Sex

A Professional Orgasm Whisperer Told Us How to Work a Sex Machine

Wil McLean is gleefully watching me browse a duffle bag filled with beige rubbery phalluses. “Are all the dicks in there? There’s more substantial dicks: there’s one the size of a coke can… I have one over there that’s four and a half pounds of penis.” These attachments—that range from slender, modestly dimpled mushrooms, to giant, fleshy grenades—are normally fitted atop a Sybian, a machine that McLean rents out through his website Sybiantoronto.com.

For those of you who haven’t “accidentally” searched for one on porn sites or seen the thing in action on Howard Stern, the Sybian is a monolithic black saddle sex machine with a support for vibrating and rotating attachments—one of them is a prosthetic finger. There’s also a three-foot cable attached to a remote control with heavy-duty switches and dials, a weighty kind of thing that looks like it should actually be used to control a grain elevator. In short: it’s absolutely terrifying.

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But if you absolutely have to fuck a machine, at least this one’s well built. According to the website, the housing is a composite material that can withstand over 1,000 lbs of pressure. Under the hood is an industrial 1/29 horsepower Bodine Electric Company motor that vibrates the saddle, and another that gyrates the attachment. It’s the sort of sleek, no frills, purpose-built design that means business. And that business is giving women really intense orgasms.

Over the years, if he had to guess, McLean’s brought “a couple thousand” women to climax working the machine at regular sex club nights in Toronto. It’s a stat that he needs to calculate on the fly, not the sort of brag he has on hand to drop like some douchey PUA guy peacocking at a nightclub. In fact, he’s a pretty affable guy. Jokey, easygoing, engaged, but relaxed—the kind of guy you’d invite to a family barbecue within five minutes of meeting him—a demeanor that comes in handy when you’re showing up to strangers apartments with a 22-pound naugahyde fuck machine that can vibrate at 6,400 RPM.

Usually McLean has a fleet of seven machines and does between 15 and 20 rentals a month (not including machines on long-term loan). Lately—specifically because of TIFF, he says—he’s been doing a lot of deliveries, and he’s had no shortage of people willing to shell out $115 a night (or $190 for two nights) to have their wicked way with his machine.

VICE caught up with McLean at his other venture—building Canada’s largest indoor obstacle course and training center—to discuss his long history with sex toys, his role as a sex educator and instructor, the science behind the orgasm, and some wisdom for couples culled from three years of professionally getting people off. Ladies and gentlemen, meet Canada’s orgasm whisperer.

VICE: When people ask you what you do, what do you tell them?
Wil McLean: I say, “professional orgasm facilitator.” Really, I fall into the category of sexual education. I facilitate an environment that people can participate in.

How does one become an orgasm facilitator?
I worked at the Condom Shack and I got into adult toys and products—that was the nature of the store. I started speaking to suppliers and when I left, they continued to contact me to ask for feedback on things. They would send me products and I would review and talk to them about it, tell them what their selling point and their angles were, and give them constructive criticism. Then I started working with an escort industry at one point, as a driver, so I was driving girls to and from clients and customers, and that really gave me an inside look at the provision of services. I saw very much first hand where the lack of safety was, but also the lack of provision for women and couples. It’s such an often misogynist, often male ego driven space; you know: it’s about sending girls out to a guy who wants sex on demand from women. Very rarely is it the opposite of that.

There’s not a lot of sexual services for women and couples that don’t feel seedy or sketchy. Do you rent a gigolo for you and your wife? He comes over with the torn jean shorts and the cowboy hat, and you’ve gotta check his bags on the way out the door… like, he’s taken all the batteries from your remotes, that sort of thing. It can be a really sketchy. I wanted to find something that works, but I had to wait until the environment in the city was right for it. Had I launched this as a service eight years ago, it would have flopped tremendously because the level of awareness in the city has really grown in leaps and bounds in the past five years.

So how does your service work?
This is a service based and designed mainly for couples. I’m usually contacted by the male of the two, it’s rare that I get enlisted by a woman—normally it’s a boyfriend or a husband or a partner bringing it to his partner as a gift or as a surprise.

