What do you do when your partner lacks blowjob skills? Where do you go for training when you wish to improve your own? Here!

M. Makael Newby is a relationship coach and dance instructor with a particular skill for breaking physical action into components and teaching them with enthusiasm… and blowjobs are one of her favorite things. This class will educate both the givers and receivers. Come learn about creating anticipation, communication, preparing for success, hand skills, tongue tricks, prostate massage, deep throating, sloppy BJs, choking and forced gagging for both bio and strap-on penises. Live demo (on dildo) included.

Many of these techniques are included in My Erotic Adventure, her choose-your-own styled erotic novel. Get empowered to give and receive extraordinary head!

Limited space available — sign up online!

It looks like our old friend the Hitachi Magic Wand is getting a bit of a facelift. Notice anything? Yep, the word “Hitachi” is being dropped from its name.

Don’t panic — it’ll always be the powerhouse we’ve always loved. But, as it turns out, Japanese company Hitachi has grown weary of having its name attached to a device far more well-known for its pleasure-inducing properties than its “intended” purpose of massaging sore muscles (although it does that quite well, too!).

Despite the fact that the Magic Wand has been in production for over 30 years, Hitachi planned to cease production of the product. Thankfully, distributor Vibratex stepped in with a better idea: simply remove the word “Hitachi,” and in turn, prevent all-out pandemonium among the masturbating public.

Laura Anne Stuart, owner of the Tool Shed in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, attended the International Lingerie Show this year and reported back about the changes. Aside from the re-branding, the toy will have stronger construction and updated componentry, making it even more durable than before. Stuart found the new model to be satisfactory indeed:

I held a new Wand in my hand at the show, and it felt just as powerful to me, with the same intensity of vibration. The minor adjustments that Vibratex made cause the toy to be less jerky when turning on and off and will reduce the extremely small number of defective wands to almost zero. The handle has been reinforced to decrease the vibrations that are transmitted to your hand (rather than to the head of the toy), and the switch circuitry has been improved. In my opinion, you can feel these changes when holding the toy, but not when applying the head of the Wand to a body part.

The Hitachi Magic Wand rose to orgasmic fame in the ’70s, when feminist sex educator Betty Dodson featured it in her book, Liberating Masturbation, and talked it up in her workshops. It’s been a cult classic ever since, much loved for its incredibly powerful vibrations and broad, tennis-ball-sized head. It’s so popular that quite a few attachments have been invented for it, and a sex pillow was even designed specifically to hold one.

So sometime in the next few months, our Hitachi Magic Wands will be replaced with updated Magic Wands. And while we’ll miss the box featuring delightful photos of’80s ladies innocently massaging their backs, we’re relieved that Vibratex jumped in and ensured the posterity of the toy that many refer to as “the Cadillac of vibrators.”

Gifted with a Polaroid instant camera at age 8, Courtney Trouble was destined to be an artist. As a teenager in Washington, she spent her days in her high school’s dark room — and her nights running in grunge and riot grrrl circles.

Trouble attended The Evergreen State College in Olympia, where she continued pursuing print and digital photography. She snagged publishing, entertainment journalism, and photography gigs for a while, then started working as a phone sex operator. Phone sex was lucrative and allowed her to be her own boss, but it was exhausting catering to her clients’ fantasies all the time. Trouble was itching to explore her own rebellious queer desires.

So in 2002, at just 19 years old, Trouble founded NoFauxxx.com, a little website offering up “subversive smut.” In the beginning, Trouble shot erotic photos of her friends, lovers, classmates, and herself with a bulky Nikon CoolPix — 600 pixels max — and no light set, studio props, or a video camera. Just, as she puts it, “that good old Olympia DIY magic.”

NoFauxxx was a fun, creative hobby at first, something to balance out Trouble’s fantasy-based phone sex work with the documentation of real queer sexuality — but over the years, it grew into a community and a movement. The queer porn movement.

In 2007, Trouble began filming her first full-length DVD. With no formal training in film or video editing and very little money, it took her two years to finish. But the result, Roulette, solidified her trajectory toward queer porn notoriety.

Courtney Trouble is now known as a sassy and unapologetic champion of authentic, queer, body-positive, binary-breaking feminist porn. She strives for inclusivity, casting performers who run the gamut of gender, sexual orientation, size, and race. She likes to shoot performers in their own homes, using their personalities as inspiration for scenes. Queer porn, she admits, is a genre defined by its lack of structure:

Queer porn is a little bit undefinable, because the “point” of queer porn is to show the vast diversity of queer desire, and performers “queering” sex more as a verb than an adjective. Queer porn is a collaborative, open-communication-centric, intimate art that is as much the performer’s concept as well as the director or producer. Queer porn removes the various niches, stereotypes, and misconceptions that the dominant adult industry places on people based on how they look or how they fuck, and allows the performers and producers to make authentic, meaningful, sex-positive imagery that reflects our true sexual natures.

