Maybe it all makes sense coming from a girl who got her start with a single called “Smile” (#fuckyouKatyPerry). And what’s Lily Allen smiling about now? Well, perhaps, in addition to orgasm on command itself, timing the release of her Womanizer (should Britney sue over the snatching of that name?) vibrator in one of the perfect “climaxes” of the pandemic. Meaning, in other words, yet another lockdown in the UK and beyond enabled ample free time to muck about in bed and pleasure oneself as the plague raged–and rages–on outside (#privilege). Called more specifically Womanizer Liberty by Lily Allen Rechargeable Clitoral Stimulator (a proverbial mouthful), the vibrator in question is best referred to as a clit sucker… a.k.a. it’s capable of giving you head with the longevity that many men cannot sustain for the length of time required for a girl to get her O.
The irony of Allen releasing her own sanctioned sex toy is that, while many would expect her to do such a thing based on the long-standing candor of her lyrics, the reluctant “pop star” has expressed that, because sex wasn’t ever talked about in her household (quelle surprise, English repression), it only built upon her insecurities regarding “the practice.” Having already openly admitted in her autobiography, My Thoughts Exactly, that she struggled to find joy in sex throughout her twenties, Allen’s 2009 hit, “Not Fair,” also takes on new meaning with this revelation about her misspent sexual youth come to light. Singing of a selfish and ineffectual lover, “Oh, you’re supposed to care/But you never make me scream/You never make me scream/Oh, it’s not fair/And it’s really not okay/Oh, you’re supposed to care/But all you do is take/Yeah, all you do is take,” Allen seemed to have been laying the groundwork for championing the benefits of a vibrator long ago. Indeed, she turned out to be the ideal candidate for exhorting female sexual pleasure in a year during which we’ve all been told to stay at home and figure out ways to “amuse ourselves.”
Even Dakota Johnson (with a fitting last name for such a cause) has cashed in on the trend of promoting the very “stay home” act of masturbation in 2020 by becoming a co-creative director of Éva Goicochea’s Maude “wellness” brand–wanking now deemed the new frontier in what’s being marketed as “self-care” (gone are the days of being told that touching yourself too much or at all will cause blindness–oh the bullshit religious zealots come up with). In many respects, the “flicking the bean” industry has been one of several to experience a financial boon thanks to the pandemic. And yes, that could be construed as a small silver lining to this entire debacle: women growing more comfortable with the notion and importance of self-pleasure. After all, the quarantine mandates throughout the world have left just as many–if not more–single people sequestered as couples (with the latter category perhaps wishing they were single after so much time spent with a person they were once used to having other activities to distract them from. Without those dilutions, couples have been in the same proximity for long enough to realize: maybe they don’t have that much in common).
So yes, what better time than during this moment of collective self-reflection to address the ongoing and ridiculous stigma attached to masturbation than now, with “The Hours” on all of our hands (and, as it is said, idle hands make for the devil’s playthings–or, in this case, the vagina’s)? Thusly, Allen commented of her newfound cause, “It’s still such a taboo subject but it’s something most people do. So why wouldn’t we talk about it with pride and without guilt?” Here again, the lingering “Catholic guilt” even non-Catholics (particularly women) seem to have about touching themselves is completely out of place with the supposed “modernity” of the times. To boot, urging further self-sufficiency among women when they’ve already found less and less viable “use” for men also contributes to the protective fortress of judgment society prefers to uphold when it comes to female-specific wanking.
Accordingly, Allen remarked, “When a woman talks about masturbation, it’s always: ‘Well you’re clearly not getting sex from a male partner so you must be undesirable–or disappointed with your partner’s ability.’ It’s lazy, archaic and just not true. You can do it yourself and then enjoy it with your partner. It’s quite a co-dependent attitude to pleasure–that we have to rely on someone else–when we’re perfectly capable of doing it ourselves. If you’re hungry, you don’t wait until your partner gets home to have a slice of toast!”
And so, in essence, Allen has effectively borrowed from the Snickers mantra, “Hungry? Why wait?” for a vibrator she’s happily attached her name to. That it happens to be called Womanizer was likely the clincher (clitcher?) for her attachment to the product, as she once covered the Britney Spears song of the same name… she, too, being an advocate for auto-plaisir based on her 2003 slow jam, “Touch of My Hand.”
