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Review: Voila Rechargeable Massager

alison hart — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 20:09:40 +0000

I can’t know for sure, but I’m reasonably certain the majority of you, the readers of this blog, are male. So why am I reviewing a vibrator in a room full of guys? Because vibrators make great gifts. Especially cute little vibrators like the Voila.

There’s been a trend in vibrator design toward small, simple, rechargeable models in recent years and I think the Voila is probably competing with much pricier LELO toys (MSRP $129). The shape is a little boxier than the ultra expensive models, but the Voila appears to be about $100 cheaper, which seems like a reasonable trade off. Especially when you consider that the Voila is water-resistant and the more expensive ones aren’t.

The Voila is sized to fit in a woman’s hand and is made of hard matte plastic, but feels very nice and smooth to the touch. Assuming that the flat end is the top, the button on the left turns it on and the one on the right turns it off. The off button is a must-have on vibrators that have “functions” that you can cycle through. The Voila has 7 functions – 4 speeds and 3 patterns of pulsation and escalation. I’ve never thought the patterns were a great idea, but they’re there if you want them. Overall, I think the buttons are functional, but a little small and close together. They may be hard for a man or a woman with large fingers to use.

There’s a small raised area on the underside of the Voila at the tapered/slightly curved end. It looks like it’d do something, but I didn’t think it was noticeable during use. That said, the vibrations are nice and strong and while it’s not the easiest shape to hold, the vibrating mechanism is in the tip and doesn’t make your fingers numb the way an egg or bullet-style vibe would. I wouldn’t call it “whisper quiet,” but it’s not audible through a closed door.

On the very top is the hole for the charger. It’s a 110/240 Volt AC charger that looks pretty much like what you’d use with your cell phone. The hole has a plug that seals it off for use in the shower. It’s billed as waterproof, but don’t submerge it. It won’t hurt you, but the chances are much better of water leaking in and ruining the toy than if you just used it in the shower.

All in all, I liked the Voila. It does what it’s supposed to do and is designed well enough not to get in its own way. Not to mention that because it’s rechargeable, it’s a little more eco-friendly than vibrators that run on batteries. It’s well-shaped for solo situations as well as couple time, which is nice for folks who like to incorporate toys into their sex life.

The Voila also comes in purple and black and you can get one at Libida.com.

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I’m a Certified Sexpert

alison hart — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 23:20:10 +0000

A while back, I heard that sex toy manufacturer California Exotic offered free toys to bloggers who would review them on their websites. The application was pretty in-depth and even though I was pretty sure I had the right pedigree to become an official toy reviewer, I lost hope after a few weeks went by with no word from the company.

This morning, I received an email that began, “Congratulations! You have been chosen to be a Cal Exotics Sexpert™!”

What does that mean for you? In a week or two, I’ll start posting the occasional sex toy review on this blog. I like Cal Exotic and I’ve sold thousands of their products over the years, but you can rest assured that I’m no shill. If anything, my experience in the dildo mines has made me very aware of what doesn’t work and I’m pleased to be able to share that experience with you, dear reader.

So keep an eye out. They say I’ll be receiving a box of goods (or perhaps a single good?) in the coming week. I hope my Sexpert™ certificate’s in there.

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Review: Tera Patrick’s Sinner Takes All

alison hart — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 00:08:38 +0000

Everyone loves a naughty tell-all book, but only a few porn stars have captured the general public’s imagination enough to write successful autobiographies like Jenna Jameson’s How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale. Jenna’s was probably the most compelling of these books to come out in the last decade, but Tera Patrick’s new book, Sinner Takes All, does something that Jenna’s book didn’t – it makes her seem like a real person.

Salacious stories are par for the course in any porn star’s autobiography, and Tera obliges us with plenty of tales of teenage drug addiction, sex that borders on rape and porn set horror stories. She also reveals things that most of us – porn stars included – probably wouldn’t be able to admit about ourselves in such a public forum.

She cops to completely shallow aspirations, mental illness, spousal abuse and generally cunty behavior that are rate in porn autobiographies because no matter what people say, they care about how they’re are perceived by others. Tera shows sides of herself that make her seem incredibly unlikeable right alongside the stories of taking care of elderly patients in a nursing home and fighting back against a huge porn company that knowingly capitalized on her naiveté by offering her a terrible contract, then attempting to drive her out of the business after she realized how badly they’d screwed her over.

Throughout the book, the theme that stuck out most clearly for me was contradiction. In one chapter Tera calls herself a beautiful, powerful woman, then describes her degrading relationship with Erik Schrody (aka Everlast) in the next. At one point she says she loves her fans and then turns around later on and calls them the “perverted guys who fantasized about me.” The biggest contradiction of all, in my opinion, is her inflated ego as “the most famous porn star in the world” and the crushing insecurity that pushed her into emotional turmoil, bad relationships, and porn scenes she wasn’t comfortable doing.