Why do you think it’s more of a male initiating the contact?
If you look at the user demographic of a lot of pornography, you find that it’s very heteronormative and male-centric. A lot of the time you get these boyfriends who’ve heard about it on Howard Stern and then they went online and got on Youporn or whatever and they watch a bunch of adult stars using it, and then they’re like, “Whoa I bet my girlfriend would be into that. I would really love to see her lose her mind that way,” and then they kind of pitch it to the girlfriend. Then the girlfriend is like “OK” or “uh fine.”

When I actually show up for the delivery, I do everything I can to impress on the male that this is about her and making her comfortable and focusing on her needs, and really using that as an opportunity to teach couples about non-verbal communication. He has the opportunity with this experience to really focus on his partner in the way that he’s not physically distracted himself. I find it usually tends to not only relieve her anxiety; but afterwards, it’s a bit of a profound experience for a lot of guys because they really get to see an honest display of sexuality from their partner without being distracted. Usually, it doesn’t matter how great a time she’s having, if you’re having a good time, you’re only seeing half of it. The Sybian can really be a good experience for couples; it sets them into a new learning curve.

Let’s talk about the machine itself. For the uninitiated, like myself, this thing’s fucking frightening.
Yeah, It’s this whole 20-pound thing, like this monolith of vibration that sits in the middle of your living room, and you sort of stare at it waiting for it to do something. It could really be intimidating and some people are very hesitant, there’s a lot of trepidation when people approach it unless it’s something that they’ve had peer reviewed and they’ve watched first hand other people experience it.

How much of your job is keeping people from being scared of this thing?
For anyone that this is their first experience with vibration play or something non-normative, it becomes my job to sort of ease them into it, lower their anxiety level, and get them to a place where it’s like, “Hey this might not be for you, that’s totally cool too, let’s just enjoy the experience as it happens as a process, but don’t worry about if you don’t have an orgasm, it’s not mandatory, you didn’t fail, we’re not letting anyone down.” There’s generally a huge weight on women sexually to perform because male ego is so precariously fragile. If a guy doesn’t have an orgasm during sex it’s as if there’s something very wrong with him. He feels down about himself, she feels it’s her fault. But for women there’s this idea that if she doesn’t have an orgasm during sex, there’s a failing on his part but also on her part even though it’s often the norm. And so that’s been internalized over and over to the point where things like toys become very intimidating to a lot of couples.

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Have you always wanted to do this?
I’ve always been a very sexual person and sexually aware person. And I’ve always been a very sexually curious person. From an academic standpoint, while I never went and enrolled in any formal courses for it, I’ve read voraciously on the subject, and it wasn’t just watching tons of porn, but actually engaging. I worked with a student nurse in school. Any time there was an opportunity to work with any sort of sexual advocacy group, I was front and center on it. So from an education standpoint, or an anthropological standpoint, it’s so interesting because it really is the unspoken keystone of most cultures, and Canada is unique in its own culture sexually as well. It kind of has its own sexual flavor.

What’s Canada’s sexual flavor?
We’re very experimentally polite. It’s so very much Canadian, but we’re wonderfully polite and encouraging and—I can only really speak for Toronto because that’s been most of my involvement—but we’re specifically a very sex-positive city. We have a lot of sex positive spaces, we have a lot of community clubs and community membership, we have tons of advocacy groups. We, more than anywhere except for maybe BC, have a lot of access to sexual services. Toronto is becoming a place where people can kind of venture to and go to sex clubs or be part of a thing like the Para PanAm orgy. We’re great with that, yet at the same time, we’re so polite about it. And we’re able to have polite conversation because it’s informed conversation.

Is this a recent thing?
I think it’s been this convergence of technology and the “social justice warrior” and advocate idealism—the feminist idealism that’s taking back spaces that traditionally weren’t feminine spaces. Especially for Facebook where you can preach to your choir and build up an army of people that agree with you before you venture out in the world to be challenged—now you can kind of say, “Yes, I want someone to come over and give me an orgasm and leave.” And that’s OK and that’s fine and you’re not a slut and you’re not desperate or “thirsty for it,” that’s just what you wanted that day and it’s Tuesday and you’re going to go out later and it’s fine. And this generation is informing the generation before it in a way that they are now starting to feel OK. So it’s really interesting when I get clients who are older—I get a lot of empty nesters who have heard about the Sybian through social media through younger people. People whose kids have moved out, they’re in their late 50s and have a weekend free now. They order it up, he takes a Viagra, they open a bottle of Merlot and they just go to town on each other.

