KamaSutronics

I take Heather to Le Central for lunch.  Le Central is a sweet little French restaurant just south of downtown, serving delicacies in an ivy-encrusted back room bathed in sunshine.  Heather is sexy, open, daring.  The hostess seats us, and Heather takes in the room: its gorgeous deep daylight, the abundant greenery.  She grins, and excuses herself to go to the bathroom, but I stop her.

I hand her a small package.  “You’ll know what to do with it,” I tell her, giving her a wicked half-smile.

She heads off.  Inside the package she will find a vial of silicone-based lubricant and an insertable vibrating egg.  I order a cup of coffee.

She returns, grinning, and sits across the table from me.  Maybe she’s a little more aware of the diners at nearby tables, the hum of conversation.  I reach into my pocket, where the remote control is waiting.  I press the button once, and a second or two later Heather emits a sound of delight.

The waitress arrives.  Heather doesn’t know her way around French food, so I order for the two of us.  She shoots me a conspiratorial look, enjoying the covert eroticism of a vibrator secretly buzzing inside her while the waitress enumerates today’s specials.  I press the button again, turning up the power, and Heather gurgles.  The waitress looks at her for a moment, and then I continue the order.

The waitress leaves, returning with my coffee.  It’s a bitter Columbian coffee.  I like it black.  I take a sip and swirl it around my mouth, savoring the warmth, the bitter, the flow of it.  It’s delicious.  I hit the button again, turning up the power.

I point out the decor to Heather, who seems distracted.  She doesn’t seem to take in the details of the room, which is sad, because the room is so pretty.  It has l’esprit de terroir — that spirit of place that can imbue a memory with so much meaning.  No one recalls the details of a dinner at Taco Bell, but here, in the shining back room of Le Central, there’s space to let your mind reach out and touch every corner of the windowed room.

I’m planning to order us some creme brulee for dessert, and I don’t want Heather to go numb before then, so I decide to turn off the vibrator.  And here is where things start to go wrong.

I’ve pushed the button … three times?  I think?  So I need to push it four more times to turn it off.  Click, click, click, click.  I wait to see Heather’s body language transmit relaxation, her face lose the aroused look, the playful connection.  It doesn’t happen.  “It’s still on?”

“Oui, oui, Monsieur,” she says.

“Hm.”  I push the button again.  “Now?”

“Still on.”

Click. “Now?”

“Nope, it’s still on.  And I’m starting to get sore.”

The waitress arrives, bringing us a bowl heaped with moules safran.  I don’t know how they make this dish, but it’s amazing.  A bowl of mussels served steaming in a saffron-cream broth, with garlic and red wine.  I consider this one of the world’s most erotic meals.

Heather is not looking happy.  I hit the button again, desperately. “No.”  [Click] “Still no.” [Click] “No.”

She says, “Excuse me, I’m going to go to the loo.”  She stands up, scowling.  She storms to the WC.

I sit in the back room of Le Central.  The room is endowed with a radiance of sunshine.  I sip my Columbian coffee.  I look at the empty chair where Heather had been sitting.  The mussels are getting cold.

I see Heather coming back, carrying the package I’d handed her earlier.  Other diners are turning their heads to look at her as she walks past them.  This is because the package is still vibrating.

She sits down, red-faced, clutching the vibrating package.  “Here, give me that,” I say, and then I head to the WC.  There’s a walk of shame along the way.

In the bathroom, I unscrew the egg and remove the batteries.

I wash my hands and return to an unhappy lunch of cold mussels in a congealing cream broth.  We don’t even stay for the creme brulee.

At least the coffee was good.

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I love the idea of remote-control sex toys that can be concealed under your clothing.  I love the idea of going to the movies, the opera, the office party, and maintaining this erotic, invisible connection that no one notices except you and your partner.

If you decide to go this route, make sure the remote has a simple interface.  Here’s how it should be: it should have one button.  That button should be an on/off button.

It’s unfortunate, but no one has worked out a method to make the fancy sensations useful in a remote sex toy.  With some, like the piece of junk in this story, you push the same button over and over to cycle through different rhythms.  This forces you to count how many times you’ve pressed the button and subtract that number from seven to figure out how many times it needs to be pushed to turn it off.  But sometimes the signal will fail to transmit, so you’ll actually need to press the button eight times, nine times, ten, eleven.

It’s ridiculous.

There’s a delay between pressing the button and feeling the reply.  So if you’re cycling through, trying to turn it off, counting the times you’ve pressed the button, you need to press the button, stop, wait, make sure the signal went through, and progress one step closer to the moment when you can turn it off.

And sometimes even that won’t work, and you’ll have to press the button over and over and over and over again, just hoping it’ll stop vibrating.

And sometimes it won’t go off until you remove the batteries.

Other designs use two buttons.  This is also a bad idea.  Suppose it’s vibrating with a rhythm she really enjoys — let’s say, rhythm number 8.  She’s so turned on.  And you know rhythm number 9 is the same as rhythm number 8, just more intense. So you reach into your pocket to hit the button and crank it higher…

but you hit the wrong button.  The vibrator goes off.

You try to get it back where it was before, rhythm number 8.  To get there, you need to cycle through the first seven rhythms, which messes up the rhythms that had been building inside her before.  And you encounter the same problem I described above, with the signal dropping — you might need to press the button ten, eleven, twelve times to get to rhythm 8.

If you want a good experience, choose a remote with a simple, solid interface, like this.

For lounging around the home, you can also connect the egg to a learning remote.  This will allow you to stimulate your partner while changing the channels, or browsing through your music.