A Puzzling Phrase in the NYT

[walkitout]

Here's a question for you:

What the _hell_ is a nipple mask? Or, for that matter, "nipple spray"?

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/03/health/more-women-seek-over-the-counter-sexual-remedies.html

I was innocently (okay, perhaps that's the wrong word) reading gawker when a Hamilton Nolan post sent me snickering off to read the NYT original. LELO is a name I associate with Fun Things Sold at Babeland (like the Smart Wand), so I hesitate to dismiss these items out of hand. On the other hand, they are being lumped in with arousal gels, which I have firmly categorized as "Surely no one is dumb enough to try that a second time", with the recognition that, like cilantro, there might be some genetic differences that make something just annoying for some people but super amazing cool for others.

I'm guessing nipple masks, sprays, etc. are the for-the-areolae equivalent of face creams and so forth. Googling, thus far, isn't getting me anything useful. Entertaining. But not useful. And I'm assuming that the nipple sprays that come up in a breastfeeding context are not what LELO is up to here (altho I'm prepared to be shown wrong).

Also, I just had a flashback to the thigh cream fad of ten or fifteen years ago. I had _completely_ forgotten that. Thanks a lot, NYT.

FWIW, I have zero respect for any of the companies other than LELO mentioned in the article, and I'm honestly a little appalled that the reporter thought this stuff all made sense together.

ETA: Here's some hilarious promo material for LELO's Smart Wand.

http://en.lelo.com/news/the-new-smart-wands-promo-video-watch-it-here

Nicely encoded. "We’re very happy with our new Smart Wands (and trust us, you will be too)." It just gets better from there. Ahem.

And from the Babeland site:

http://www.babeland.com/smart-wand-medium/d/3772_c_3000

"No more fiddling with buttons means more time to fiddle with yourself!" A little less subtle, but definitely a lot of deniability left.

ETAYA: Also, I'm still slightly weirded out about the overall premise of the article.

"many women are turning to over-the-counter products, including lubricants, arousal gels, massage oils, nutritional and herbal supplements, and vibrators. Drugstore chains are now selling these products right next to the bandages and heating pads."

I do realize that the lube selection next to the condoms has gotten better over the last decade-ish, and that's a super cool thing. But I also still perceive a massive difference between what I remember being right in front of my face in Cap Hill drug stores in the 1990s and what I can find even when I go looking for it in a Walgreens in Metrowest this year. For one thing, the non-latex gloves are almost never shelved next to the condoms.

Comments

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

I was wondering those same things, having been referred to the article here: http://www.thedirtynormal.com/2012/07/03/to-ms-b-and-the-nyt/ .

Seemed odd to me that they lumped vibrators in with the snake, I mean peppermint, oil. I also noticed that while they mentioned someone who was having difficulty due to meds for bipolar disorder, they did NOT mention difficulties due to SSRIs or oral contraceptives. Hmmmmmm.

awesome blog! Thanks for the pointer!

[walkitout]

I'm going to go read lots of it next.

In the meantime, this is interesting.

http://answers.google.com/answers/threadview/id/716392.html

It doesn't answer the question I had (is there regional variation in lube sales?) when I found it, however, it does suggest that the weirdness I keep running into isn't weird at all, it's normal (and bad): women who _don't_ use lube, and who probably should. Whether they are 30 something or 60 something, they all seem to have some complicated and remarkably pathological sounding (to me anyway!) explanation for how their own lubrication ought to be "enough".

That's just lame. But considering the lameness that is expecting to come from penetrative sex? Probably kinda minor.

If I were to start posting a whole bunch of stuff about sexual matters, do you think I ought to put things in the tags and/or subject lines to warn readers? I sense an obsessive period of interest in this coming on. . .

Re: awesome blog! Thanks for the pointer!

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I like Emily Nagoski a lot. I sometimes disagree with her, and I think she has a bit of a tendency to oversimplify, but she always makes sense. Another one I like is realadultsex.com (current top image mildly NSFW, but the site as a whole is much less NSFW than one would think from the title).

I'm not seeing anything in that answers.google.com link that has women commenting on their own situations -- am I missing something, or were you looking at some of the sublinks?

Re: awesome blog! Thanks for the pointer!

[walkitout]

Ah. Sorry about the confusion. I have, in person, had conversations with a number of women over the years which tend to have a fairly predictable format. "You seem like someone who I can talk to about this [describes sexual problem]" I say, "Are you using lube? You should be using lube. Is it good lube? I like astroglide." The woman says something that indicates either complete ignorance of lube or generalized negative feelings about lube but definitely doesn't use it and isn't actually ok with starting to use it. Usually for a complex set of reasons that strikes me as pathological. So that was one of the things I was nattering on about.

The other thing I was after is only tangentially related: are these women typical or am I having conversations with women who are kinda out of the loop, sexually speaking? I was trying to figure out if lube was widely used and if the market was uneven. Finding relatively recent market figures that indicate lube sales are _way_ lower than I think they should be was, er, revelatory. This is a Problem. I think there are a _ton_ of women out there who don't realize their lives would be better with lube. Never mind sex with their partners. Their sex-with-theirownself life would be better with lube.

Re: awesome blog! Thanks for the pointer!

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Oh, I see. Yeah, Emily Nagoski is a major lube fan too. I haven't needed lube in forever (last time was when I was pregnant -- I have these weird hormones that mean I get dry during pregnancy and not during breastfeeding, which is the opposite of most people), so I tend to forget about it myself, but I have nothing at all against the general concept, and am sure it's going to be important once I really hit menopause. (I've certainly told women who freaked out about the prospect of dryness due to breastfeeding that Astroglide is MUCH cheaper than formula ... that was the kind of thing that came up frequently in my Usenet days.) And surely people who use condoms should be using lube? (Now that I think about it, I don't think I knew that when I was in college. Oops. These days the Teen Health Centers in schools here hand out not only condoms but packets of lube.)