Two things I learned on a recent trip to San Francisco:

ONE:
Schick Intuition is the most tremendous pubic-area shaving apparatus I have ever used. It is like taking a white, furry rabbit and rubbing it onto your nether regions and magically – through the power of rainbows, possibly – eradicating all of your unwanted curlies. Because of its self-lathering feature (aloe! Vitamin E!), it doesn’t even feel like you’re shaving, but like you’re fake-shaving, like when you were a 7-year old boy watching your dad shave his pubes over the toilet and you’d sit there in the corner of the washroom with a fake Fisher-Price pube-shaver, following his movements and pretending you were ten years hairier.

(This was a review unit found on the bed in my hotel room, not personally purchased, although the marketing geniuses at Schick were correct in assuming that even men would become so enamored with this product that they would be forced against their better judgment to personally purchase this pink contraption solely constructed for women’s legs for years to come, and with it a package of tampons to further cement the red herring that I’m buying it for my girlfriend, god, she makes me run these fucking errands all the time. Christ, I am a wicked-awesome boyfriend.)

TWO:
Fleshlight? Really?

We were browsing through a sex shop in the Mission where a friend was looking for a portable, subtle vibrator that she could take on her travels and that wouldn’t alert customs to think that it was a bomb or, even more tragic, to snicker at her. We browsed for an embarrassing amount of time, and in two visits (punctuated with my gleeful visit to Dave Eggers’ Pirate Store), enough for me to realize that, holy shit, I masturbate all of the time! Why don’t I have a device that will both save time and elevate my masturbatory experience?  And now I do. Or did, before I tossed it into the recycling bin in half a session after deducing that I couldn’t craigslist the $100 fucker.

Why The Fleshlight Is A Piece Of Fucking Shit:
1:  The way it works is like this: you warm it up in a sink of warm – not hot – water, lube it up, insert your penis, extract your penis, lube it up, insert your penis, extract your penis, lube it up, repeat. The lubricant soaks through the rubber and collects somewhere within the handle (I’m supposing, because I refused to look before tossing it). It’s very much unlike a youthful, perky vagina that is always self-lubing and more akin to having intercourse with a dehydrated octogenarian (supposing, again), or, more aptly, like you’re FUCKING A RUBBER VAGINA (sadly, I’m not supposing this one anymore).

2: Besides the continual extraction of your penis for lubrication obligations (lubrigations?), to simulate sex you lie on your back, insert your penis, and then pump the Fleshlight in a jacking-off motion. So really, it’s still jacking off in the same old-fashioned way, although it takes more time and effort when you count the amount of Lube Duty involved. Dig? It takes more time and effort. It’s not at all automated or handsfree. And, also, you are FUCKING A RUBBER VAGINA.

3: Now to counter the last argument, the website suggests that you place the Fleshlight under your mattress so that the handle is sturdily buried. Then you slide to your knees and onto the floor, grab a hold of the top of your mattress, insert your penis into the Fleshlight, and hammer away. Sure, this takes care of the problematic methodology of redundantly jacking off and teeters you closer to the hip-thrusting action of authentic sex, but once in awhile (every 3 seconds or so) you will pop out of your masturbatory euphoria and realize – and there’s no denying or repressing this, you will in fact be very, very aware – that you are now FUCKING A MATTRESS.

4:  The website also suggests an alternate: “The "shoe method" is a style of hands-free Fleshlighting. Stick the narrow end of the Fleshlight into a shoe, on a flat surface. [And then fuck it.]”  I haven’t tried this, but I’d imagine this would feel only sort of like a vagina and even more like you’re FUCKING A GODDAMN SHOE NOW, YOU SICK FUCK.

5:  No boobs to grab or throats to choke.

6: When capped, it looks like a flashlight, natch. This might’ve been a Eureka, Q-of-James-Bond-lore moment for the engineers, but I suspect it was more along the vein of, “This sort of looks like a flashlight, let’s just roll with that. Who’s up for Counterstrike?” I live in a turn-of-the-century (read: run down) joint in the Annex that, while looks awesomely pretentious from the outside, is prone to black outs. Pathetically, in my low-rent existence, a flashlight isn’t a safety measure used in rare emergencies as it is a necessity used monthly to swap out fuses and toggle breaker switches.

Inevitably, in an urgent, frequent, highly irritating moment of need of artificial light, I, or an incredibly beautiful and naked woman in my bed (with bangs), will instead grab the Fleshlight, point it at the fuse box, notice no beam of light, flip it over, and stare right into the mouth of a rubber vagina instead of a burnt-out bulb. Neither of us would be startled; it’d be one of those moments where we’d sigh heavily, slumped over, and I’d say, “Sorry, it’s just my fucking rubber vagina again,” like our numbers didn’t come up in the lottery.

If they’re going to disguise it as a rarely-used piece of safety equipment, they need to go all the way and fashion it as a defibrillator.

But then you’d be FUCKING A DIFBRILLATOR.

7: Asian genitalia are brown, assholes.