If you’d told me before I started reviewing sex toys that, one day, I’d lie in bed sweatily shoving the muzzle of a vibrating teddy bear against my genitals, trying in vain to achieve anything close to an orgasm, I’m not sure I would have believed you. And if I had believed you, I’m not sure I would have pursued this career path.
Earlier this year I received an email from Teddy Love, a company that makes a teddy bear vibrator. I’m much pickier now than I was when I started reviewing toys, but there are some offers you just can’t refuse. It seemed impolite to look a gift bear in the mouth, as it were, so I agreed to try it out.
When a comically large box arrived on my doorstep and I pulled the bear out, I actually shuddered. The Teddy Love is, it must be said, intensely creepy. The glassy, dead eyes of a typical teddy bear, when paired with its protruding tongue straight out of a psychosexual fever dream, create a chilling image. For the first few nights I owned the Teddy Love, I kept it across the room from my bed, facing away from me, for fear of what terrible things it might do to me in the dark of night.
But eventually it was time for me and Charlie Tango to get to know each other a little better. (I named him after Christian Grey’s helicopter in the Fifty Shades novels, a nod to the bear’s ill-advised attempt at being sexy while instead being creepy as hell.)
The Teddy Love’s tongue—easily the most frightening thing about it, apart from the fact that it exists at all—is one of its supposedly pleasurable features. The bear’s nose is meant to go on the clitoris, while its tongue slips inside the vagina. However, within seconds of settling Charlie’s smug face on my bits, I discovered this arrangement was not to be. The distance between the Teddy Love’s nose and tongue is shorter than the distance between my clit and my vaginal opening, so I can have his tongue inside me or his nose on my clit, but never both at the same time. Bummer?
The tongue itself, perplexingly, is only about three-fourths of an inch long—not even long enough to penetrate the vaginal opening if you have fleshy labia, let alone hit the G-spot, located two to three inches inside. When I texted my boyfriend these measurements in dismay, he replied that it didn’t sound like it was meant for an adult-sized person.
The childlike quality of this sex toy is, of course, what makes it so unsettling for so many people. But it’s also why I was intrigued by the Teddy Love. It seemed to me it would serve some niche markets in the kink community: plushies, furries, and age-players (people who role-play as someone of a different age than they are). I asked the folks at Teddy Love if they’d intentionally targeted these demographics, and they told me they didn't know about these groups before launching their product, though they’ve since become aware of these markets.
Nonetheless, my curiosity was piqued, as someone who dabbles in age-play myself. I have a “daddy dom/little girl” dynamic with my boyfriend, meaning that we sometimes take on the respective roles of helpless, bratty girl and benevolent, domineering caretaker, both in and out of the bedroom. This sexual identity is a new one for me, so I wondered if masturbating with a teddy bear would help me go deeper into “little space”—the calming, kinky headspace associated with age-play. But nope. Far from being arousing, this bear struck me as deeply upsetting.
That phrase—“deeply upsetting”—kept popping into my head while I got busy with Charlie. It is deeply upsetting to look into the lifeless black eyes of a teddy bear and think, I am going to have sex with you. It is deeply upsetting to shift a bear’s face around against your junk in search of a comfortable position for the rigid nose and pointy tongue. It is deeply upsetting to look down between your legs and see what appears to be a teddy bear performing cunnilingus on you—even if, like me, you used to masturbate this way as a child.
On top of all that, it’s also deeply upsetting that the bear is executed as badly as it is. Teddy Love brags that their product designers also make toys for Mattel and Hasbro, and that their bear is produced by “a Disney-certified manufacturer.” But you cannot send a children’s-toy designer to do a sex-toy designer’s job. The vibrations in my bear feel diffused through its whole head, not focused in the face where they ought to be—and they’re high-pitched and buzzy, so they feel good for a minute or so until my clit gets too numb to discern pleasure.
The bear’s controls are located in its ears and left paw and operate on a hair trigger (or a bear trigger, if you will). Many times I got Charlie’s face right where I wanted it, lost myself in a rare moment of pleasure, and then accidentally turned the vibrations off by nudging his paw with my thigh. If it’s that easy for me to shut the bear off, I have to assume it’s also easy to turn him on accidentally. “Teddy Love is discreet and blends in with household furnishings. It can be left out on a bed inconspicuously, without fear of someone finding it,” the bear’s initial crowdfunding page boasts, though I’m not sure how “discreet” it would be if a guest sat down on your bed and your stuffed animal started loudly vibrating.
“It keeps almost feeling good, and then I remember it’s a bear,” I texted my boyfriend 40 minutes into a fruitless testing session with the Teddy Love. If I closed my eyes and imagined it was my darlin’ going down on me instead, an orgasm started to feel within reach—but then I felt polyester fur graze my thighs or poked myself in the urethra with that stabby little tongue, and the illusion was ruined. After an hour I asked, “Can I please stop?!” and my boyfriend texted back, “You can stop. And then you can do your damnedest to get off with a different toy, as a healing practice.” I sighed with relief, threw Charlie across the room, grabbed my Hitachi Magic Wand, and pursued what little pleasure I was still able to feel at that point.
It’s deeply upsetting to masturbate while watched by a bear whose muzzle is covered in your sexual fluids.
It’s also deeply upsetting to contemplate cleaning such a thing. Teddy Love says “standard toy cleaner” works for the face and you can get the fur clean using “a damp cloth with soap and warm water.” No part of the bear is submersible. So, you know, good luck with that.
While I think a teddy bear vibrator is theoretically a nice idea for people whose kinks involve stuffed animals or people who like their sex toys cuddly and unintimidating, this particular one is so poorly designed as to be painful. A vibrator should have a good motor, should be easy to clean, and should not ignite existential horror in the very depths of your soul when you look at it.
As such, the Teddy Love is practically unbearable.
