Tech
Give Your Hand a Rest. Try One of Our Favorite Sex Toys Instead
Other Sex Toys We Like
We test a lot of sex toys and accessories here at WIRED, and there isn’t enough room in one list for all of our favorite picks. There’s barely enough room on this list for all the toys we’d consider phenomenal, let alone the ones we consider the absolute best. So here are some other products that are great in their own right and worth checking out.
Lovense Osci 3 Rabbit Vibrator for $114: Rabbit vibrators are often associated with vulvas because they simultaneously stimulate the G-spot and clitoris, but the flexibility of the Lovense Osci 3 (7/10, WIRED Review) makes it so anyone can use it. I have friends with phalluses who love rabbits because of the dual stimulation: the long arm can penetrate the anus while the shorter arm rests against the perineum, delivering intense vibrations. A lot is going on with Osci 3, and it’s full of features worth exploring, so I highly recommend it to anyone who loves bells and whistles.
Lelo Enigma for $199: Lelo’s Enigma is a weird-looking toy. It not only looks like some device a Stormtrooper would keep under their pillow to, well, who even knows, but looks aside, I can say this: I had one of the hardest and quickest orgasms of my life with this toy. Even after I climaxed, I sat there for 20 minutes wondering what had just happened. To this day, I don’t know if it was a blended orgasm, a triple orgasm, or some religious experience that only a heathen can have in the perfect setting. Like the Rabbit vibrator before it, the Enigma is designed to stimulate both the clitoris and the G-spot. But instead of relying solely on vibration, the Enigma’s clitoral stimulation arm contains a powerful air pulse mechanism for providing suction that imitates the sensation of receiving oral sex. The bigger, rounder end of the toy is where the vibration motor lives. Its body is flexible enough that you can use just one end or the other at a time, but if you use them together, it’s an intense experience, to say the least. Even going slow, the Enigma fires you off into space at warp speed—in a good way. That said, the vibration end is a bit thick at its widest point, so if you’re not comfortable with large-diameter toys, take it slow and easy. Use lots of lube.
Unbound Bender for $69: The Bender is unique because it’s so flexible and allows you to get creative if you’re alone or with a partner (or two). You can easily shape it to fit your body in so many ways. One minute, it’s the ultimate G-spot stimulator, while the next it’s reaching deep, heading toward the A-spot, or as we call it in the biz, the anterior fornix erogenous zone. Then, with more twists and turns, you’ve got yourself a clitoral vibrator. There’s no end to such high-quality, luxurious magic that comes with Bender! It’s also waterproof, and while the vibrations aren’t as powerful as a wand-style vibrator, they’re buzzy enough to make an impact, especially for those who find many vibrators to be too intense to the touch. It’s also super quiet, even at its highest setting.
Coconu Wave Massager for $50: The Coconu Wave (8/10, WIRED Recommends) is asymmetrical, with a flat cut-out on one side, giving you a variety of rounded and pointed corners to use for stimulation. It’s shaped like a raindrop, with a curved tip that does a great job of concentrating the vibrations it produces. The body is clad in platinum-cured silicone, and it’s soft and squishy to the touch. The silicone used on the Wave takes lube extremely well; even a couple of drops of water-based lube make the exterior of the Wave take on a texture sort of like the inside of your cheek. Slick but not squeaky or sticky.
Dame Com for $95: Dame’s take on the classic magic wand introduces a new angle on an old favorite—literally. Most wands are straight, and nothing on the human body is straight, so using them to reach your most sensitive areas can be pretty awkward. The Com (8/10, WIRED Recommends) offers an elegant solution. The wand handle is angled ergonomically, so the toy does all the reaching for you. The battery life could use some work, though; you’ll get about an hour out of a single charge, but that’s also why no one should ever own just one wand vibrator. Not only should your vibrators always be fully charged, but it’s important to have something else on standby and ready to finish the job that another toy might have been unable to do.
Dame Fin for $49: For those who loved the Dame Fin, good news: Fin 2.0 has arrived. Slicker in appearance and with two more intensities to choose from (making it five now, instead of three), the Fin 2.0 may as well teach a master class. With your favorite water-based lube, the Fin can seamlessly move across the body, stimulating everything from the earlobes to the nipples to that spot on the inner thigh that makes so many people squirm in ecstasy. When you’re ready to take things up a notch, it can bring your sexual pleasure journey to fruition—in other words, orgasm.