If Tera comes out of this book looking complicated and paradoxical, her ex-husband Evan Seinfeld manages to seem even more dissonant than she. Evan writes a few chapters from his perspective that reveal him to be the suitcase pimp douchbag we all know he is, as well as a partner who withstood abuse, emotional manipulation, and pure insanity to be with the woman he loved.

In the book’s afterward, Tera writes a very raw post-mortem of her marriage and how she’d managed to be so oblivious for so long to the things that ultimately convinced her that the relationship was doomed. The perspective gained by putting her life under a microscope and analyzing who she is and how she got to this place was too much for the already fractured relationship to withstand. And she’s happier for it.

I didn’t leave the book with the impression that Tera might have wanted to give me about herself, but I was very moved by the courage it took to include the details she knew might make it hard to do so. From the experiences that led her to this career to her institutionalization in a mental hospital to the rise and fall of her marriage, Tera is straightforward and earnest almost to a fault – even when it’s hard to take her at her word. Her story is as much about her ugliness as her beauty and that’s what makes it a compelling read.

Review of Pink Visual’s iTouchHer Web Apps

alison hart — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 23:33:50 +0000

Pink Visual has been trying to find a way to capitalize on the popularity iPhones for a while now. First it was 3-D porn, then they made a movie entirely on an iPhone. Now they’ve created a “web app” (aka, a website formatted to look like an app) called iTouchHer.

I do not have an iPhone. Rather, I own the G1 (Google phone) pictured to the left. But because this site is available on the web, anyone with a touch-sensitive smart phone or a computer can play these games.

There are eight games on ITouchHer.com and I played them on the phone to get a feel for the games as close to the way they’re meant to be experienced as possible.

Intro
Before you start playing games on iTouchHer (but after you’ve already chosen which game you want to play), you’re shown an instruction screen followed by a confusing screen that tells you that you need to tap on different parts of a picture of a woman (her erogenous zones) to start. It doesn’t matter one bit which you choose and you’re never shown the woman again.

Nude Photo Hunt
The nude photo hunt shows you two hardcore pictures with one minor difference between them. You’re supposed to tap on the part of the photo that’s different from the other. Pretty simple.

The game itself is relatively challenging and actually funny at one point. There are ten pictures and when you complete the game, you have the option to a short clip from one of Pink Visual’s squirting movies. The movie’s there whether you win or lose, so don’t worry too much if you get some wrong.

Tranny Hunter
This game is very similar to the Female or Shemale? quizzes I made for the VideoBox blog last week. This one shows you an explicit picture of the woman or tranny in question after you make your choice between TRANNY and NOT. Which I guess is cool if you like trannies. Perhaps not so much if you don’t because you’ll definitely see some ladycock.

Like Nude Photo Hunt, there are 10 pictures and game is definitely not a gimme – I only scored 6/10. I’m pretty sure the only reason I did that well was that I knew who a couple of the non-trans ladies were. The reward video is from Absolute Gonzo.

WWDC Quiz
WWDC stands for Worldwide Developer’s Conference, which it may been designed for. The “game” itself is just a quiz about Apple history. When you get an answer right, you see a woman in various states of undress. When you get the answer wrong, you are “tormented by Vista advertising collateral.”

I only managed to get 6/10 correct on this quiz, but it deemed me an “Apple Fanboy” anyway. And for my trouble, I was presented with a video of hot lezbo action.

In order to get to the rest of the games, you click the right arrow button at the bottom of the screen. This isn’t intuitive and might cause people to miss the other 5 games on the site.

Roast Beef or Twat?
Funny concept, kinda lame execution. In reality, it’s very easy to tell the difference between roast beef and pussy, even when they’re blurry. The video at the end is some kind of grandpa fucks a teen movie, so honestly, I’d skip it if I were you.

Transpotting
Exactly the same as Tranny Hunter with different images. Lesbian movie at the end.

3 Way Touch
This “game” is really a photo set with captions. After the first few pics, it tells you where you tap, but I wasn’t too into it. Another lesbian video at the end.

Lesbian Seduction
Another photo set. This one starts out with instructions and eventually becomes just pictures without captions. After a while, it just stopped without warning. Tapping on the picture ceased to cause anything to happen. I had to click the home button at the bottom to get back to the main menu. Needless to say, there was no video.

Squirter Adventure
Another photo set with instructions. Much shorter than the last two. The photos featured Sophie Dee as did the video at the end.

