’t be that bad. Definitely.

“I'm keeping out of it.” Bollox – you’re milking the publicity for all you’re worth!

“Now I understand that you can't please everyone with the things you say and nor should you try... but surely they have to report what I say accurately before they start to damn it?”  Well, yes, you do have a point there, Ricky. But that’s the press for you; accuracy never stands in the way of a good story. But actually although you may have been a teeny-weeny bit mis-quoted on something of absolutely no consequence, evidence of your use of the word “mong” is pretty watertight. Just have a look at the first quote from your own blog.

“Again that's the good thing about Twitter. It's documented.” Ah yes, it is. And the bad thing about Twitter is also that’s it’s documented.

“I should just say a thank you for the overwhelming support too. Means a lot.” Vanity, Ricky – pure vanity.

And that's another thing. All these people saying it's "disgusting" and "ban him from the telly"... They never liked me anyway. They couldn't have or they would understand.  Vanity…followed by paranoia. Hitler was misunderstood by people who didn’t like him too. And while I’m not comparing you to Hitler, Ricky – perish the thought - there are certain similarities: short, pompous, self-deluded, had a lot to say - none of which was remotely funny, especially if you were disabled or a “mong”…I could go on.

But hang on – do you seriously believe that there are people out there who don’t like you, Ricky? People who don’t find you amusing? People who consider that your extraordinary arrogance and the distain with which you treat your audience is less excusable than the use of a mildly controversial word? My girlfriend has a dog named “Mongo”; we sometimes shorten it to “Mong” and he’s not offended and he’s about as mongrel-oid as it’s possible to be.

And I don’t suppose anyone else would be have been had you not done your best to divert attention away from how unfunny you are by being so utterly provocative.

But you’re probably right – your distracters never liked you anyway. And as you say, they certainly can’t ban you. Why? Because you’re Ricky Gervias, of course, the indisputable, indispensible funny-man and comic genius.

But I’ll let you have the last word, Ricky:

“Still mustn't grumble.”