Crave Vesper Mini for $109: In a society where things tend to get bigger, Crave decided to take the iconic Vesper and scale it down, creating the Vesper Mini (9/10, WIRED Recommends). Like its original model and its second incarnation, the Vesper 2, the Mini is just as discreet and stylish, while packing a whole lot of punch. The Mini, which is equal parts vibrator and necklace, has three speed intensities and one pattern option to choose from, is 100 percent waterproof, and because it’s made of polished 316L surgical stainless steel with a nickel-free plating, it’s body-safe. It’s a must-have if you prefer your sexual pleasure to be highly sophisticated, elegant, and wearable.
Magic Wand Micro for $65: I know what you might be thinking, “But it’s so smol!” You know what else is small? Hummingbirds, grapes, and puppies. So don’t let the smallness of anything, especially this Magic Wand Micro, cause alarm or assumption. Like all wands, the broad head of the Magic Wand Micro delivers rumbles galore that don’t just stimulate the clitoris but the entire vulva—and for a whopping three hours, when fully charged. It’s also USB rechargeable, so take that, outlet-needy wand vibrators! Unlike some other wands—like this one’s older siblings—there’s no need to be near an outlet for your entire body to feel the surge of pleasure everywhere. Nor will you feel like you have an extra limb in bed with you, thanks to its diminutive size that can easily be wielded about without fear of knocking yourself or a partner in the head. Its size also makes it travel-ready, meaning lunchtime wanks during the workday can become a daily practice. Fun fact: Feminist pornographer Erika Lust has made masturbation breaks a permanent policy in her company, so it’s not exactly unheard of or even vulgar to rub one out when you need a quick de-stress session. I have had dozens of wand vibrators in my life, but this one, as Renee Zellweger would say, “had me at hello.”
Crave Wink+ Bullet Vibrator for $89: For years, my favorite bullet vibe was Le Wand Deux, but with Crave Wink+, I’ve finally met a bullet that is currently rivaling my love for the Deux. Made of gorgeous body-safe, nickel-free stainless steel, the Wink+ offers four vibration intensities and one pattern mode, is 100 percent waterproof, and when fully charged and used at its highest speed, you can get up to a whopping five hours of playtime with this bad boy. It’s truly remarkable, and I know it will be on my nightstand for a very, very long time.
Dame Hug Cock Ring for $75: If you thought cock rings needed to be a super-snug fit to deliver the benefits they offer, think again. With the Hug (9/10, WIRED Recommends), Dame’s first foray into toys for penis-havers, the fit isn’t just comfortable, but easily adjustable thanks to the pinchable arms. Its design not only stimulates the penis and scrotum when rolling solo, but when used with a partner, the Hug is perfectly shaped to stimulate the clitoris during penetration.
What’s Your Sex Toy Made Of?
Photograph: Getty Images
Throughout this guide, we reference the different materials these sex toys are made of, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s notoriously difficult to pin down exactly what materials some sex toy manufacturers use and how safe those are for contact with your most sensitive body parts. This is due to FDA regulations and how they classify sex toys: medical devices or novelty. The former category requires rigorous testing and standards, whereas the latter makes it easier to get products into the market. There are a few sure bets, though. You want your sex toys to be, first and foremost, nonporous. A porous material will be almost impossible to fully clean and will degrade the product and house more and more bacteria over time. Secondly, you want it made of materials that will not shed chemicals, plastics, or other materials during regular use. The materials that generally fit that bill are surgical steel (316 or 316L steel), borosilicate glass, and silicone.
Silicone is one of the trickier materials because there are so many ways it can be made, and so many different testing standards in parts of the world. Frankly, there aren’t enough studies that test which kinds of silicone are safest. There are a couple that have a solid body of research behind them, along with some common testing standards: Platinum-cured silicone and food-grade silicone. Food-grade is a label regulated by the FDA, and it means the silicone has been tested to make sure it doesn’t leach harmful chemicals into food. Crave cofounder Michael Topolovac says, “Once you go below food grade, a lot of things come into play that are hard to verify.” Platinum-cured silicone is safer than standard (peroxide-cured) silicone because the chemicals used to make the silicone are more completely consumed during the process, leaving nothing behind to leach into your body. Platinum-cured silicones are surprisingly odorless for this reason.
