WORK SAFETY WARNING

Seriously, don’t read this at work, unless you have extremely permissive employers or you toil far enough away from them that they’ll never know. Maybe you think that The Fleshlight is about Christmas cookie recipes, but this article actually deals with a totally gross, hilarious website whose contents I will be discussing in such depth that it will basically be like you’re visiting it — and it’s totally gross and hilarious.

Consider yourself warned!

I know I probably shouldn’t, but sometimes I’m actually brave enough to click on banner ads.

ANOTHER WARNING: This is generally inadvisable. Punching the monkey does not, in fact, generate any revenue for you at all. No matter how many different colors and letters are flashing at you, you should never believe the little pop-up box that says you’re the one million, three hundred and seventy thousand, two hundred and eighty-third visitor on the site. There are no engines on the internet capable of measuring that, and even if they were, they wouldn’t be there just to make sure you got some money.

Worse, those devices that do exist to track your every click’s progress through the interwebnet are often designed to either record everything you do and send it back to ad companies, or fuck your computer right into the ground. Sometimes both: Software engineers are creative, and most of them hate you. They dedicate hours crafting incredibly badly-written, invasive, damaging pieces of software to punish you for your interest in screen-savers, wallpapers of Matt Damon, or free fonts. One click on the wrong banner can reduce your brand new Dell to a grinding, lurching shadow of what it once was, no matter how many times you get your roommate to re-load the operating system.

Even more alarming, sometimes clicking on the wrong thing can take you to a website that is so bizarre that you start out thinking it’s a joke, only to find with deeper investigation that no, no, it can’t possibly be serious but it really is real.

So it is with the website today, sexually-oriented and looking to sell relatively high-priced products of luxurious design and spurious value. It defies comprehension, and in being so mysterious and hilarious and creepy, it becomes a candidate for some of the best random web surfing I’ve done in many years.

Let the Sex Toy Website Round Up Begin!

The Fleshlight

This is basically the first thing you see when you go to the Fleshlight website:

Close your eyes. Trace your finger across the tender satin lips. Set your imagination free and allow yourself to explore her warm slippery folds. Did she quiver? You could have sworn it. It is all too real, too good, as the skin gently parts and closes again around you, pulling you deeper into its tight, sultry embrace…

Yes, you’ve pretty much guessed it: The Fleshlight is a portable vagina, contained entirely in the aluminum body of a flashlight. The sultry embrace mentioned in the product description comes from a carefully molded exeterior that begins with something that sort of looks like the worms from Dune, and which extends into… the place… where batteries would normally go.

Fleshlight stresses that with “2 million dollars spent in research and development”, they have devised a product with the following key sales points:

  • Discreet
  • Private
  • Unbelievably realistic

These are some pretty serious claims for a product valued at fifty United States dollars, particularly considering the massive investments in both time and money that have been made in it. Could it be that the Fleshlight offers everything that a man is looking for when it comes to self-abuse? Discretion, privacy and unbelievable realism?

Let’s really take a look at this.

Discretion is apparently priority #1 for the Fleshlight, otherwise known as “The Pocket Pussy Your Wife Won’t Find.” Those of you who have seen the 1989 classic Parenthood will, after you sew up your sides from all the remembered laughs, likely recall the scene when the power goes out at a family birthday party, and Steve Martin pulls out what he thinks is a flashlight, only to turn it on and discover that it’s his sister’s vibrator. What follows is a hilarious scene of embarrassment and human suffering, as Steve Martin realizes what he’s holding in his hand, and the audience is spontaneously forced to imagine Diane Weist using it.

Apparently the guys in product development over at Fleshlight didn’t see Parenthood, though. In a breathtaking piece of through-the-looking-glass logic, they opted to spare you from unintentionally mistaking their sex toy for a flashlight by making it look just like one. So, when the lights go out at your friend’s birthday party and you go looking for his sex toy, all you’ll find is a flashlight instead.

Now, I’m no two-million-dollar prosthetic vagina scientist or anything, but if I don’t want people touching the plastic synthetic objects that I have sex with when I’m lonely, wouldn’t it be more logical to disguise it as something that they’d have no use for? Like a thermos, or an out-of-use portable phone? Do I really want to run the risk of having one of my friends come over to help me out with something, only to accidentally introduce them to parts of my life nobody should know about?

