Yossarian Lives

Many years ago, I was involved in the creation of a small, online sex toy retailer. I was young, just 22 when I came on board to handle all the forward-facing aspects of the business, from customer service to PR, via blogging, copywriting, social media and more. Times were tight, but we were passionate. Every sale counted, every product could mean the difference between getting paid and going hungry. For a time, we used a lift in someone else’s office building as a makeshift stock room. The lift, incidentally, was made by a company called ‘Schindler’, and was therefore known as ‘Schindler’s Lift’. (“Yes madam, your inflatable dildo is in stock. It’s just in Schindler’s Lift, up on the 9^th floor, but should hopefully be down soon.”)

And all the while, as we worked late into the night fighting for every single sale, we fantasised about a time when we would stock EVERYTHING. The breadth of our sex toy range would humble every other adult retailer out there, and our mighty warehouses would sprawl into the verdant Hampshire countryside like surf rolling up a virgin beach.

What I didn’t know, though, was that it’s not the size of your warehouse that matters. It’s how you fill it that counts.

I stayed at that company for around three years and loved it, before taking a big step up to my current position, where I’m still currently sat, smiling to myself about the old days, sharing a warehouse with a company that sold bottled water, the staff of which were incredibly curious about the stock we were holding and suspicious of us as a result. Smiling about how naive I was, how innocent and idealistic.

Recently my partner Annie Player, who also moves within adult creative fields, and I are increasingly contacted by start up sex toy companies, full of good intentions, that disappear again before we can even reply to them. A significant bulk of my twitter followers are probably sex toy start ups that follow a thousand people in a day, tweet twice, and then abandon the account, a testament to how hard it is at the bottom of the pleasure product ladder.

Online at least, the sex toy market is dominated by two or three large retailers and then a bustling pool of smaller retailers. It’s a kind of benign ‘orgasm oligarchy’; the largest share of the wealth divided amongst the elite and the rest is fought for below.

What I’ve come to realise in the few years: I no longer believe that a vast depth of product is truly the right approach, as I had previously believed it was when I was at the bottom of the ladder. Perhaps the right approach these days, if one wants to survive as a retailer of pleasure products, is to define one’s niche up front and stick to it fiercely. A good example that comes to my mind immediately is a company like www.labelleuk.co.uk, which has been around for a good few years now, quietly finessing its website and looking at stock opportunities. I think its survival and success to date is thanks in no small part to its clearly defined manifesto.

As a sex toy consumer, I often find that overwhelming choice is just that: overwhelming, and that’s the major complication of sex toy shopping. The sheer volume of choice, the baffling array of messaging, the indistinct USPs, the fact that all the manufacturers and suppliers are competing with each other and therefore more concerned with one-upping each other than clarity of customer buying decision all make sex shopping an exhausting and vaguely unfulfilling exercise. Which is a shame.

It’s tempting to believe that a virtually limitless breadth of product will attract all customers, cater to all tastes, satisfy all needs. But I fear these benefits are superficial; the temptation is hollow. That’s because, if there’s one thing people shopping for sex toys want above everything else, it’s clarity.

Have you bought a new mobile phone recently? The moment you walk into a phone shop, you’re immediately shouted at by countless different messages, statistics, bullet point lists and arcane technological language. If you’re not pre-armed with knowledge and research, the choice is so baffling that it’s virtually impossible to make a good buying decision right there and then. Now translate a shopping experience like that to something as personal as sex toys, especially for a relative newcomer to sex toy shopping.

What we need, as sex toy consumers, is two-fold: a Which? Sex Toy magazine (and if you’re interesting in helping me make this a reality, please do get in touch) and a more focussed product offering from every major sex toy retailer.

The eerie, digital white glow stares back ominously, obstinately, expectantly. The virgin paper begs to be defiled, but the words, the words, they just won’t happen.

There are 27 words in that sentence, and I had to correct six typos. I have no doubt there are several more in this post that went undetected.

The same is true at work. I feel like I’m idling. Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve stopped being clever. I’ve taken criticism too sharply, been too arrogant; I’ve been writing to put bread on the table, instead of writing to read it back and smile.

There are dozens of people who would chew their legs off for a shot at what I get paid to do, and most of them would probably be better than me at it, which means that if there’s one thing I can’t afford above all the other things I can’t afford, it’s complacency. I’ve been complacent before; it’s ruinous.

I’ve lost my discipline. I had that word tattooed onto the sole of my foot to keep me focused  but I’m flailing. Words are laborious now. Morphology won’t morph, phonology never phones and my syntax is taxed. I’m a boxer on a losing streak. A surgeon with tremulous hands. A pianist with broken fingers. What happens when the one craft for which I consider myself able betrays me?