Medical grade is a label you’ll see pretty often, but if it’s not backed up with the specific regulatory body or testing standard used to determine that it’s medical grade, it leaves me wondering why that hasn’t been disclosed. If the manufacturer specifies which kind of silicone it uses, we will list it in the product description. If it’s unclear, we’ll list it as unspecified silicone. That doesn’t mean it’s bad! It just means the specific kind used in that toy isn’t listed or hasn’t been provided to us.
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Tech
Everyone Speaks Incel Now
At the beginning of the year, The Cut kicked off a brief discourse cycle by declaring a new lifestyle trend: “friction-maxxing.”
The idea, in a nutshell, is that people have overconvenienced themselves with apps, AI, and other means of near-instant gratification—and would be better off with increased friction in their daily lives, which is to say those mundane challenges that ask some minor effort of them.
Whatever your feelings on that philosophy, the use of “maxxing” as a suffix assumed to be familiar or at least intelligible to most readers of a mainstream news outlet is evidence of another trend: the assimilation of incel terminology across the broader internet. The online ecosystem of incels, or “involuntarily celibate” men, is saturated with this sort of clinical jargon; its aggrieved participants insulate, isolate, and identify themselves through in-group codespeak that is meant to baffle and repel outsiders. So how did non-incels (“normies,” as incels would label them) end up adopting and recontextualizing these loaded words?
Slang, no matter its origins, has a viral nature. It tends to break containment and mutate. The buzzword “woke,” as it pertains to our current politics, comes from African American Vernacular English and once referred to an awareness of racial and social injustice—this usage dates to the middle of the 20th century, preceding even the civil rights movement. But the culture wars of this century have turned “woke” into a favorite pejorative of right-wingers, who wield it as a catchall term for anything that threatens their ideology, such as Black pilots or gender-neutral pronouns.
Back in 2014, the eruption of the Gamergate harassment campaign set the stage for a different linguistic realignment. An organized backlash to women working in the video game industry, and eventually any sort of diversity or progressivism within the medium, it exposed a vein of reactionary anger that would gain a fuller voice during Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign. This was a period when many in the digital mainstream got their first taste of the trollish nihilism and invective that fuels toxic message boards such as 4chan and gave rise to a network of anti-feminist manosphere sites collectively known as the “PSL” community: PUAHate (a board for venting about pickup artists, it was shut down soon after the 2014 Isla Vista killing spree carried out by Elliot Rodger, who frequented the forum), SlutHate (a straightforward misogyny hub), and Lookism (where incels viciously critique each other’s appearance).
Lookism, named for the idea that prejudice against the less attractive is as common and pernicious as sexism or racism, is the only forum of the PSL trifecta that survives today, and while we don’t know who coined the “maxxing” idiom, it’s the likeliest source for the first verb with this construction. “Looksmaxxing,” which borrows from the role-playing game concept of “min-maxing,” or elevating a character’s strengths while limiting weaknesses, became the preferred expression for attempts to improve one’s appearance in pursuit of sex. This could mean something as simple as a style makeover or as extreme as “bonesmashing,” a supposed technique of achieving a more defined jaw by tapping it with a hammer.
If the 2000s introduced people to pickup lingo like “game” and “negging,” the 2010s ushered in language that extended the Darwinian vision of the dating pool as a cutthroat and strictly hierarchical marketplace. “AMOG,” an initialism for “alpha male of the group,” gave us “mogging,” a display where one man flexes his physical superiority over a rival. An ideally masculine specimen might also be recognized as a “Chad,” who allegedly enjoys his pick of attractive partners, while a Chad among Chads is, of course, a “Gigachad.” Women were disparaged as “female humanoids,” then “femoids,” and finally just “foids.”
Tech
OpenClaw Users Are Allegedly Bypassing Anti-Bot Systems
In San Francisco, it feels like OpenClaw is everywhere. Even, potentially, some places it’s not designed to be. According to posts on social media, people appear to be using the viral AI tool to scrape websites and access information, even when those sites have taken explicit anti-bot measures.
One of the ways they are allegedly doing this is through an open source tool called Scrapling, which is designed to bypass anti-bot systems like Cloudflare Turnstile. While Scrapling, which was built with Python, works with multiple types of AI agents, OpenClaw users appear to be particularly fond of the software. On Monday, viral posts promoting Scrapling as a tool for OpenClaw users started to spread on X. Since its release, Scrapling has been downloaded over 200,000 times.
“No bot detection. No selector maintenance. No Cloudflare nightmares,” reads one viral post this week about the open source tool. “OpenClaw tells Scrapling what to extract. Scrapling handles the stealth.”
