Make Your Own Sex Toys front cover

Written by Matt Pagett
Published in 2007 by Chronicle Books

The cover of Make Your Own Sex Toys promises 50 quick and easy projects, a count that is probably accurate if you have a very loose definition of what constitutes a sex toy.  While I don’t have a hard and fast definition for what is and isn’t a sex toy, I would imagine that for something to be a sex toy it should either turn you or someone else on.

The first section of the book focuses on toys that are designed to turn yourself on and includes projects like drilling a hole in a bar of soap, drilling a hole in a melon, and knitting a “Willy Warmer.”

Perhaps my standards are too high, but a bar of soap with a hole in it doesn’t seem at all sexy.  In fact, fucking a bar of soap is one of the least sexy things I can imagine (and that’s ignoring the fact that soap makes a terrible masturbatory lubricant).  While Pagett recommends warming the melon for maximum pleasure, I’m trying to picture anyone whose recurrent fantasy is to get a good piece of melon. I prefer melons that come in pairs and are attached to a woman. To each his own I suppose.

By far the silliest project is the Knitted Willy Warmer or as I have come to think of it, the cock Koozie.  With the possible exception of Red Hot Chili Peppers fans, absolutely no one will find themselves aroused by the sight of your manhood sheathed in yarn like the extra roll of toilet paper on top of the commode at grandma’s house.  Seeing anyone in such a state might be hightly amusing perhaps, but definitely not arousing.

The book continues in a silly vein suggesting such unlikely toys as a cell phone in a condom, a quilt (!!!!???), and homemade body wax.

Despite the lighthearted tone, it is clear that if this book is a giant prank, it is a prank the author isn’t in on.  Taken as a whole the projects listed in the book, are more likely to turn you or your partner off than on.  The net result is a book that does more for chastity than every Baptist church meeting ever held.