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[A href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2006/11/09/violetblue.DTL"]Violet and the Dildo Factory[/A] [/FONT][FONT size=2][/FONT]
[FONT face=geneva,arial size=1]- [A href="mailto:
[email protected]"]Violet Blue, Special to SF Gate[/A]
[/FONT][FONT face=geneva,arial size=-2]Thursday, November 9, 2006
[/FONT] We have a dildo factory hidden in plain sight here in San Francisco, and in one sense I did get a [A href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Ticket" target=_blank]Golden Ticket[/A] in that I got a tour -- a tour with benefits. But then doesn't every girl want to see where her toys come from? On the afternoon I toured the Vixen Creations dildo plant I got much more than I bargained for. Sure I got to see acres and acres of erect, happy and proud colorful phalli waiting patiently in rows before being plucked, packed and sent to their final orgasmic destinations. I also got to see the goop being poured into almost whimsically inverse molded penis holes -- and I immensely enjoyed the champagne-like "Pop!" each faux penis made upon extraction from its mold. Somewhere, most certainly, every time this particular cork pops, an angel gets her wings. Yet of course, because it's San Francisco we do things delightfully differently here. We don't have just any dildo factory -- we have one driven by a message of sexual pleasure and health, in a drop-dead gorgeous aluminum and curved wall warehouse in Dogpatch, staffed by people with more than a spring in their step and the best working conditions and employee benefits this side of the dot-com boom. We are also at the epicenter for the mad science behind the most realistic and hygienic dildos available: Vixen's incredible, top-secret formula for VixSkin. Vixen Creations was started in 1992 by Marily Bishara, who was a Bay Area IT consultant who literally saw a hole in the sex toy market that needed to be, ahem, filled. The sex toy market was (and still is) full of poor-quality toys. It's a "novelty" market saturated with [A href="http://www.boingboing.net/2006/03/04/guide_to_unsafe_sex_.html" target=_blank]unhygienic crap made of seriously sketchy mystery materials[/A]. More and more, consumers are concerned about the safety and hygiene of dildos and vibrators churned out on [A href="http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?story_id=5323679&fsrc=RSS&no_na_tran=1" target=_blank]assembly lines in China[/A] (with no thought to the safety or pleasure of the consumers). Out of fire in the loins and passion for the satisfying strap-on, Vixen was founded in Bishara's kitchen. Slaving over what could only be a hot stove, she cranked out high-quality dick for a couple years before her business challenged the Mafia-like stranglehold of "novelty" sex toy distribution and moved into its current open, airy and modern loftish "Charlie and the Chocolate (Dildo) Factory" location. Even today, staff members take the newest products off the assembly line right to the doorsteps of our local sex toy stores, sometimes selling their expensive creations door-to-door and offering a lifetime warranty on each silicone product sold. Hey, it's just our hometown dildo factory. But here employees work in virtually every aspect of the business from shipping to product design, and that's what gave Vixen its biggest breakthrough in over a decade. The ultra-realistic, extremely hygienic VixSkin started as an employee's two-years-in-the-making formula for a shockingly realistic, skinlike material -- a material that, unlike all other "realistic" toy materials, is nonporous and can be easily sterilized for absolute cleanliness. VixSkin was launched last summer, and now there are many Vixen dildos made from the insanely popular stuff. So many that this small business has grown in both production volume and staff, and is revving up to launch an incredibly realistic line of men's toys (I know -- I got to stick my fingers in a prototype!) and a new "objet de sex" every month starting in 2007. As my whirlwind tour drew to a close, I was happy I didn't get swept away in the purple silicone river or gorge myself on the employee "free bin." OK, maybe I did walk out with a fat bag of fun -- you can make all the "you're turning violet, Violet" jokes you want. [HR color=#ccc noShade SIZE=1] [img height=120 hspace=4 src="http://www.sfgate.com/templates/columnists/violetblue/biophoto2.jpg" width=100 align=right border=1] [FONT size=1]Violet Blue is author and editor of over a dozen sexual health books and erotica collections. She is a professional sex educator, lecturer, podcaster, video blogger, porn/erotica reviewer and machine artist. Violet is also a fetish model, a member of Survival Research Labs, an author at Metroblogging San Francisco; girl friday contributor at Fleshbot, a San Francisco native, and a pro blogger. For more information and links to Web sites discussed in Open Source Sex, go to Violet Blue's Web site, tinynibbles.com. [/FONT]
[FONT size=3]URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/g/a/2006/11/09/violetblue.DTL [/FONT]
