A Few of Our Favorite New Vibrators

May 14, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Buying a vibrator can be a tricky task — just because it looks cool in your friendly neighborhood lady-friendly sex toy store (or online) doesn’t mean it’ll be great once you get it home. Too strong, not strong enough, too complicated — picking a vibrator is almost as complicated as picking a man. Luckily, we’ve tried several out so you don’t have to. Here are a few of our recent favorites:

Lelo Ina: We appreciate the sleek, modernist design of this easy-to-use vibrator. (We, personally, are not huge fans of vibrators that try too hard to look like penises. When we want the real thing, we’ll have it, thanks.) This two-pronged model allows for simultaneous vaginal and clitoral stimulation, though we happen to prefer just letting the vibrator work its clitoral magic and then call it a day. This more than does the job, with lots of fast/slow variations as well as several different kinds of rhythmic pulse. The up/down/left/right buttons on the Mac-inspired white plastic handle are very easy to use, and we love that this is part of a new crop of vibrators that charge up instead of requiring batteries. We don’t even want to figure out how to get batteries anymore, and there’s nothing sadder than your vibrator running out of charge when you want it most. Did we mention this also comes in three gorgeous colors?

We-Vibe 3: This design is so different that it’s a little intimidating at first: What to do with this purple, U-shaped, vibrating silicone thing? Turns out it’s pretty smart. One end goes inside, one goes outside, and you get that magical vaginal/clitoral stimulation in a way that doesn’t feel too forced. And yes, there’s even plenty of room left inside you to allow this to be, as the instructions tell you, “worn while making love.” (Being small, we were skeptical, but, yay, technology!) It’s also chargeable and comes with a cute little remote that makes it fun for your partner even if he/she is just watching (and controlling) from the sidelines. Most importantly, it works. And it, too, comes in three classy colors, complete with travel case!

Filed Under: Feminism in the Bedroom Tagged With: , ,

Obama Campaign Targets Women: Thanks, Mr. Limbaugh!

March 15, 2012 By 2 Comments

The Obama campaign is launching a concerted effort this week to target women, The New York Times reports. And as long as this isn’t the kind of woman-targeting that involves trying super-hard to sell us yogurt, this seems like great news. Not because we love being focus-grouped, but because we love being listened to. And the fact that Obama’s handlers see an opportunity in this all-too-long conservative War on Women means that we’re winning.

Many have wondered why Rush Limbaugh’s recent attempt at slut-shaming law student/contraception rights superhero Sandra Fluke caused so much uproar. That is, they’ve wondered why this particular “mouth dump,” as Jon Stewart recently called Limbaugh’s regular diatribes, of all his disgusting mouth dumps, got so much attention. Was it because Fluke is a private citizen, as opposed to regular political targets like Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton? Maybe. But I suspect it’s because he was calling her a “slut” for wanting basic insurance coverage of contraception, something most women in America want. I think it’s because in calling her a slut, he was calling the vast majority of American women sluts. And we don’t love that.

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Filed Under: Activism: Anyone Can Do It, Being a Sexy Feminist, Feminism in the Bedroom Tagged With: , , , ,

Lady-Friendly Sex Toy Stores Across the U.S.

February 6, 2012 By 4 Comments

Move to a new city and you’ll have to find a new hair salon, dentist, gynecologist, massage therapist — and, more difficult than any of those, a great, classy, clean, comfortable place to buy your vibrators. As a public service, we compiled this list. Please let us know if there are more we should add — we can’t be everywhere at once!

Babeland (Seattle, Brooklyn, New York City)

Coco de Mer (Los Angeles)

The Pleasure Chest (Los Angeles)

Early to Bed (Chicago)

Eve’s Garden (New York City)

Forbidden Fruit (Austin, Texas)

Good Vibrations (San Francisco, Berkeley, and Oakland, Calif.; Brookline, Mass.)

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Guest Post: Why Feminists Need to Keep Talking About the Pill

January 19, 2012 By Leave a Comment

Writer Rachel Friedman (The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost) worries that we’re using the pill for purposes that go beyond birth control — and mean too much dependence on hormone-based drugs. We here at SexyFeminist are, of course, all for birth control because of its liberating effect it has on women’s lives, but we also think it’s always worth asking whether you’re on the right medication — or whether you need medication at all. (Intrauterine devices are so totally in now!) We urge you to hear her out.


The birth control pill used to have a very specific, very important goal: preventing pregnancy. The pill helped liberate our mothers.  It ushered in an era in which contraception was separate from the act of intercourse and almost single-handedly reconstructed the doctor/patient relationship.  With the advent of the pill, scores of empowered female patients arrived at their doctor’s office demanding the prescription they needed.

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Live Tweets from Feminist Boot Camp

January 5, 2012 By Leave a Comment

We’ll be live-Tweeting from Feminist Boot Camp today! The annual event, sponsored by Manifesta authors Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards’ Soapbox Inc., offers young women a week-long immersion in women’s issues. We’ll be covering a workshop by Your Daughter’s Bedroom author Joyce McFadden about mother/daughter sex talks.

Follow what we’ve got to say about it here: @TheSexyFeminist

Filed Under: Activism: Anyone Can Do It, Feminism in the Bedroom

Sexy Feminists Read: Jaclyn Friedman’s ‘What You Really Really Want’

December 6, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Jaclyn Friedman gives us the book we didn’t know we desperately needed with What You Really Really Want: The Smart Girl’s Shame-Free Guide to Sex and Safety. In it, she walks us step-by-step through why most of us have no idea what we actually want in bed and offers clear, revealing exercises to help us finally figure it out. We talked to her about making our sex lives more feminist, the prevalence of porn, and the value of submission and rape fantasies.

