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Have you ever had issues sizing your toy? Finding the right toy for yourself can be a difficult and daunting task at first, but never fear! After The Yes is here with a guide to assist! Check them out and support HERE Twitter: @Aftertheyes1

Helping Others With Toy Sizing Is Hard

When you are shopping for a penetrative sex toy picking the correct size can be frustratingly difficult. It doesn’t matter if a toy has the right texture, finish, shape, and other features if it arrives and you find out that it’s so big it can’t be used or so small that it fails to satisfy. Worse still, picking the right size for a sex toy is something that even very experienced people screw up from time to time, and it’s an absolute mine field for beginners. Getting sex toy sizes wrong comes with more consequences than most other consumer products as sex toys more often than not can’t be returned or refunded, especially after they are opened. That makes ‘discovering’ your size something that can be very expensive, and for my wife and I it took about 300 dollars of exploring. We’d like your cost of exploration to be much lower, and that’s a big reason we got into the review scene in the first place. In this piece, I’ll enumerate the reasons that make it practically impossible to recommend the ‘correct’ size to strangers, especially blind, and I’ll also be giving the advice I can give to people who are finding purchasing their first toy intimidating and it will raise your success rate. First, The Pitfalls Your Body is Unique I’m sure you’ve heard that before, but this plays an especially important role with how your body interacts with sex toys. The most common use case of toys where size is a factor is to pleasurably fill a space. This space has a finite maximum stretch that varies from person to person, and further still the percentage of that maximum where pleasure crosses over into pain also varies. Right out the gate I’m in an impossible situation to recommend a toy size if you don’t already know a little information about where those thresholds are for you. Sure, I can use normative averages to guess but it’s useless to apply population statistics to an individual seeking help. This creates a bit of a chicken/egg problem. The people who need the most help with this often are the most lacking in the necessary information I need to make a recommendation that I feel confident about. Actual Size Vs. Felt Size So we’ve learned how our different bodies can change what size we should be looking for in a sex toy, but did you know that what sex toys are made out of factors in? This one trips up newcomers rather frequently. Hard materials will feel bigger than softer ones. When you insert a really soft body-safe silicone toy it will compress and accommodate your personal shape to a degree dictated by how soft it is(This also varies wildly and is rated via the Shore Hardness Scale). Metal and glass aren’t going to be budging at all and won’t be making any changes to fit your unique shape. These factors can drastically affect how big a toy ‘feels’ at identical sizes. Case in point, my wife is somewhat of a size queen in her natural habitat of soft silicone dildos. She can take the knot of a large Apollo, which is a sex toy from notoriously large toy maker Bad Dragon, and get off just on the fullness, no motion required. Apollo in large is over 3 and a quarter inches in diameter at the largest point. None of her glass toys even hit an inch in diameter, and the Vamp from Tantus(one of the older and harder versions) at less than 2-inches diameter is so rough on her that we hardly use it anymore. It should be noted that the Vamp is also silicone and the difference in hardness between that and her Apollo are extreme. Geometric Scaling – Math Alert There’s a little unintentional trick going on with toys and their listed dimensions. Geometry scales in ways the human brain isn’t good at tracking when represented as a scalar number. Adding an inch of diameter to a 2 inch diameter toy is a much larger increase to the volume an orifice has to accommodate than going from 1 inch to 2. This phenomenon came up so much and bothered me so greatly that I decided to come up with my own metric to describe it. Basically I just normalized size to multiples of the cross-sectional area that the statistically average penis takes up(1.67 inches squared for those wondering). I call that D-score, and it’s used heavily in my reviews. It basically just means “this is like taking x number of penises at the same time”. I find this measure useful, or I wouldn’t use it, but there are still shortcomings of this method. First, if you’ve never taken a penis in said orifice you have no comparison basis, and secondly geometric scaling plays another dirty trick on our brains. I described above how we all have different pleasure/pain thresholds and maximum sizes we can take. What this means is that not only does a toy take up more volume than you might expect as it gets larger, but because it is filling a finite space instead of an unlimited space increases in size are felt a lot more at the top end of this threshold. Going from 0-50 percent full reduces the available room by 50%, and going from 80 to 90 also decreases the available room by 50% and again at 98 to 99, which, in the physical world may not even be a whole millimeter. So as a toy’s Diameter or Circumference goes higher not only is it expanding volume and cross sectional area at a non-intuitive rate but it’s also more rapidly taking up the remaining available space. All that is to say a half-inch increase in diameter may not be a big deal in one toy but can make you question why in the world a manufacturer thought the size increase was okay in another one.

Intended Use There are many different ways to use penetrative sex toys and how you’re using them can drastically change the desired size. A good thrusting toy from a size perspective is going to be by default smaller than a toy used explicitly for size play, refer back to my wife’s Apollo and being able to orgasm without moving due to the size. Using that thing as a thrusting toy can be done but it takes lots of preparation using gradually larger toys to work up to it, many of which are excellent thrusting toys in their own right. You want the thrusting motion as accessible as possible while maintaining a size that still brings you pleasure. On the other hand, a toy used for size play discards the accessibility requirement, or rather, it intentionally tests the limits of its own accessibility. I can’t know how to make a good size recommendation if I don’t know how you intend to use the toy. If you’re buying your first toy, you might not know this either, and that can make recommendations difficult to get right.