Bob: Hang on, Dave, I’ll be right down. I just have to thread the television cable up over this beam, here.
Dave: Well just a minute, I’ll put some light on it. Where’s your flashlight, in here?
Bob: No! No, NO, it’s not anywhere near–
Dave: Hey, here it is. Kind of light, maybe there aren’t any batteries in it…
Bob: THE LIGHTBULB IS BURNED OUT, IT’S NO BOTHER REALLY–
Dave: It is? Let me take a look, I– Oh my God your flashlight has a clitoris!

So, I don’t know, maybe the guys at Fleshlight haven’t had this problem yet, but I’m thinking that it’d be more discreet if it wasn’t disguised as something so useful.

Privacy is sort of a vague term, too, while we’re picking at it. Are we supposed to believe that other sex toys are, in some way, more public than one that’s disguised as a household tool? Sure, it’s more subtle than a full-scale replica of Jenna Jameson’s pooter, but if we’re referring to use, is any one tool more private than any other?

All other things being equal here, whether your hammering away on a piece of plastic shaped to resemble an ass or the most functional part of an ass housed in a flashlight, the point is that you’re hammering away — there’s nothing particularly private about it. Unless your intention is to transport it from one place to another, in which case you’d admittedly raise fewer eyebrows with the Fleshlight than the Jenna Jameson reproduction, then it doesn’t really matter what the hell it looks like. You’re going to be using it in a place that has a door and a lock, unless you want someone to walk in on you and wonder why you’re banging your flashlight.

In which case, it better be worth it, which is where the unbelievable realism must come in.

Okay, again, I am not a globally-recognized vagina expert here, I am not claiming to have won the 2003 World Female Genitals Competition in Stockholm, Sweden. I would have to bow to the judgement of others, perhaps even those who have vaginas of their own, and ask the following questions:

  1. Would anyone use the words “molded gel insert” in describing the “unmistakable sensations of penetrative sex”?
  2. Are the regions associated the unmistakable sensations of penetrative sex on real women also accompanied by a mild vanilla scent?
  3. Are real women comprised entirely of a hairless vagina and a long handle, or are they — as rumors indicate — also composed of other organs, and possibly even limbs?

Of course, I’m probably being unfair on that question. After all, Fleshlight.com also offers all models and varieties in two other forms:

So clearly, there is appreciation for the total female form. As long as it has a pleasing vanilla scent and a long handle, for proper gripping.

You could almost forgive the Fleshlight as a particularly expensive novelty with a high opinion of itself, except until you start to read the exceedingly creepy copy that accompanies some of the specific products. Assuming you even get past the “slippery folds” on the main page, you run into all kinds of special interest in the “texture of a young woman’s vagina” or — God help us all — in watching “every inch of yourself slip in and out of the soft, smooth, Super-Skin gel.” Honestly, when you read something like, “She’s smiling at you across the bar… Make your move today” in the product description for a sex aid, what are you supposed to think? That you can use the thing in an elaborate fantasy at a bar?

Bartender: Buddy, what the hell are you doing with that flashlight on my bar?
Customer: Shh! She’s smiling at me. I don’t want her to know that I’ve noticed!
Bartender: Oh, holy Jesus.
Customer: You think I could ever score with a chick like that?
Bartender: Frankly, I’m not sure.

When you first visit the Fleshlight website, you think you’re having a good laugh at a particularly imaginative sales pitch, until you figure out that no — they’re not kidding. They’re deadly serious. They want you to buy their flashlight-shaped genitals, just like four hundred thousand others have, and they want you to appreciate the time and effort they put into making fucking a flashlight feel just like a Real Girl.

For that sincerity, that creepy undercurrent that reminds you of the guy in your office who smiles at you for just that one minute too long — along with the overall hilarious stupid ickiness of a vagino-flashligt hybrid — I must award The Fleshlight…

FOUR OUT OF FIVE SCREAMS OF TERROR

Tune in next time, to see what other scary shit the internet turns up!