Only, it hasn’t betrayed me at all. I’m betraying it.

This isn’t block. God knows I want to write, and God knows there are a million different things I want to write about, and a thousand burlesque events I’m yet to review, and a hundred sexual anecdotes I’d like to relate, and dozens of observations I’d like to share. No, this isn’t block. This is laziness.

This post is for me. This post is me addressing my laziness. Wake up, Stu.

She’s amazing. Truly. She’s the funniest human being who’s ever lived. She’s the most beautiful woman in the history of women, and sometimes she purrs when she’s asleep.

Today is my first anniversary with Miss Annie Player, and I couldn’t possibly be happier about that then I am. Something like two and a half years ago, I received a tweet. It asked me if I’d be interested in going to a meeting of erotic artists. I’d only been living in London for a couple of months, and I was excited and flattered to be invited. The tweet was from Annie Player, and it changed the course of my life forever.

I never expected to be with her, and yet, today, I’m writing this while she paints her fingernails on the sofa to my right. We’re a couple; we’re friends, partners. We didn’t plan it or predict it; that first day I met her, in the Spice Of Life in Soho, she was the best-looking woman at the table. She was the best-looking woman in the pub, and I could only barely make eye contact because I fancied her so much. Now, I get to put my head down next to hers every night, and wake up with with her every morning.

Annie, I love you completely, and I can’t wait for this day to roll around next year, because it will mean I’ve had another year with you, my favourite person. It will mean that for another 365 days I can sniff your hair when you’re not looking, and I can write about how much I love you while you paint your fingernails. I don’t think you know how much you’ve changed my life, how much you’ve fixed me, how far I’ve come because of you, and how important you are to me. You are the most brilliant person I’ve ever met, and I’m so proud to be with you.

Hey look, here’s us…

The result of a very long meeting.

Of all the Erotic Meet events that @Annieplayer pulls together, the mixed media meets are my favourite. I love them because, well, how often do you get to sit round a table and talk shop about topics you love with people who love them as much as you do?

I always take a lot away from these events, but yesterday’s was my favourite so far. Particularly because I finally got to just sit and talk with one @Remittancegirl, something I’d been hankering for since the first time we met several months ago. (Everyone in attendance was equally interesting, I should say. ILB was as funny and insightful as always, Jilly was honest and adorable, Harper was glamorous and well-read, and Ash, who makes bespoke BDSM furniture from time to time, is always a treat to chat with. We’ll come back to him in a mo.)

Remittance girl, though, was effortlessly knowledgeable, incredibly insightful and refreshingly modest. The question that gave direction to the conversation was “are all the best artists crazy”? A fascinating topic, especially when, after we’d reeled off a list of the artists we considered we considered crazy and why, Harper asked us to turn the spotlight on ourselves and identify our own crazy traits. This threw up an interesting realisation for me: that despite a mild self-destructive streak and a preference for sexual overindulgence, I’m a relatively stable, balanced and healthy human – so is my creativity less valid? Less desirable? Can a sane person create work that appears ostensibly insane? I could have spent the whole afternoon talking about Heller’s treatment of sanity in Catch-22, but since I have Catch-22 tattooed on my wrist and everyone’s probably fed up of hearing me talk about, I left the subject largely alone.

When asked if she was crazy, Remittance Girl replied dryly, “I’m not crazy anymore”. We all laughed, and then she relayed some parts of her past and everything made sense. She said an interesting thing; in essence, that she’d rather live an unhappy life and use that unhappiness to drive her creativity and therefore leave a legacy than live a happy life and be forgotten. It put me in mind of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a story I love, because in that epic a horrible and melancholy king (Gilgamesh) is made happy when he recognises the city he built will enable him to live forever, the irony being that the city he built (Uruk, which became Iraq) was built on unhappiness, rapaciousness and vindictiveness. Me? I’d rather be alive and enjoy my happiness. What’s the point of a legacy if you’re not around to enjoy it? I’d rather live forever… but only for a while.

And then I got to go home with @Annieplayer and play ‘Drink Along With Withnail’. I genuinely only remember about 15 minutes of the film before I was incapacitated.

Oh yeah, Ash. He’s known as EroticArtisan, and the work he produces is spectacular – it’s done for the love of doing it, and he’s a modest yet self-assured character. A very desirable blend. I hope you’ll see some of his work soon over at my company’s site, www.spanking.co.uk.