Going Viral – The Blogalypse 4 – Good Vibrations

Almost a week has passed since André and I started showing symptoms and decided to lock ourselves down. As we start to feel better, certain ‘urges’ return and normal levels of flirtation in the house recommence.

We are lucky enough to have one of those Ring video doorbells that records anyone approaching our house and I often laugh to myself that if we died or disappeared in mysterious circumstances and the police had to analyse the footage of our comings and goings they would basically have to sit through months of watching me grabbing Andre’s butt as he walks up the stairs to our front door and him shouting ‘Hoiiiii!’ as he skips faster up the steps to get away from my grabby little Trump-hands.

But while we’re all stuck at home with our spouses, a little bit of flirtation, in fact a little bit of what the British call ‘nookie’ is good for morale. If you’re lucky enough to be locked in with someone you desperately fancy, then the next few weeks or months are going to pass infinitely more quickly and in better spirits. I’m trying to stay in a happy place, so I’m not going to examine the flip side of that too closely – those poor poor people stuck with abusive spouses, bullying parents or the type of evil devil children who make you want to stick forks in your eyeballs rather than spend another 5 minutes with them. Those people have my complete compassion. But this blog post is not about those very real tragedies going on around us all the time behind closed doors. This is a blog about what Barry White (God rest his soul) would be instructing us to do in a crisis in his honey-soaked croons.

Jokey memes are currently being passed around the internet faster than the spread of the virus itself about the huge number of ‘Apocalypse babies’ that will be born in nine months, as bored people searching for something to do at home turn to rutting constantly, to pass the time and block out the stress of impending doom. (I am of course talking about you people who don’t own an X-box and weren’t sensible enough to panic buy craft supplies instead of toilet roll).

These babies will be known as ‘The Coronials’ and one of the memes suggested that on their 13th birthdays in the year 2033 we will have a glut of ‘Quarantinagers’. Gotta love the memes. Best thing to come out of any crisis.

A selection of possibly popular baby names for December 2020 have already been circulating:-

Corona and Covid (obviously). Double bubble if you have twins.
Pandemia
Quarantina
Vi and Russ (more twins)
and my personal favourite, Charmin.

Thankfully, those of us with contraception don’t have to worry about another mouth to feed in the future dystopia that we find ourselves facing. But if you’ve forgotten to organise your coil implant or condom supply before the lock in, or if you are indeed locked in alone or with your own grandpa perhaps, all is not lost. There is always my go to suggestion in times of stress – masturbation. Great for the immune system, for increasing happy hormones, for good mental health, and it’s completely free.

Last week, as I was rearranging my imaginary funeral in my head yet again, whilst dry-coughing repeatedly into the back of the dog’s head as it straddled my lap (the Government does not recommend this), I wasn’t really thinking many frisky thoughts. Nevertheless, when a friend sent me a link to an article in the papers entitled ‘Don’t masturbate with hand sanitiser during the Corona crisis’, I couldn’t resist following the clickbait lure.

I simply can’t help wondering if journalists are running out of things to write about to make their version of the chaos stand out from other newspaper’s versions of doom of the day, and are therefore inventing a crisis within a crisis about stupid people being even more stupid just to create such clickbait and retain their jobs. However, it worked. And clicking on that link and reading the dross written in one of my least favourite publications, ‘The Sun’, is how I got sucked into (no pun intended) buying THIS item. Because halfway down the page was a comment saying that this particular piece of kit, selling for a mere £20 on Amazon UK made some random dude’s wife ‘scream like a banshee’.

And before I had even realised what was happening, within two clicks of a finger I had accidentally purchased said item. And when I say ‘accidentally’ I mean in the same way men who turn up at A&E with a hoover pipe stuck up their bottom say they ‘accidentally’ fell onto it whilst doing naked housework.

I hasten to add, that it slightly unnerves me that I might die in this crisis and it will go down in history that my last purchase was a very powerful vibrator. But that’s the unfortunate truth, and followers of my blogs know that I try to keep it real and raw.

All other impulse buying on the internet I have managed to talk myself out of with relative ease using the MoneySavingExpert.com‘s mantra ‘Do I want it or do I neeeeeeeed it?’ And that includes this gorgeous, bargainous, cheerfully bright, yellow floral bralette that repeatedly taunts me from a targeted ad on my Facebook feed (M&S you insatiable temptress you!). My 36F cup dumplings keep trying to persuade me that they neeeeeeed it, but I keep paffing them down into their grey mumsy support holster and telling them we all need to make sacrifices while resources are more scarce.