After her first film, Trouble helped build Reel Queer Productions, a video line for which she directed and edited 11 more movies, both plot-based and gonzo, including Roulette Toronto, Seven Minutes in Heaven, Nostalgia, Billy Castro Does the Mission, and Bordello.

Trouble is a performer as well. She loves being in front of the camera, using her body and sexuality (as a genderqueer fat feminist femme switch) to make a political statement. As a performer, she has starred in her own films, as well as The Wild Search, Crash Pad Series Volume One, and in scenes on Shine Louise Houston’s website CrashPadSeries.com and Madison Young’s website Madison Bound. Performing, she firmly believes, makes her a better director.

Taking everything she learned from the trial-and-error development of NoFauxxx, Trouble collaborated with queer pornstar Tina Horn in November 2010 to launch QueerPorn.TV, a community-based porn site featuring exclusive content and interviews with performers. She also runs QueerPornTube, the first ever free, user-generated queer tube site, which hosts the work of both amateurs and professionals.

In 2011 she established her own porn production company, TROUBLEfilms, through which she has released several films: Fuckstyles of the Queer and Famous, Live Sex Show, and Lesbian Curves (which just won a Feminist Porn Award for “Hottest Dyke Film”). TROUBLEfilms also distributes Tobi Hill-Meyer’s Doing It Ourselves: The Trans Women Porn Project and The Genderfellator.

By taking complete control of her content distribution, Trouble is able to release scenes featuring fisting, knife play, squirting, and other sex acts that distributors usually don’t allow due to obscenity laws. These often nonsensical laws are what inspired Trouble, along with genderqueer porn icon Jiz Lee, to create International Fisting Day to educate and dispel myths about fisting.

Ten years after its initial launch, NoFauxxx changed its name to Indie Porn Revolution, and subsequently received an AVN nomination for “Best Alternative Website.” It is now the longest-running queer porn website on the internet, with a unique genre- and gender-less navigation structure that encourages the viewer to explore its breadth of erotic imagery without choosing a familiar category marker first.

When asked what keeps her passionate about queer porn, Trouble said:

The effect that my work has had on other queer folks . . . I get letters all the time that queer porn has changed, and sometimes even saved, a life. It saved mine 10 years ago, and the fact that it’s still relevant and even more so now, is why my passion thrives. Sometimes people use my art as a survival tool. Not very many pornographers get to say that their porn is that essential.

Courtney Trouble loves animals (especially her chihuahua, Cookie Party), the njoy Eleven and Hitachi Magic Wand, and cheeseburgers. She is working on a film called Come Find Me, which follows a woman on a bike-powered scavenger hunt to her real-life lover. It will be Trouble’s first full-length movie starring a heterosexual couple.

Check out this fun interview with Trouble from this year’s Feminist Porn Awards:

Courtney Trouble can be found on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, YouTube, and on her blog.

Big news! After much toiling behind the scenes, our affiliate program is now live. If you run a blog or website and want to promote our shop and the products we carry, you can now apply to be a part of our program. We offer 15% commissions on every sale you send our way. If you’re already talking about us online or want some incentive to do so, this is it!

How you choose to promote She Bop is up to you, whether you simply place a banner in your sidebar, mention us on Twitter, write reviews of your favorite products… or all of the above! Then, when a visitor clicks on one of those links or banners, their IP will be logged and a cookie will be placed in their browser for tracking purposes. If the visitor orders from us, the order will be registered as a sale for you (for which you will receive 15% commission).

Read more about the program on this page. There’s also a FAQ. Applications are approved or denied on a case-by-case basis. We are generally looking for websites and blogs that are relevant, well-maintained, and likely to be an asset to our program. When you’re ready to apply, go here.

Throughout the month of May, 10% of all purchases made at She Bop on Tuesdays will go to TransActive’s In A Bind program! TransActive is a Portland-based non-profit that provides a wide range of services to transgender and gender nonconforming children, youth, and their families. Their In A Bind program provides chest binders to trans-masculine youth in need. It is the first national chest binder donation/distribution program, with over 1,300 people on the waiting list for a binder.

All proceeds from this fundraiser will be used to purchase binders from our distributor and donate them to TransActive. You are also welcome to visit the shop to donate binders.

So come on down to the shop on any Tuesday in May to support this amazing program. Be sure to follow TransActive on Facebook and Twitter, and check out this interview with the Program Coordinator for In A Bind, conducted by our very own sales associate and educator, Wyatt Riot!