Cloudflare is not enthused. The company already blocked previous versions of Scrapling, since users of the open source software kept trying to get around anti-scraping protections. This week, the company was working on a patch for Scrapling’s most recent iteration. “We make changes, and then they make changes,” says Dane Knecht, chief technology officer at Cloudflare. He says the company’s trove of website data and its ability to track trends has given it the upper hand.
“We already had a signal that they’re starting to get a higher ability to get around us,” says Knecht. “The team of security operations engineers had already been working on a new set of mediations.”
Large language models were trained on the corpus of the internet—and the process involved a lot of scraping. In some sense, Scrapling users are following in the footsteps of the original model builders, but on a more individualized scale.
Over the past few years, website owners have attempted to put up additional anti-bot protections, either to block software like Scrapling or to find a way to make money off of the bots trying to access their sites. In turn, Cloudflare has been working overtime to keep blocking increasingly powerful bots attempting to get around these protections.
In July 2024, Cloudflare started to offer its customers additional tools that block AI crawlers, unless the bots pay for access. In less than the span of a year, the company claims to have blocked 416 billion unsolicited scraping attempts.
“I Didn’t Know What I was Getting Into”
As Scrapling gained traction in recent days, crypto enthusiasts capitalized on the attention by launching a $Scrapling memecoin. Karim Shoair, who claims to be the sole developer of Scrapling, posted about the memecoin on X (those posts have since been deleted). After the price skyrocketed for around five hours, $Scrapling quickly fell off a cliff as users sold off their stakes. “Bunch of fucking scammers,” reads one comment on the Pump.Fun site that hosts the coin.
“I didn’t know what I was getting into when people made that coin and I endorsed it,” says Shoair, in a direct message with WIRED. “But once I knew, I didn’t want any association with it and the money I withdrew before will go to charity, I won’t benefit from it in anyway. Or maybe just leave it to be wasted.”
In the fallout of this event, the unofficial GitHub Projects Community account, which has over 300,000 followers on X, deleted its posts from this week highlighting Scrapling’s open source software, and appeared to distance itself from the project. “We do not support, promote, or engage in crypto assets, token offerings, trading activity, or crypto-based fundraising,” it said in a post late Monday night.
Putting the crypto forays aside, most software leaders continue to see agents and autonomous AI tools as the future of the web. Even Knecht from Cloudflare, whose work includes blocking bots from nonconsensual scraping, wants to build toward a world where humans and agents benefit from online data and the wishes of website owners are respected. “I see a path forward for an internet that is both friendly to agents and humans,” he says.
This is an edition of Will Knight’s AI Lab newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
Tech
The AirPods Pro 3 Are $20 Off
Looking for a new pair of earbuds to pair with your favorite iPhone or iPad? Right now, you can grab the Apple AirPods Pro 3 for just $229 on Amazon or Best Buy, a $20 break from their usual price. They’re our favorite wireless headphones for iPhone owners, with great noise-canceling, easy connectivity, and unique features like heart rate and live translation.
The active noise-canceling on the third generation AirPods Pro has improved a great deal, with our reviewer Parker Hall comparing them to the Bose QuietComfort Ultra 2 Earbuds when it comes to filtering out all but the highest frequency, loudest noises. The improved ear tips, now lined with foam, are more comfortable and fit better in smaller ears, with four different sizes to choose from. They also have better sound isolation, which improves the noise canceling and transparency mode performance noticeably.
While Android owners have a variety of choices when it comes to earbuds and headphones, iOS users will appreciate the extra features specifically built for anyone in the Apple ecosystem. If you’re into running with minimal devices, the AirPods Pro 3 can actually take your heart rate through your ears, a neat trick that we found surprisingly consistent with other fitness trackers. Another unique feature, live translation, will bring up the Translate app on iOS and relay what someone else is saying directly into your ears in your own language. Once again, we were impressed by how fast and accurate the system was, and as more languages are added it will become even more useful.
We really only had two minor complaints about the AirPods Pro 3, one of which was that the default EQ is a bit V-shaped, with a slightly overdone bass that’s either really appealing or slightly grating. Thankfully you can tweak your EQ in Spotify or Apple Music to dial in that experience. The other issue is that these have limited compatibility with Android devices, so if you’re on a Samsung or Pixel, you’ll want to check out our other favorite earbuds. For iPhone and iPad owners looking for the latest and greatest for their listening experience, the discounted AirPods Pro 3 are an excellent choice.
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