But the vibrator that would make me howl like a banshee, that’s something even I, with all my practical stoicism in a crisis simply couldn’t resist. It’s not just a gift to myself, but also to the neighbours, who I like to amuse with things I realise (only retrospectively) they can hear through our too-thin walls. My banshee screams can be added to other gems Andre and I have exposed them too over recent months, not limited to but including:-

On New Years’ Eve:- ‘If you’re coming upstairs don’t forget to bring ALL the drugs?!‘ (the dog was scared of fireworks and we had doggy relaxation meds).
Late at night when I was getting tired and cranky:- ‘Come to bed! I need to sleep and can’t relax without a potato!’ (This takes a little longer to explain, but revolves around Andre’s recent obsession with building up his muscles at the gym and me saying that sleeping in the nook of his shoulder/arm is like sleeping on a big bag of jacket potatoes now).
And then there’s the best one, which I really think should become another Blogalypse T-shirt design, which was on Shrove Tuesday when our dear neighbours would have heard me yelling to Andre ‘Don’t call the pancake a cunt!’ (I’m not even going to try to fully explain that one but it now serves as a catchphrase to chastise anyone who is losing their temper with an inanimate object. It works in all kinds of situations. Try it in your homes this week, I think you’ll find it a really handy phrase for reminding yourself to get a grip. Kind of like ‘Don’t cry over spilt milk’ or ‘Don’t sweat the small stuff’ for the modern generation.

That’s right….‘DON’T CALL THE PANCAKE A CUNT.’ It’s a message we all need very much to meditate on right now and is much more poetic than just yelling at your family members to calm the fuck down and chill out.

And now I’m hoping to taunt the neighbours with the idea that we’re having significantly better orgasms than them. To be fair, I have to listen to their noisy teenagers grunting and shrieking whilst playing Fortnite hour upon hour and their almost relentlessly obsessive DIY pursuits (HOW MANY TIMES DO YOU NEED TO RETILE YOUR BATHROOM?). So we’re almost even.

The next day I go to the door to greet the Amazon delivery guy with a gingerly held out rubber-gloved hand whilst holding my breath so as not to infect him with any potential Dreaded Lurgy I may or may not have. My banshee vibrator is here!

The world may be in crisis. People can’t find food or loo roll. There aren’t enough nurses or medical testing kits or oxygen masks. But Amazon can still deliver me a pulsating sex toy in less than 24 hours door to door, so you know we haven’t reached the end of days quite yet.

Keeping my gloves on, I carefully unwrap and dispose of the packaging, because if I haven’t currently got Covid-19 then there’s a small possibility I might get it from touching something that someone else infected might have touched. Unlike the AIDS crisis when it first came to our attention in the 80s when people ignorantly thought you might be able to catch it from toilet seats or using someone else’s washed coffee cup at work, scientists are indeed telling us that the virus can stay alive for anything between several hours to several days on inorganic surfaces, so you can’t be too careful right now.

I look at the inner box of my new toy. My owl eyes hone in on the printed info that says ‘Made in China’. I reassure myself that this vibrator came too quickly (no pun intended…again) for it to been in China any time in the last few days, and also even if it had, the Chinese have got on top of this virus thing waayyyy better than we have in Europe right now, so there is no reason to assume my actual vibrator in its triple packaging has been contaminated with anything at all. Which is great news, because really….death by masturbation sounds kinda cool in a way but it would also be a really really silly way to go. Even more silly than death by shark or elephant, which were my previous best options.

In the interest of clarity, my new toy is actually called a Massage Wand which is code for ‘sex toy pretending not to be a sex toy’. It’s shaped like a microphone, so if it’s sexually disappointing I can still use it for mirror-karaoke and Ru Paul style lipsyncing sessions and won’t have completely wasted my money. Other possible uses include massaging the tension knots from between my shoulders where I spend too much time hunched over a keyboard or my phone scrolling through endless Corona updates and memes, or….if things with my health do deteriorate I’m hoping that by placing it next to my breast bone I will be able to rattle the phlegm from my virus-clogged lungs, enabling me to cough it all up and breathe better. You never know…Amazon vibrators could be the health cure we are all praying for. Andre has even discovered that he can do a half-decent Stephen Hawking/Darth Vadar impression by pressing it to his Adam’s Apple. Human ingenuity in a crisis never fails to impress me.

My massage wand comes with a USB charging port. This is a massive advantage over the last vibrator I owned which was so many decades ago that it needed to be powered by six white mice running on a wooden wheel and only managed the sort of wheezing vibration level of a dying fruit fly jiggling itself pathetically against the window sill. No batteries mean less chance of it running out of charge even if the lock-in is many many months. It’s almost like they designed it specifically for this sort of crisis. I’m not joking when I say I know a few people who would even see this alone as evidence of a conspiracy. I wish I could say it was comforting to know there are people out there even weirder than I am.

This toy has multiple levels of speed, power and rhythm. Playing with the different controls I’ve discovered that I can vary the pulsing from a really irregular ‘inexperienced lover with no sense of rhythm who gets you close only to let you down when it’s most frustrating’ level all the way through to the ‘workmen will be doing essential maintenance on your road but will go for a tea break just when it gets exciting’ intensity that is sort of titillating but then rapidly irritating and ultimately disappointing. Not one of the optional rhythms actually sustains its sodding rhythm. The more fancy ones sound like they were programmed by a rave DJ for flailing Millenials and the faster ones just sound like a space invader game and at best make me giggle. It’s not designed to be inserted or thrust anywhere useful so in that way it really is what it says it is and ‘just’ a massaging tool. Masseurs everywhere will now be wondering if they could buy one and deduct it as a business expense on their tax return. I’d argue that you probably can. But then I cast people’s butts for a living and am not an official accredited tax advisor, so I’ll leave it up to you. I’m going to attempt to tax deduct it as a tool for agitating bubbles from my plaster. In the age of impending international financial catastrophe, we’ve got to be as creative as we can to repurpose anything and everything after all. ‘Waste not, want not’, I can hear my wise old granny saying…although probably not about sex toys, to be fair. Back in her day they were lucky if they had an allotment-grown marrow, and that’s all I’m saying on the matter.