How do they find you?
What Google metrics is telling me is that most people are searching for “Sybian in Toronto” and I’m the first one that comes up: SibianToronto.com. The Sybian itself is unique and it’s pretty expensive, it’s the Cadillac of sex toys. Just getting one into Canada with all the attachments and what not, with the value of the dollar right now, you’re actually looking at $2,500 [$1,850 USD], which is out of most people’s reach. A lot of people shopping for one realize that they can try before they buy. Some clients eventually buy one outright, or they’ll just rent it on occasion when they can get the kids out of the house and have a night to themselves. And that makes it something that they can actually justify. It’s the same price as going out for dinner—just buy a ten-dollar bottle of rosé and have at it in the livingroom.

But a lot of people in our sex positive communities have been my biggest ambassadors. Maybe the more sexually adventurous one in the group might have gone to a sex club and used it and then told their girlfriends about it, and then you get the quiet girlfriend who didn’t say anything, who then goes home immediately, and emails me. Sex clubs have been a big part of the exposure for it.

I’m from Montreal which is traditionally thought of as a very sex oriented city, what’s the story with Toronto?
It’s not that similar from Montreal; Montreal is very hetero-centric. But very kink-focused; there’s a lot of leather, a lot of PVC workshop groups out there. The community out there is wonderful in terms of celebrating the showmanship of it. Toronto’s sex scene is very relationship-dynamic-focused, a lot of swingers, a lot of open relationships. Polyamory’s been the word of the day for the past four years for a lot of the Toronto sex scene. We have places like Oasis Aqualounge, which is an on-site sex club. So there you can go, become a member for a fee, and you can have sex on premises. And then there’s places like The Ozone which is a non premises club so you can go and meet and you know, participate in certain things but you can’t have sex on site.

There are a lot of sex parties and orgies that happen in the city, so I get a fair number of invites to bring them the machine. Let’s just say that you show up to a sex party with a Sybian and you’re kind of like the guy who showed up to the potluck with the chocolate fondue machine.

You’re basically a hero.
Yeah, it’s a bit of a showstopper and it ends up being quite the icebreaker, all the guests will gather round to watch that show and then they’ll put a turn in.

Walk me through an average rental process.
When I drop it off, I usually give the renters a bunch of pro tips, there’s no mystery, it works on very fundamental science principles. The machine works on the basis of vibration, and resonance. What most people identify as the clitoris is actually called the clitoris gland and that’s literally the tip of the iceberg as far sensation goes. There are four different branches of the clitoris that reach back into the pelvis itself and all of those link to the pudendal nerve system, which is at the base of your spine.

Assuming you’ve had heteronormative sex, if you’re having sex with your partner towards the end you can get sort of harder and harder in thrusting, and that will send vibrations deeper into the pelvis—if you started off with that, she’d back you way off. Like, What are you doing? But once you’re warmed up, you can increase in intensity and when you’re really pounding it, that vibration is driving back and what normally would be painful is actually now lighting up nerve endings deeper in the pelvis.

The Sybian is extending waves of vibration back at a frequency that the body understands and it wakes up nerve endings and because it’s so steady and such a deep low vibration, it penetrates through the body deeper. It’s vibrating areas that surface wise, more often than not, a penis won’t ever come in contact with.

Our body has a natural frequency bias, and each person has a bias—if you looked at all your favorite songs and lined them all up, I would almost guarantee you that most of your favorite songs are in the same key.

Dude, you’re blowing my mind.
I’m dropping science on you. Now all your songs might be in a specific key, but your friends’ favorite songs might be in a totally different key, and that’s because their body is also tuned to a very specific bias for frequency. The Sybian, because of the size of the motor, is able to send bass vibrations through the body, as opposed to smaller toys with a smaller form factor which can’t help but work at a higher frequency. The Sybian works at a much lower resonance that kind of hums its way through the body, which is something that the body can handle more easily. As you increase the intensity of it, you’re kind of turning up the volume, but you’re not turning up the frequency.