Overall
All in all, the photo hunt and the tranny games were the most entertaining of the bunch. The photo sets may have been experiments with the concept of iTouchHer that they moved away from when it was obvious that they were no fun. Pink Visual says they’re designing tons more games for the site, so it may actually become a great portal for adult games and quizzes once they get a few more decent ones in there.

Is the World Ready for 3-D Porn?

Review: Gianna Michaels in Her First Anal Scene

alison hart — Tue, 21 Jul 2009 17:02:53 +0000

I’ve finally had the opportunity to watch Big Wet Asses 15, so I thought I’d give you guys a quick review with screencaps of Gianna’s big scene. Most first anal scenes get a lot of undeserved hype, but I think Gianna’s was very highly anticipated by many porn fans (myself included).

Gianna starts with the obligatory Big Wet Asses intro – getting oil poured all over her big, round behind. When the posing is done, the scene begins with Michael Stefano kissing and eating Gianna’s ass in a room that looks like a bank vault with a couch inside. Gianna and Michael seem to have pretty good chemistry and there’s lots of kissing in the scene.

The sex starts in earnest with a slightly noisy/quacky blowjob. Gianna wastes no time and begins working her fingers into her ass while she’s performing the BJ. From there, Michael starts fucking her pussy with her fingers still in her ass. The sex is loud and a little rough (there’s a small bit of hair-pulling) and Gianna looks great with a little bush.

After some more cock-sucking, Gianna mounts Michael in cowgirl on the couch. There’s lots of kissing again, and although you can tell they’re both enjoying it, it seems a bit subdued. Gianna climbs onto his face and rides him for a while, sucking his dick afterward.

After some more rimming and rubbing, at 22:45, they finally get down to the main event. Gianna is lying on her stomach, holding her ass cheeks open, and he works his dick in slow. Things go pretty slowly at first, but she has him pour a ton of lube inside her ass and then she starts really fucking him.

I don’t know how much anal sex Gianna has in her personal life, but it seems like a relatively new experience for her and she keeps repeating, “God that feels crazy” while they do it. After a little while, they shift into spoon and she gets to rub her pussy. It’s a nice-looking position with a good view of her tits.

After a little ATM action, they switch to cowgirl (her ass looks great), then more ATM and she melts onto his cock for some reverse cowgirl. Anyone familiar with Gianna’s style would probably expect a lot of energy in this position, but I think her relative inexperience with anal slows her down a bit.

For the rest of the scene, they switch to her lying on her side while he kneels. Director William H. Nutsack (I guess he’s dropped the Nutsack as of late, but I’ll never abide by that) does a great job with this angle and watching Michael Stegano’s dick slide in and out of Gianna’s huge wet ass is highly aesthetically pleasing.

For the pop shot, Gianna says “Make me your dirty fucking whore. Cum all over my ass” and he jerks off onto her side/buttcheek and she licks some of it up.

All in all, not exactly the scene I was waiting for, but my hope is that this is the first of many Gianna Michaels anal scenes.

Review: The Girlfriend Experience

alison hart — Thu, 21 May 2009 21:21:05 +0000

A lot has been made of Sasha Grey’s role in Steven Soderbergh’s new film, The Girlfriend Experience, especially by the adult press. Our news outlets have a serious (self-hating?) obsession with porn performers “crossing over” into the mainstream and a porn actress making an independent film with an Oscar-winning director is certainly a far cry from, say, Zombie Strippers.

The Girlfriend Experience is about an expensive New York call girl named Chelsea and her boyfriend, a personal trainer, set during the fall of 2008 while the presidential campaign and the recession were both in full swing. The film follows them around to a variety of meetings where they both whore themselves out, albeit in slightly different ways.

It won’t come as a surprise to the many people who’ve noted that her porn performances tend to be a bit lackluster and flat that Sasha played her character competently, but without much emotion. The problem is, I’m not sure whether this was simply a mediocre performance or how her character was intended to come off. Perhaps both.

A complete lack of character development coupled with a meandering storyline is what sunk this movie. By the time things actually began to happen in the film (internet drama, forbidden love, relationship turmoil), I didn’t care. It wasn’t even clear exactly what was occurring at some junctures because Chelsea had no discernible motives or emotions.

To put it bluntly, The Girlfriend Experience was not a good movie. But it wasn’t Sasha Grey’s fault.

The reason I say it wasn’t Sasha’s fault is that she was barely even a character in the film she was supposed to be starring in. We see more of the back of Sasha’s head than any other part of her. When she’s not facing away from the camera, she’s often visually obscured by curtains, beams, darkness or furniture. These angles were so noticeable that it felt like Steven Soderbergh’s directing was the real “star” of the film.

Overall, it wasn’t a movie I enjoyed or would recommend seeing, but I didn’t hate it. I would say, however, that if you want to watch a Sasha Grey movie, Fashionistas: Safado would be a better choice.

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