The Harmony Wireless Wonder

I am now reviewing sex toys for sextoy.com. While I don’t receive any money for these reviews, I am receiving free sex toys. You can find the Harmony Wireless Wonder and other vibrators on their site.

You can imagine how eagerly I’ve been waiting for my first shipment of sex toys to review. It was wonderful timing that the same week my toys arrived I had a perfect opportunity to try one out — in just a few days I was due to attend a social occasion with my ‘pet.’ It seemed like the perfect opportunity for us to experiment with wireless toys.

The Harmony Wireless Wonder from Doc Johnson is a wireless vibrator, meaning that it can be controlled from a distance with a remote control. It comes in two versions, yin and yang, which are identical except for the color (I got yang, the white vibe pictured above). The vibrator itself is insertable, but safe only for vaginal use. It is waterproof, but the accompanying controller is not. Since the vibrator is  made from hard plastic you can clean it in soap and water. According to the packaging, this vibrator is free of phthalates. Like most Doc Johnson sex toys, it is labelled ‘for novelty use only’ though this does not mean it is necessarily ‘unsafe.’

The first thing I noticed when unboxing the Harmony was that it had no instructions whatsoever to assist in its setup or use. The next thing I noticed was that it has strange batteries; I’d been a little worried that the toy would use button batteries, which run out quickly and are expensive to replace. Instead, the vibe itself uses three ‘N‘ batteries and one ‘12v‘ battery, which are included. These look like stubby AAs. While they are more powerful and long-lasting than buttons, you’ll still need to go out of your way to replace them, probably with a visit to your local or online sex toy vendor.

The remote control takes the single 12v battery, and it’s a slightly different size from the N batteries, preventing too much confusion. The top of the vibrator screws down over a rubber ring, meaning you’ll want to keep it screwed on as tight as possible to maintain the vibrator’s ‘waterproof’ nature. I had a little trouble figuring out how to put the batteries in until I noticed the diagrams, which are around the shaft of the vibe under the cap rather than on the top where I expected.

Because it runs on three batteries, the Harmony Wireless Wonder is fairly powerful. It’s about as powerful as your typical egg vibrator with an attached powerpack. The vibrations are evenly distributed throughout the shaft of the device and it’s quiet; while you can hear some quiet sounds when the vibrator is being held or used externally, once inserted and under clothing it was totally silent.

The biggest drawback of this vibrator is its controls. While the remote control is small enough to conceal easily in a pocket or the palm of your hand, that’s pretty much where its advantages end. The small LED light on the remote lights up when you press a button but it gives no indication of whether the toy is currently active. If you sit on the remote control by accident, like in that memorable scene from the movie Shortbus, you’d be clueless about whether or not you had turned it on until you found your squirming partner. The remote also gives no indication of which of the 7 modes is active, and each time you turn off the remote you have to cycle through all the modes again to get back to the one you were last on.

At one point during the evening the toy stopped working entirely, however I suspect interference from an outside source — as soon as we moved to a new area it began working again.

I can’t give any comparisons between this vibrator and other wireless toys as it is the first and only one I’ve experienced. It’s not as strong as a electric vibrator of course, and it won’t provide any direct clitoral stimulation unless you hold it in your hand. I think most women would find it to be a delightful tease rather than deeply orgasmic.

For us, playing with the wireless wonder turned the whole party into an act of foreplay interspersed with multiple furtive yet noisy visits to a nearby private location. The toy was dripping wet each time we took it out, so we can attest that it is waterproof, or at least pet proof. There was an instant reaction any time I turned the toy on, and it seemed to work at a short distance though we didn’t test its limits much. It was wonderful sharing a naughty secret all night. The first mode was hard for her to feel when she was very worked up, as the most gentle vibrations would be lost in her natural internal movements. The third mode, which is the toy’s maximum steady vibration, was definitely noticeable and the fifth mode, a series of steady hard pulses, made it hard for her to stand up when combined with any other kind of stimulation. She told me the next day that she really enjoyed how she had to work against the weight of the toy to keep it inside; my pet was wearing a dress and panties, but a pair of tight jeans would probably make things easier. Being teased for hours had a definite effect: late that night my pet ejaculated twice when I fingered her, harder than she ever has with me before — but of course there’s no way to guarantee the toy has a similar effect on you or your lover.

If any of this sounds good to you, I recommend you try the Wireless Wonder or a similar vibrating toy. Its drawbacks were slight compared to the fun we had with it, and the fun we hope to have in the future.

So I am NOT actually doing novel in 90, this round. I had some minor setbacks around when it started, and was actually out of town for the first few days of the session. I can jump in later, and am working on increasing my output in other ways. I’m partway into a work of erotic short fiction, but am also unfortunately just a few days from the deadline of the anthology I wish to submit it too. It will be an experiment in turning work around quickly, and I hope I succeed.

Otherwise my life is quite good right now. A few interesting people have come into my life lately, people I may be enlisting to ‘help’ with my reviews. Although the cold weather has been hard on my fibromyalgia, and I have a lot of work to do get my life where I want it to be, I find myself happier so far in 2010.

I was on two panels at this convention, and I can’t say as much as I’d like about what went on during them. I think I might take to bringing my laptop or a notepad to panels I am on as well as panels I simply attend, so I can start jotting down interesting things my fellow panelists said. During the first panel I was on, ‘ePublishing: Dealing with the Internet’, I noticed panelist Michael Finn during just that with his iTouch as I shared some of the details of the 21st-century storytelling research. Everyone on the panel was good, with Priscilla Spencer acting as an excellent moderator and Teresa Patterson making an excellent voice of caution amongst the rest of us starry-eyed enthusiasts, without ever reducing herself to being a luddite.

The other panel I was part of was Erotica vs. Pornogaphy, and it turned out to be one of the most entertaining panels I have attended since Fourth Street Fantasy Convention last year. It probably helped that Steve, one of the masterminds behind 4th Street, was a very active member of the audience — essentially an adjunct panelist as Amanda Rush mentioned in her blog entry on the con.* The panel opened with a steamy reading by our moderator, which delightfully set the tone for the raunchy and laughter-filled conversation that followed. Being the umpteenth iteration of this panel, the actual topic of ‘porn vs. erotica’ was discarded in favor of a wide-ranging discussion of sex and writing. Although often silly, there was often a lot of thought-provoking commentary. My admission that I hoped my more erotic works would be found by underage readers and show them the breadth of sexual possibilities, as my early explorations of erotica had done, launched us into an interesting discussion of the educational potential of the erotic. While many of us on the panel agreed this potential was strong, Steve added a worthy cautionary note: that authors should think of their stories, and the erotic first. If one became too concerned with depicting a ‘realistic’ or ‘healthy’ sexuality, one might very well lose sight of the fact that stories are fantasies and fantasies can depart from reality. When asked for book recommendations I got to namedrop M.  Christian, Polly Frost, and Cecilia Tan, who are basically my go-to authors for that kind of thing these days. And, along the way I also confessed to giggling inappropriately when kinky things are being done to me, shared my desire to see the cast of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman in an ‘Endless Orgy,’ and emphasized that sex in sf can involve speculation about sex itself, as well as sex for the sake of character development, plot, or titillation.

It’s been a ridiculously long day (yes, I am ending my day at 7 am, so what?) so I am going to break this into two parts. In part two, I will share my notes from the panels I attended as a spectator and whatver else I feel like sharing from the con.

*I saw her pink haired head around the con; I never got to meet her, but found her entries via twitter search. It was fun to follow the twittering from the con, though there was not as much as I expected.