The lonely souls who curl up every night with their Fleshlight masturbator now have a new accessory to lust over: A rod that heats up your Fleshlight sleeve to 135 degrees, which is apparently the perfect vaginal temperature. Wait, what?
If you're not familiar with Fleshlight, it's basically a long soft tube that's supposed to feel like a vagina or an anus when you fuck it. When you're done, you remove mushy sleeve from the tube structure for easy cleaning. They even mold the sleeves from the genitals of famous porn stars. But no matter how much you model a Fleshlight masturbator after real lady parts, it's just too cold to be the real thing.
Now for $30, you can buy a little stand that will warm up the removable Fleshlight sleeve to 135 degrees in five minutes. Apparently 135 degrees is the scientifically realistic temperature for your pleasure.
Seriously, that's what Fleshlight says. They say, that your Fleshlight sleeve should be 135 degrees. From the website copy:
In less than five minutes, your sleeve will reach 135° Fahrenheit (or 57° Celsius). Our engineers have determined this to be the perfectly realistic temperature.
Which seems hot? 130-135 degrees is medium rare. Is Fleshlight trying to cook my penis medium rare? Ashley and I heated up water to 135 degrees. I stuck my finger in and within seconds I was in too much pain.
(No I did not put my penis in the water, are you insane?)
For a more scientific opinion we asked biologist Diane A. Kelly if there is any danger to using a Fleshlight heated to that seemingly absurd temperature. She raises a number of interesting points:
I don't know about dangerous (that would require actual testing with little meat squares to see whether they cook at that temperature), but normal human body temperature doesn't usually exceed 99 degrees F — and since a core temperature of 104°F or 105°F is considered a serious get-to-the-hospital-now fever, I doubt even arousal would pump vaginal temps up that high.
Whether it's dangerous to use a fleshlight heated to 135 degrees really is a trickier question. Despite its name, it isn't made of meat. So you'd have to take the heat loss characteristics of the material it's made out of into account — maybe it loses heat so quickly that getting it to 135 is the only way it stays warm while it's being used? Also, there's the question of wet heat transfer versus dry heat transfer — a wet surface transfers heat much more readily than a dry surface, so you can get a burn from a wet surface at temperatures that would be merely uncomfortable on a dry one. So if the temperature is 135, but dry, it might just be uncomfortable, but not dangerous. But I'm not sure what might happen if someone decided to use lube.
It's possible that the Fleshlight sleeve loses temperature so quickly that you need to heat it up to 135 degrees because it's going to drop to a more reasonable temperature for your actual, er, session. As for her point about wet versus dry heat transfer, I'm interested in knowing how lubrication would affect this equation. I'm assuming you are supposed to lubricate the thing.
I reached out to Fleshlight to see if they might explain the strange science behind this creation.
And no, you can't just use a curling iron. You need to buy Fleshlight's heated dildo to warm up your plastic vagina. [Fleshlight]
This post has been updated to reflect expert commentary.