Herbenick was initially bummed out by the 2012 election season, when various political snafus highlighted the unfortunate state of sex education in the country. She thought about how discussions about sex are often confined to sensational media portrayals, with little room for a multi-faceted, realistic approach. The light bulb went on when she considered her own experiences:

. . . she realized that she and all her sex-positive colleagues “have experienced firsthand how quickly sex becomes normal and everyday when we’re in a bubble of people who talk about it, who have sex books on their bookshelves, who teach about it, and who talk about it like it’s no big deal.” She wondered, “If more people engaged in everyday acts of sex-positivity, would change happen more quickly?”

We can only hope! Herbenick’s idea is to give a virtual pat on the back to the people who help make sex, bodies, and gender a part of everyday conversation. So far the project features photos from sex shop owners, bloggers, sex educators, sexuality conference attendees and presenters, writers, sex therapists, students, and regular ol’ folks, with photos of everything from sex-positive burial tombs to vulva art and crafts.

It’s great to see the ways in which even single individuals are making a difference: a creator of a deck of cards meant to spark conversation around sexuality, a person who casually leaves sex-themed books on their bookshelf for friends to peruse, a mom who blogs about sex and motherhood, someone who hands out safer sex materials at Pride parades.

The site also features the Redhead Bedhead, whom visited us for her Superhero Sex Shop Tour back in December (the tour’s over now, but she continues to publish profiles of the shops she visited — check ‘em out!). Also, as big fans of Early to Bed in Chicago, we loved this picture of owner Searah Deysach’s mom helping pack up vibrator kits. And you cannot stop your heart from being warmed by this picture of legendary sex educators and partners Carol Queen and Robert Morgan Lawrence at the closing keynote of CatalystCon. Their talk was extremely moving.

If you’ve been into She Bop, you probably noticed that we also follow a philosophy of normalizing sex. It’s not hard for us — we’re used to talking about vibrators, dildos, and lube all day. We also understand how tone, body language, and word choice can help put customers at ease. But most of all, we believe that sexuality is healthy and worthy of discussion and attention. With Make Sex Normal, we know that are not alone in this crusade.

If you’ve ever wondered just what kind of research and development goes into lube creation (and we sure did!), you’ll love this article in the Chicago Reader that details the story behind Überlube. We just added Überlube to our shelves, having been impressed with its light, effortless feel and high-quality glass bottle. Now that we know the whole story, we appreciate it even more!

Here’s how Überlube came to be: Stephen Magnusen and Franz Zwergel were best friends since high school. After college, they lived together working various jobs: selling security products, modeling, producing hair shows. They were on the hunt for a business endeavor they could enter together, but no ideas were sticking until one night in 2002 when a friend described something using the invented word “überlube.” The word struck them. Nobody was making an actual product called “überlube,” so that is what they set out to do — create a lubricant that fit the adjective’s definition: the best, the greatest, beyond the norm.

Neither guy had a background in chemistry or much knowledge about lube, but they had connections: hair salon friends, a chemist father. They set up a lab in a basement in Wisconsin and began a rigorous testing schedule, and soon, they were self-made lube experts:

After almost three solid weeks of 12-hour days, their experiments grew increasingly obsessive-compulsive. Zwergel remembers them like this: “‘OK, now stick your arms out; I’m going to pour A on your left and B on your right.’ And then we’d test each other and put the same product on both arms. That’s when we knew we were getting burned out — when we started calling out differences between the same product.” One of Magnusen’s fonder recollections is of an experiment wherein he attempted to set Zwergel on fire to test the product’s flammability: “Some of our ingredients said that they were scorchable,” he says. “So we had Franz in the kitchen covered in Überlube and I had my creme brulee torch and I went to town on him. And I was unable to light him on fire.”

Magnusen even went so far as to invent a device to test lubricity. And three months later, after testing tons of formulations and extensively polling their friends, they found the winning formula. There are only four ingredients – dimethicone, dimethiconal, cyclomethicone, and tocopheryl acetate (vitamin E) — but they’re high-grade, with very specific proportions.

“I remember trying a new composition and calling Franz to tell him I think we have it,” says Magnusen. ”It had all the fine qualities we were looking for, and I knew it the second I dabbed it on my wrist. Unperceivable tack. Zero foaming. Highly lubricious. Acceptable combination of sensation versus slip. And it had the one thing we really wanted to get right but didn’t know if it was possible: it lasted while I was using it and dissipated when I was done. I was totally psyched.”

When Überlube hit the market, Magnusen and Zwergel celebrated with shots of Überlube. Yes, Überlube in shot glasses, right down the hatch.