What with sales of sex toys going through the roof right now (and yes, apparently this is a fact), and Pornhub offering free memberships to people stuck indoors in the crisis so their advertising revenue peaks, the other people profiting from the crisis will of course be those email scammers who write to people claiming they have hacked into your computer and used your camera to record you masturbating. If you haven’t received one of these gems yet….where have you been? Basically they try to blackmail you by saying they know you’ve been watching porn (most of the internet then) and that video footage of you ‘spanking the monkey’/‘draining the lizard’ (I keep a collection of these emails just to laugh at the badly translated euphemisms) will be sent to all of your contacts within 24 hours if you do not pay the scammer so many thousands of pounds by Bitcoin (cryptocurrency that can’t be traced). Some of the emails can even be semi-convincing to the less savvy recipient as many will contain user names or even passwords people have used in the past (such things are being bought and sold in large batches on the Dark Web all the time) making people believe their personal technology has indeed been hacked.

Here’s an example of one of my favourites, who politely excuses his poor English first:-

Hello
Dо not mind оn my illitеrасy, I аm from another country.
 
I uрlоаdеd thе mаliciоus рrоgram on yоur systеm.
Sinсе thаt mоment I рilfеrеd аll рrivy backgrоund frоm yоur system. Thе mоst intеrеsting еvidenсе thаt I stоlе – its а vidеоtарe with your self-rubbings. I adjustеd virus оn a pоrn web sitе аnd аftеr yоu lоadеd it. Whеn yоu dесidеd with thе vidеo аnd taрреd оn a plаy buttоn, my dеlеtеrious sоft аt оncе sеt up оn yоur systеm. Аftеr adjusting, yоur саmеra shoоt thе vidеоtаре with yоu sеlf-abusing, in аddition it sаvеd рreсisеly thе роrn vidео you mаsturbаtеd оn you pervert. In next fеw dаys my mаlwаre collесtеd аll your sоcial аnd wоrk сontacts.
 
If you wаnt tо delеtе thе recоrds- pay mе 3500 euro in Bitcoin.
Yоu have 24 hours. Оthеr wаy I will send the tаpе tо all your сolleаguеs and friends.
 

I’m afraid they just make me roar with laughter rather than shake with fear. Much like the ones I receive from Russian Brides, or other similar internet scammer trolls, I would really really love to be able to write back to these people but they never leave a return address that’s functional. Because if I could write back to them, this is what I’d say:-

Dear scammer,

None of my friends and probably the vast majority of my clients would be the least bit surprised that I masturbate, since I am a proud advocate for this free and healthy activity. And even if you had filmed me masturbating in front of my computer, all you would have seen is THIS:-

Yes, that’s my sex face. Or scrunchy face as I like to think of it. What you are trying to blackmail me with is sending a photo of my brow furrowed in intense concentration peeking over the top of my gingham duvet cover. Hardly likely to scandalise the nation and ruin my life, is it?

Yours with pity and contempt,

Mrs Wankathon Frottage, Milton Keynes, England, The Earth, The Universe.

The people these scammers are mostly likely to catch out, unfortunately, are the older generations who haven’t grown up with this kind of shit. Those who still believe it must be true because the internet said so. I am fairly sure this is the intended target audience after one of the scammers kindly added a helpful tutorial to his menacing threat:-

Pay me $2000 in Bitcoin or your life will be ruined! If you don’t know how Bitcoin works, here is a link to a handy guide that explains simply how to use it. You can also find video help guides on Youtube.

(I’m not kidding).

In my youth, we used to help our parents programme the video recorder. Kids of today are being called in by the older generations to help them upload their lifesavings to fraudsters to avoid video of grandpa’s willy being sent to everyone on the Chelsea gardening society Mailchimp list because he ‘accidentally’ clicked on a video of horse porn that time. How the times have changed.

So it’s not all doom and gloom and financial disaster. Some businesses really do know how to profit from a crisis. And even if some of our new toys turn out to be disappointing, we’ve still (most of us) got hands. So as The Sun says, don’t use them on your privates after using hand-sanitiser (but feel free to give them a good old 20 second wash and spritz AFTERWARDS). I’m amazed people still need to be told this stuff, but then again I once owned a pair of Superman pyjamas that actually had a label printed inside saying ‘Does not give the ability to fly’. These were adult pyjamas.

There’s a distinct possibility that it will neither be masturbation nor a raging pandemic virus that kills off the human race, but instead plain old stupidity. There’s a fair amount of it about right now and you can’t always tell who has got it and who hasn’t until they turn up in A&E with that aforementioned hoover pipe stuck up their bottom.

So be careful out there. Until next time, stay safe, stay sane, stay happy and see you on the other side.

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