“Tell Me What To Do” Toys
By Dr. Carol Queen • Mar 21st, 1996 • Category: Carol QueenSeveral very popular items at Good Vibes fall into a category I’ve begun to call “Tell Me What To Do.” Unlike traditional how-to books, whose main function is to teach you to have a particular kind or kinds of sex, these help script your encounters. We do carry a lot of how-to books as well, from my own Exhibitionism for the Shy to Pat Califia’s Sensuous Magic to Lonnie Barbach’s For Yourself. But when you buy one of these, you pretty much have already decided you’d like to try the book’s main how-to topic, whatever it is.
“Tell Me What To Do” products are different. They don’t instruct you on how to do a particular activity so much as they instruct you to have a particular kind of sex or intimate encounter, period. The best examples are Laura Corn’s book 101 Nights of Grrreat Sex and the perennial favorite, Dirty Words Dice Game.
101 Nights is an engaging book with a really clever gimmick. From the outside it looks like any other large-format paperback, but once you open it, you find that its pages are sealed together and have to be torn out of the book and opened before you can read them. Half the pages are geared to the woman in a couple and the other half are for the man (and there you have its intended audience — heterosexual couples; sure, a gay couple can enjoy it together, but they’ll have to translate half the pronouns). Every week each partner takes a sheet out of the book, which instructs them in a particular activity or fantasy with which to surprise the other. If any extras — sex toys, props, costumes, etc. — are required, author Corn lists them like recipe ingredients. Voila! Plenty of books suggest you spice things up, vary the routine — this one provides the shopping list.
The Dirty Words Dice Game is exactly the same, only much more compact and without the list of ingredients. Some dice have an erotic activity — like “lick,” “kiss,” and “squeeze” — on each of facet. The other dice have body parts. Put ‘em together, roll the dice, and what do you have? A simple, sexy instruction that should get anyone started. No gender specifics, either, so every variety of couple can use them.
It’s not the fact that “Tell Me What To Do” toys are numerous that makes me single them out for comment; it’s how popular they are. Even before we got these two items in stock, we noticed steady sales on the single board game we carried, Enchanting Evening (and also joined by Passion Play and several others), and on the book Tricks, which offers couples a smorgasbord of erotic roles and suggestions for games to play and scenarios to act out. How could I resist the obvious conclusion: people want to be told what to do! Not all people, of course — but I think the popularity of these items, aside from their novelty value, rests in the way they take sexual decision-making out of our hands and help us out with a script or some suggested activities. And if a role or a Laura Corn-suggested activity or a roll of the dice doesn’t work out, well, there’s always the next one!
I’m not suggesting that we should be relying on books, games and gizmos to score our sexual symphonies — and I’m not saying that we shouldn’t. If one of these toys helps a shy person feel more outgoing or jazzes up a lackluster love life, it’s obviously a success! Trading off taking charge with a partner can be wonderful fun, eye-opening, intimacy-producing — and whether you draw a card, tear a page out of 101 Nights, hand your sweetie the dice, or just whisper “Your turn,” you’re giving each other the gift of balance. You can lie back and enjoy, and you can initiate; you can wash his or her back, and she or he can wash yours. Whether you call it “switching,” as S/M players do, or “you do me and I’ll do you,” it’s a wonderful way to treat your lover.
Your move!
Dr. Carol Queen >> Carol Queen is a writer, speaker, educator and activist with a doctorate in sexology. First as an organizer in the lesbian/gay community, where she helped found one of the first gay youth groups in the United States, and later in the emerging international bisexual community, as a sex worker and a practitioner of alternative sexualities, she typically teaches and writes from her own experience and that of her communities even as she references academic thought on these subjects. See her website: www.carolqueen.com.
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