I’m at home writing and researching a book that’s due at the end of this month, and I’ve entered into a sex ed area that is a real sore spot for me. You’ve no doubt read my gripes and warnings about the widely available and highly profitable anal numbing creams and “shrink” creams, but have I ever told you the many reasons why they’re evil?
Lubricants with benzocane and numbing agents such as Anal-Eze, “good head gel” and desensitizing creams contain oils, flavors and colorings, and they are very unsafe. Numbing the back of your throat, the penis, the vagina, and especially the anus can lead to serious injury and infections that can (and often) land users in the doctor’s office or ER. Think: you can’t feel the skin breaking or tearing, and if it’s the anus, there’s fecal bacteria. When you can’t feel pain, you are getting injured, period. Pain sucks, but it’s an important tool during anal play, telling you something’s not right. If it hurts you’re either going too fast, you need more lube, the item is too big, or you’re not really in the mood. And when I researched my fellatio book, I communicated briefly with a dentist who’d seen signifigant bruising *inside* the throat of a female patient — again, just think about it.
Also unsafe but widely available are “shrink creams”, “sure grip”, “tighten up” and “feel like a virgin again”, which claim to make the vagina smaller or tighter. The key ingredient in these creams is alum (aluminum chloride, an aluminum compound). Alum absorbs water out of the outer layer of the skin; as more water is absorbed, the cells begin to swell, closing the ducts that water would normally flow through. No study has been done on the effect of these creams on the cervix, which is what they eventually end up getting rubbed on during penetration, but I’ll wager it’s not good. I kind of want to make the manufacturers snort a thick rail of alum, so they can study the effects on their own mucous membranes. What I really hate about these “shrink” creams is the fact that they’re trading on female insecurities about the vagina not being tight, pretty or good enough for their male partner — like we need any negative reinforcement from our pussy-phobic culture about how we look, feel or smell down there. The marketing text runs, “China Shrink Cream is formulated to tighten the vaginal walls. China Shrink Cream is to help with loose vagina due to multiple child birth and frigidity.” I also want to throw up every time I see the packaging on these creams, as they are often called “oriental” or “China Shrink Cream”, paralying off of racist stereotypes and exotifying Asian “sexual mystery”, much the same way the porn industry fetishizes skin color and markets (I think racist) negative stereotypes about black male sexuality with its “interracial” videos.
The short of it is that because sex toy companies market this shit as “for novelty use only”, they can get away with anything — even though they explicitly know their products are for sexual use (genital application). It’s clear that they just don’t give a shit if anyone gets hurt using their products. Same goes for the scary chemical materials many companies use in the manufacture of their toys (mostly in China), but that’s another rant, for another day.
Grrr. /rant.
