Meet the Woman Making the Best New Male Sex Toy

A horny dude will put his hard-on just about anywhere to get off. Besides their God-given hands, men masturbate by using products like the Fleshlight, humping their beds, sticking their meat in cuts of real meat, or dropping a few grand on a dead-eyed sex doll. Even with all of those places to put your penis in, I'm surprised that I rarely hear about guys using sweater sleeves to make their junk nice and toasty.

A friend of mine recently sent me a link to the Swoon Kink store on Etsy, which uses cashmere to make restraints, floggers, and, yes, masturbation sleeves. The sleeves look like a miniature cashmere sweater made for a small child or dog, with a ribbed-and-folded section at one end of the sleeve. (For all the Silicon Valley bros out there, there are also sleeves with hoodies attached). I was skeptical about having a bunch of yarn jangling on my Johnson, but regardless, I ordered one for my very own, a blue-and-brown-striped sleeve ($23, plus shipping) that seemed like the perfect accessory for my preppy pecker.

When it arrived in the mail, I was struck by was how professional the packaging was. My little fuzzy love maker was snuggled around a cardboard outline of a penis, with a tiny Prince Albert at the tip. There's also a tiny Swoon Kink tag at the sleeve's base, which makes the product seem more dignified—like an accessory from a high-end store, rather than a cock sweater I bought on the internet.

After a brief visit to PornHub, I was ready to get into my turtleneck. Jerking off with the Pleasure Sweater feels like a Muppet's dosed your dick with MDMA before jumping up and down on it until you have the warmest, strongest, most tingling orgasm of your entire life. It was absolutely incredible. I put the ribbed part around the base of my shaft, which it hugged with the perfect amount of tightness that not only provided pleasurable pressure but also kept the sleeve from moving around too much.

The soft fabric creates friction that doesn't chafe—an intense sensation produced because, whereas normally there's only sensation where the hand contacts the skin, the cashmere sleeve drags over all of your eager nerve endings for an overdose of stimulation. There's no time for the best parts of your Johnson to rest.

Naturally, the climax makes for a bit more of a mess than usual, meaning it's easy to get jizz all over the cashmere; the instructions call for the sleeve to be washed in cold water and dried flat, which works pretty well. Even cum rags need to be laundered—especially those of the high-end, dual purpose variety.

Susanna Gray, who created these sleeves, is an open-minded and sex-positive 54-year-old from Sunfish Lake, Minnesota. She's a packaging designer by trade and has a knack for sewing. When she saw a pair of fingerless gloves in a store, she decided to make a pair of her own; after showing them off to her husband, he said to her, "Know where this would feel good?" while pointing to his nether regions, so she decided to make him a little treat.

He liked it—a lot—and in 2010, she brought her product to the Smitten Kitten, a sex toy shop in Minneapolis. They ordered some sleeves and asked Gray to try her hand at restraints, whips, blindfolds, floggers, and the like. She was happy to oblige; now she sells sleeves through the Smitten Kitten and a few other wholesale clients, and she also sells about 10 a month through Etsy.

"There are men who prefer a moister experience when masturbating, and there are men who like friction—that was news to me," Gray laughs. "From what I've heard, [the sleeve] appeals to the friction guys. There's nothing out there for them, so it filled a niche in a very luxurious way."

She makes the sleeves shrinking thrift store-bought cashmere sweaters in the washing machine to make the material tighter and more durable; she then sews the material into tubes, packages them, and ships them out to friction lovers the world over. Gray says that the biggest impediment to growing her business is streamlining the production of the sleeves, since at the moment she's the one doing all the work.

Still, she takes great joy in providing pleasure to so many people and doesn't think of her product as too raunchy. "I love that it's soft and cute, and it starts as a sweater," she exclaims. "That's just perfect."

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