That’s a little extreme, but actually, silicone lube is known for its far-reaching talents. It is not compatible with silicone toys, which is its main downfall (silicone is a synthetic that will bind to itself, leaving a toy tacky). However, as an incredibly long-lasting, silky, and waterproof lube, it’s wonderful for extended sessions, anal sex, water play (just don’t slip and fall in the shower!), and more. Those same properties also make it great for a host of other things:

• Shining, smoothing, and de-frizzing hair
• Skin moisturizing
• Anti-chafing
• Polishing and conditioning latex and rubber, touching up patent leather
• Easing into rubber or latex clothing
• Shaving
• Oiling anything that is stuck or squeaking: locks, door hinges, bike chains, exercise equipment, hamster wheels…
• Massages
• Soothing chapped lips
• Conditioning tattoos
• Summer’s coming so we’re just gonna throw this out there: slip ‘n’ slide. (Or lube wrestling?)

Überlube was not designed solely as a sexual lubricant anyway. Magnusen and Zwergel saw it as more of an above-and-beyond product; so it is not just sold in sex shops, but also in hair salons and clothing boutiques.

For sure, silicone lube is a good thing to keep around the house. And on the bedside table. Do you have any favorite uses for silicone lube?

P.S. We have free samples of Überlube in the shop, so stop by and ask for a couple!

Sunday, June 30th — 7:30 p.m. — $20

Are you intrigued by the idea of tying someone up and having your way with them, or perhaps being restrained while someone does delightfully kinky things to you? Well, this class is designed to be a friendly first step towards that goal!

This class will cover the many hot ways bondage can be used (it’s not just about dominance, folks!), address safety concerns, and teach three simple and functional ties. We will then experiment with creative ways of applying these basic techniques to put people in a variety of compromising positions. Handouts and online video links will be distributed to help remind you of key skills when you get home.

Please come wearing comfortable clothes that you can move around in. If you have rope or a soft mat, please bring them (otherwise we will have some extras that can be shared). You may want to come with a practice partner, but it isn’t necessary. People of all genders and orientations are very welcome.

Chris is a happy, sex-positive perv who has been grinning his way through the kink scene for about eight years. He helps organize CockCircus, Seattle’s only public BDSM party for men, and enjoys evangelizing about the many virtues of bondage.

Limited space available — sign up online!

Wednesday, June 12th– 7:30 p.m. — $15

Have you ever wanted to rock your boa? Peel your stocking? Shimmy your hips? Get your glamour puss on because this class is for you! Join Orchestre L’Pow producer Madison Moone for Striptease Salon, a flirty evening of classic bump and grind perfect for beginners or just the curious.

Students will be guided through a sexy burlesque movement study including bumps, grinds and struts, followed by a tantalizing round of peeling techniques and prop dancing. We will also explore classic burlesque characters before constructing a series of short teases as a group. Together, we will discover a deeper sense of our personal erotic being while developing a greater appreciation for our feminine power!

Students should dress in comfortable clothes such a yoga or dance wear. Music and demo props will be provided by Miss Moone. All levels of fitness welcome, no dance experience or nudity required. Please avoid alcohol consumption before attending and arrive by 7:20 p.m. — class will begin promptly at 7:30 p.m., no late entrance after 7:45 p.m. No photographs are permitted. There will be time for shopping after the class!

Grab your best girlfriends and join Miss Moone for an evening of fun, laughs and celebration of the female spirit. See you in class!

Limited space available — sign up online!

Sunday, June 2nd — 7:30 p.m. — $20 — Q Center (3 blocks north of She Bop at 4115 N. Mississippi)

Oh la la! The female body is a deep pool of pleasure, and Ducky DooLittle is here to teach you how to swim. She will demystify the female body, from erogenous zones, to the vulva, clit, G-spot, female ejaculation, pelvic muscles, and even anal pleasure. This workshop is for anyone with a vagina and those who love them.

Expect to learn how to have (give) a better orgasm that very night, how to expand your orgasms, have multiple orgasms or how to orgasm if you never have, the truth about the G-spot and female ejaculation, why you might feel like you have to pee during sex and how to stop that, and the truth about which sex toys will take you over the edge, plus which products are the healthiest, highest quality and have the best price.

Together we’ll compare ancient Eastern knowledge, current scientific data, personal discoveries, tips and techniques and send you home with a wealth of orgasmic knowledge and resources. Walk away understanding why some touches deliver amazing stimulation and how to draw deeper orgasmic responses.

Plus, everyone who attends this workshop gets a raffle ticket to win sex toy prizes from Tantus, Aneros, and Sliquid!

Ducky DooLittle is a sex educator and author from New York City. She is the author of Sex With the Lights On. She has appeared in the New York Times, HBO’s Real Sex, The Morning Show, MTV, NPR, The Howard Stern Show, and Playboy TV, to name a few.

Limited space available — sign up online!