The amplitude of it can become overpowering and overwhelming on the nerves, but it never gets to a point where it’s super painful. You just sort of work your way up gradually and your ability to sustain rises.

Is the key to mastering the Sybian to find that frequency?
It’s like anything with a partner—it’s like dancing, you can’t just go on a solo choreography and just let it run, you have to check in constantly and adapt with your partner. You’re listening and watching, I often won’t even look at the person that is on the Sybian. What I’ll do is I’ll put my leg against their leg so I can feel the vibration and then I’ll listen to their breathing. One of the cool things is that you get to give somebody so much pleasure, but you aren’t distracted by your own physical pleasure. You can kind of really get a good sense for what’s happening. I’ll watch and listen and see, I’ll look for the toes moving, or I’ll check in with her breathing. What the skin looks like, is she getting flushed across her chest? Is she sweating? Is she holding on to me tighter? Is she leaning back? Is she searching for a more comfortable spot by moving around? If she started rocking her hips in a very specific rhythm I’ll start pulsing the machine at the same rhythm to mirror that. Really it’s very much about matching what your partner is subconsciously doing.

Would you say it’s kind of a science, but it’s kind of an art at the same time?
You’re the orgasm whisperer, you get on this thing and some partners are harder to read than others, some people are stone still and quiet and they give you nothing, nothing at all. And then they’re like, “OK, I’m done.” And that’s it, that’s the ride. They blink and they orgasm. And some are more vocal and really visceral. I had a woman bite the top of my head once. Some people, you have to hold them on so they don’t fall off.

What are some of the craziest experiences you’ve had as an orgasm whisperer?
I don’t want to give people’s experiences away too much because they are personal but there is a thing with Sybian that once you’ve ridden it a couple times you really, really learn to let go because it’s all about you. It’s one of the few sexual experiences that’s entirely about the riders. Once you accept that, you just don’t give a fuck anymore. Noises come out of you that you didn’t know you [could make] I had a rider who rode fairly regularly with me, and she would become completely unintelligible. There’s a point at which it’s such an intense experience that you lose the ability to verbalize without any sort of real cognizance. Often I’ll council people riding the machine to just tap when they need to tap out because they can’t verbalize what they want anymore.

That sounds almost like a psychedelic experience.
It’s fantastic when someone has an enormous experience away from what they’re usual experience is, for some people it’s really profound. I’ve had people cry while they’re on it, but like joyfully crying, or people who have cried after because before they had the inability to release at that level. I’ve had people that will have a G-spot orgasm for the first time, or they’ll squirt for the first time because they haven’t been able to access that before.

What do you think this sort of tells you or has taught you about sexuality in general, have you learned a lot just from when you started using this thing to where you’re at now?
Any time you spend any amount of time with people on a level that exceeds small talk, you really start to see the nuance of human nature in a new way. You appreciate what you have, but also it’s completely broadened my scope as to what sexually people are available to and into. Stereotypes are out the door.

I don’t ever look at someone now and think they wouldn’t be into that, because there’s a chance I delivered a Sybian to their door. You might look at someone and think they’re the most conservative person in the world, but I’ve watched them hang from chains and beat the shit out of each other at a sex club. Some 70-year-old dude with a Colonel Sanders mustache and a Smart car is one of my key renters and his wife—the tiniest quietest macramé crocheting granny—loves this shit. She’s got outfits for it. So it’s kind of impossible to gauge. You just don’t know what your neighbors are like, if you think they’re sanding floors at midnight, it’s probably this thing.

Any final sex advice?
If you’ve had an experience that wasn’t great, examine what the experience was and why you didn’t enjoy it. More often than not, it’s the person you had the experience with which was the issue, or the emotional context in which it was placed. A lot of people forgo a lot of potential joy in their life by hemming themselves in and saying, I couldn’t do that or I would never do that. If you tried and tested the avenue and found out it’s not for you, that’s fine. I’m not saying go suck all the dicks until you find the one dick—if you don’t like dick then you don’t like dick. But if you had one interaction with something it’s usually not enough to gauge whether or not it was right for you. You gotta try things more than once—and try everything again with someone you feel comfortable with. That makes a big difference.

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