Getting it up (and running)...

I remember my very first sex toy. I was thirteen, a gymnast (sadly, I can claim "gymnast" as a title no longer), and I had pulled a hip abductor muscle on the left side of my groin. It hurt like the dickens and I was inexperienced enough in the realm of sexuality to find humor in the situation when I would tell my coaches, "I need something to help me really get into my groin."

Alas, it was with no ulterior motive that I headed to the mall with my older sister (KC), to search for a wand massager for my thigh. A bit of hunting around at the Sharper Image led me deeper into the mall to find the same massager at half price in a Wal-mart knock-off store. I hugged it tight to my lap in the car ride home, ignorantly blissful of the sensations to come.

Dutifully I performed my pilates-type stretches (pilates had not yet been invented when I was a young teen or, if they had, no one in my life was rich enough to practice them correctly) every morning and evening. After pulling and lifting and rolling and tensing, I would reach behind my dresser and pull out my trusty 13" long, baseball-bat-inspired massager, and sink back into my waterbed while my aches subsided. (My LEG aches, you dirty-minded heathens!)

One fateful day, long after my massager had been discovered by friends and family and jokingly nicknamed my "vibrator" (an idea that made me flush, whether out of embarrassment or pleasure, to this day I have no idea), I was mid-massage when I decided to let the softball-sized vibrating head venture north and rest on my crotch. (Yes, it was my crotch back then, not my pussy or cunt or even my vagina. Those terms of endearment would come later.)

I froze. My eyes popped open and lips clamped shut mid-gasp. The sensation was overwhelming and I was terrified. Terrified of the feelings raging through my body, terrified that they would stop, and, most of all, terrified that I had discovered something that made my body feel so much. Jaw-clenched, I was unable to tear my hands away from the massager and all of thirty seconds later, I fell off the edge of the bed, shaking and trembling. It wasn't the orgasm that affected me so much, it was the sheer intensity of the sensation. I felt like I had discovered something dangerous.

It was the dark feeling that invaded my head after that first orgasm that really affected me. Why did something that felt so good make me so scared?

Many people in my life ask what brought me to being a professional sex toy buyer, of all things. "Where was that booth at the high school job fair?" they muse. I often wonder why I did come into this line of work as pushing sex toys into people's bedrooms is not my real passion (heck, hands work just as well if not better, sometimes). Sex toys are, however, how I discovered what passion could feel like. If I am able as just one small woman in this big, sex-negative world, to help someone else find pleasure inside themselves, then I feel that am doing my job as a buyer. And if I am able to convince them (and you, friendly reader) that what they are finding in themselves is good and powerful and true, then that might just make me the happiest grown-up, ex-gymnast, smut-peddling sex-activist that I can possibly be.