Dear Dan,
What is the best way to sanitize a latex dildo? At least I think it's a latex dildo. I actually don't know. I had a yeast infection a few months ago, and before I knew what was up, I used my toy. Now I'm afraid to touch it until I know it won't reinfect me!
Inserting This Chances Harm
"It sounds like ITCH isn't 100 percent sure what their dildo is made of," said Hannah Jorden, senior staff sex educator at Smitten Kitten (smittenkittenonline.com), a progressive sex toy and gear shop based in Minneapolis. Don't feel bad, ITCH: Most people don't know what their sex toys are made of.
"Sex toys aren't regulated like food when it comes to packaging," Jorden said. "It could be latex, some other porous rubbery substance, or even a nasty, rash-inducing, endocrine-disrupting, cancer-causing mixture of PVC and phthalates."
"The trick," said Jorden, "is to buy only nonporous, nontoxic toys from trustworthy manufacturers and retailers."
So maybe your best course of action, ITCH, would be to toss that old dildo and buy yourself a new one. So what should you look for when you go dildo shopping?
"The best option is medical grade, platinum cured silicone," said Jorden. "As long as they're sterilized between uses, silicone dildos can be safely shared with different partners, and they can be used in different orifices without risk of bacterial contamination."
Dear Dan,
I'm a 30-year-old straight guy 18 months into a relationship with a 30-year-old bisexual woman. We get along wonderfully and fuck wonderfully. Have you ever tried to see who can out-rim whom? Fun stuff. The snag is that while she's nontraditional in many respects, she also has a certain dedication to Catholicism and wants us to marry. I'm agnostic on God, but I don't care at all for his earthly representatives. I know that a marriage license doesn't automatically come with a dead bedroom, but it seems utterly unnecessary. It's also a binary sort of thing, and thus our go-to solution when we have a conflict. I suggested flipping a coin as a sort of probabilistic compromise. She wasn't interested. Breaking up over the details of your future life together seems like a dumb thing for two smart people in love to do, but that's the outcome we're inexorably moving toward.
Running Into No Go
If you were my boyfriend, RING, and you told me—right after I had defeated you in a rimming contest—that you would marry me if you lost a coin toss, but not because marriage mattered to me, I would never rim your ass again. Because if my feelings, however contaminated they were by Catholicism, mattered less to you than a coin toss, well, then your ass would have to learn to eat itself.
You've already lost the coin toss. You fell in love with a woman who wants to spend her life with you, and you want to spend the rest of yours with her. And the woman you want to spend the rest of your life rimming wants to marry the man she spends her life rimming. Since you would be willing to marry her if you lost a coin toss, RING, then clearly marriage isn't something you couldn't bring yourself to do. That means you're the one who should compromise.
Dear Dan,
I write to you on the behalf of a young employee of mine. The scenario: A 21-year-old Mexican employee came to me and blurted out, "I had sex with a woman. Then two months later, I met her husband at a bar. I did NOT know that she was married! She didn't tell me! As it turns out, her husband is a good guy. Now I really feel bad and I don't know what I should do." Then he asked me what he should do. I told him I was not a good resource, but that I knew of one. What should I tell him?
Employee Relations Resource
You should tell him that some married people cheat on their spouses, ERR, and that some married cheaters fuck people who wouldn't fuck 'em if they knew they were married.
Unless he can depose this woman and her husband, your employee has no way of knowing if this woman's husband was wronged. But if a wrong has been committed here—if your employee was party to an infidelity—he didn't knowingly do anything wrong, ERR, so the wrong isn't his. Nor is it his to right.
He should avoid further contact with this woman—unless he gets an explanation from her that eases his conscience—and he should avoid becoming buds with the husband, however good a guy he might be.
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