Lack of Industry Standards By it’s nature the sex toy industry lacks standards on communicating ideas of size. There’s no such thing as a standardized large or a small and it would be boring if there were. Competition in this market is absolutely hinged on innovations in shape, size, material, texture, and aesthetics. Having standards for size here would be a negative to the industry and the consumer. However, this makes for a dizzying and confusing landscape for inexperienced and first-time buyers. Some companies have toys marked small that are bigger than other companies toys marked large. Some companies even have big differences between different models where one model may say large at 11 inches long and another may say large at 8 inches long. These labels are basically useless to the consumer, serving merely the purpose of separating SKUs. This gives new buyers the unenviable task of making sense of those geometric measurements we were talking about earlier, and many aren’t able to.

The Fun Stuff – Solutions Okay so if you’re new to the market I’ve probably not helped with your anxiety thus far, breathe, it’s okay, we’re going to fix that now. Here are some sure-fire ways to increase your size selecting accuracy and save a whole wad of cash. Try Before You Buy(When you can) For reasons beyond the scope of this article, there’s not a single reputable toy company to my knowledge that allows you to take toys for test drives or return them for the reason “my eyes got bigger than my hole(s)”. Yet trying before you buy is one of the surest ways not only to avoid big mistakes in purchasing but to hone your understanding of your preferences as well. It may be a little outside of your comfort zone, but if you know someone that has a few or more body safe toys you may want to politely and respectfully ask if they are open to you borrowing a toy. My wife and I have saved our friends well over a thousand dollars worth of ‘try outs’, and we feel great about that. I understand not everyone will react that way but a lot of people who are willing to do this drop subtle hints, maybe that they aren’t even aware of. For instance, someone really private and unwilling to share might not have let you find out about their toys in the first place. So if you know someone with some toys, and especially someone with a large collection, I am confident that even if their answer is no they won’t get mad at you or something for asking. I’m spending a lot of words on this tip in particular because it is just really the most helpful thing to be able to do. If you’re nervous about it, try dropping a non-directed hint at some point, something along the lines of “I’m trying to figure out what my first dildo will be but I’m having trouble committing because I’d like to be able to try something first if I can’t return it”. If you do get a very positive response to that, try not to be too surprised, we can be a passionate bunch. There Are Ways to Play it Safe Although it pains me greatly to say it, if you are a first time buyer you may want to avoid the fantasy toy companies for purchase number one. Consider a penetrable vibrator for a first pick as they are typically designed to be in very safe zones for girth and the vibration function allows you to explore a lot of use cases all at once. If you are looking at non-vibrating toys definitely try to stick to manufacturers that stick to human shapes in general. Both of these options tend to avoid sizes that are unusable to a large portion of the population, while fantasy companies often have wide selections of dildos that are designed to be challenging for even the experienced or even intentionally impossible in edge cases. Fantasy companies are where Emily and I landed after a long journey of trying things out and we personally find fantasy designs are frequently superior to mainstream offerings in quality, texture, shape, etc, and they certainly have tons of options in ‘normal’ ranges. I just can’t bring myself to throw that pile of potential missteps at a newbie without some serious try-it-out action occurring. Masturbate It’s not often, but I’ve seen it enough to include it. There are people who attempt to buy toys before they’ve really explored their own bodies. If you have at least one working hand, it is your safest and cheapest method of exploring your limits. I am confident that if you are fretting about which size is right for you that your hand can become a configuration that isn’t large enough or is way too large for you. Be mindful of this, take measurements, get your ballpark numbers for limits and explore them. If you have a sexual partner, they can definitely help. Also take note of what feels good. If you especially like G-spot, P-spot, A-spot, continuous texture, little texture, etc, it really affects the design and size of a good toy for you. A squatty girthy toy for size play isn’t likely to be good at A-spot play too. Local Sex Shops I typically hate these. I find more often than not they are full of harmful toxic toys and crazy markups. That being said, they are a great way to see what ‘1.75 inches diameter’ looks like in person. A toy that is as wide as a coke can looks way more intimidating than a coke can I guarantee it. It is super useful to be able to guage things up close instead of trying to project that out from a 2-dimensional image with unknown scaling and perspective distortion. If you see something that is clearly too big, or clearly too small, write down the exact product name. Look at the packaging to see if they contain clear measurements. Many won’t, but you can take those product names and search them and the sizes are typically available online. You now have your ballparks and a working ‘no zone’. Pick a Reviewer, Not a Review Look over a wide selection of sex toy reviewers and, pay close attention to this part, find the one that likes the same things you do for the same reasons you do. If you’re really sexually inexperienced, which includes self love, you may not think you know what these things are but you should at least be able to rule out things you don’t like. For instance, if you are really into very realistic looking dildos but don’t know that yet and you visit my blog for all of ten minutes you’re going to run into lots of pictures of very high-fantasy dildos and that’s likely to turn you off. On the other hand maybe you’ll fall in love with high-contrast saturated pigments and novel shapes the way we did, who knows? Point is, you should be able, even without experience, to at least cross options off the list and you may even find someone you immediately click with. You’re also already on a fantastic review site right now if you’re reading this. Finally, if you still want to ask someone online for advice, remember the pitfalls section and try to have as many answers to those details as possible when you do ask for advice. Every detail provided goes a long way to providing advice that’s actually useful to you. Good luck out there!