Your book is really about knowing what we want. Why is that so important?

I consider it an act of political resistance. We live in a culture that uses women’s sexuality to keep us malleable. Everybody wants to run women’s sexuality for their own interests. But you don’t have to access the book from that point. It also just creates a more satisfying sexual life. It’s not accidental that we don’t know. When I was doing talks on college campuses for Yes Means Yes [the anthology she edited with Feministing's Jessica Valenti], I started hearing this question phrased differently: How do I know what I want to say yes to? Themore I thought about that question the more I realized, yes. That is our problem.

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SF Talking Points: Boys Should Get HPV Vaccines, Mississippi Could Outlaw The Pill

November 1, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Boys can (and should!) get HPV vaccines, too: The CDC is now recommending that boys, as well as girls, get the much-debated, and in our opinion downright miraculous, human papillomavirus vaccine. Why this wasn’t the case from the start, we have no idea. HPV causes cervical cancer, yes, but also mouth and anal cancer. It’s transmitted via men, and most sexually active adults — the ones who were over 25 before the vaccine came out, since 25 is the upper age limit for getting it — contract a form of the virus at least once in their lives. The only way men aren’t involved is that, so far, it’s not detectable on men’s private parts the way it is on pap smears. So women who get it go through a rather laborious cycle of more frequent paps (usually every three months until it clears up) along with a colposcopy (an outpatient, but extremely uncomfortable and inconvenient, biopsy of cervical tissue). The HPV vaccine causes all kinds of debate because, um, from what we can tell some people think their kids are going to run out and have sex afterwards, as if the one thing stopping them was a fear of a virus they likely didn’t know about and certainly couldn’t spell. (Rep. Michele Bachmann used Gov. Rick Perry’s HPV vaccine mandate in Texas to score points in a recent Republican debate. She then later spread false information about the vaccine causing mental retardation, an unforgivable gaffe.) In any case, it’s baffling to us that parents wouldn’t be lining up to get their girls and boys vaccinated against this virus. You know how we’re always looking for a cure for cancer? This is as close as we’re getting for the moment.

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Filed Under: Being a Sexy Feminist, Feminism in the Bedroom Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

Sexy Feminists Read: Anna David’s ‘Falling for Me’

October 9, 2011 By 1 Comment

In Anna David’s new memoir, Falling for Me, the author sets out to find the empowering side of being single by following the advice set forth in Helen Gurley Brown’s groundbreaking 1962 book Sex and the Single Girl. So should we be living more like women in the ’60s? We talked to David (whose book launch we’re sponsoring in New York City Oct. 10) about that — and why it’s still so hard to be single.

You recently ignited a bit of a blogger controversy by asserting in a post that “women had it better in the ’60s.” Do you really think women had it better then, hands down? Or just in certain ways?

Definitely just in certain ways. Which is what I said in the piece! But I get that when people want to pick a fight with you — or are, say, angered simply by the title of your piece — they don’t see words that might minimize their vitriol. My point was that I wish women would stop making statements about things that don’t matter. I love Gloria Steinem and am incredibly grateful for all that she’s done, but for her to go around making a stink about the Playboy Club TV show when everyone knew the show was terrible and wasn’t going to make any kind of cultural impact seems silly. Instead, I’d rather she talk about things that do matter and we can change, like how judgmental and cruel women can be to one another simply because we always see each other as competition.

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Filed Under: Being a Sexy Feminist, Feminism in the Bedroom, Flirting & Dating, Love & Marriage Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Easy Ways to Be Kinky

July 24, 2011 By 5 Comments

Sex can be liberating, mind-blowing, stress-reducing, soul-moving, or just plain fun. This much we know. And while we’re all for “spicing up your love life,” as the magazines like to call it, we’re pretty sure it’s not rocket science to do so — and certainly doesn’t require a new story every single month about it (we’re looking at you, Cosmo). So here it is, the definitive — and only — cheat sheet we’ll ever give you for mixing things up in the bedroom. And since we freely admit that this is hardly brain surgery, little, if any, explanation will be provided. Simply pick the ones you like, ignore the rest, and have a great time:

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How to Be a Feminist Boyfriend

May 26, 2011 By 34 Comments

After having a few recent conversations about whether men can even be feminist (The Sexy Feminist says: YES) and stumbling across this plea for guy-friendly feminist reading from a concerned girlfriend, we got to thinking: What does it take to be a feminist boyfriend? Let us count the ways:

1. Read feminist sites. We recommend this one, of course, but there’s also Feministing, Slate’s DoubleX blog, and many others. And we don’t say this as our No. 1 tip just to keep ourselves in business — reading sites that filter news through a feminist perspective is the quickest, easiest way to get a feel for, well, just how far we still have to go. He’ll get exactly why we still need feminism after spending an afternoon reading about Dominic Strauss-Kahn, Planned Parenthood cuts, and, ugh, Charlie Sheen. Hopefully he’ll also come out a fan of Bridesmaids, Tina Fey, and Jane Fonda.

2. Make sure you’re giving her what she wants, and not what she doesn’t want, in bed. This comes down to talking. It’s fun. Have some wine and discuss what you both like (and don’t). Then everyone’s on the same page. It’s so easy to lose track of equality in bed, and while we aren’t advocating strict and literal equality (if you like being tied up, ladies, go for it!) we think the key is making sure everyone is equally satisfied, whatever that means.

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Filed Under: Feminism in the Bedroom, Flirting & Dating, Love & Marriage Tagged With: , , , ,
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