Blade By Fleshlight: An Innovative Masturbation Sleeve That Hugs Your Junk

In the perfect world, this Fleshlight would honor Wesley Snipes's role as a vampire-killing vampire. In reality, the Blade is a new Fleshlight with a soft, flexible case that allows you to squeeze your junk. That's pretty cool! To an extent!

If I could have Facebook page with my new Fleshlight Blade, the relationship status would say "It's complicated." I'm not entirely sure how to communicate everything I feel about the toy, nor how to reconcile my personal feelings with what I know about the toy's history. Perhaps history is a good place to start!

The Blade is a hilt-shaped masturbation sleeve with a big, pink, fake ol' vagina inside of it. While its predecessors all have hard plastic cases, this toy comes in a malleable bronze sheath about the consistency and thickness of some Halloween masks. Therefore, you can apply pressure anywhere on the outside of the toy and experience an extra snug fit on the inside. Smart, right? Fleshlight is advertising this as their first new product in ten years, which it technically is. However, it's also a repackaged form of the Fleshjack Sword, which came out a month earlier. The only differences between these cock-snuggling cousins are A) the Sword is blue, B) the Sword features a man's butt, and therefore it is C) apparently gay.

So my decidedly heterosexual Blade and I had some quiet time together, and even though I'm not the type to kiss and tell, I'm going to tell you all about it. (It's not like I kissed this thing anyway.)

The Good: The only way to change the pressure of the old, hard-bodied Fleshlight is to fiddle with the small screw cap on its back; this was both distracting and ineffective. The Blade, however, lets you change the pressure at will. You just squeeze harder! And since the Blade's body is oblong (that is, its not a perfect cylinder like the other Fleshlights are), you can pinch specific spots with ease and precision. One of my favorite things about the Tenga Flip was the squeeze action it offered, but Blade definitely has it beat in that department: the Flip offers a sandwich-style squeeze from two sides, but you can grip from any angle with the Blade.

The Blade only comes with one texture (at the moment): a consistent ribbed tube that varies a little in width. Fleshlight describes it as "sharply intense" but I'd call it pleasant. It's nowhere near as intense as the Alien Fleshlight or Stoya's Destroya texture, although it is somewhat realistic feeling when properly lubricated.

Another great thing about the Blade is that it's much smaller and lighter than a normal Fleshlight, so it's easier to pack away or hide from roommates when you're trying to wash it out in the bathroom and they walk in on you! (This happens to me all the time.)

The Bad: The Blade doesn't exactly play nicely with the other Fleshlight models. One of the cool things about the Fleshlight family is that you can buy one case for $20 and it will fit any sleeve you buy. Unfortunately, this standardization doesn't extend to the Blade; the case and sleeve were only made for each other, and the texture isn't really that cool to begin with. I said it was pleasant, yes, but to be honest, squeezing it makes those ridges smush together so you can barely feel anything besides smooth tightness.

Also, the Blade makes a mess, and seems to be designed to prevent any clean-up of that mess. To begin with, there are four tiny holes on the back of the sleeve where air wheezes out with every squeeze, thrust, and pump. This helps the toy stay molded to your member, which is great, but it leaks. Water, lube, and jizz escape with equal ease, especially when you hump this thing as hard as I do (ahem, ladies).

After you've dealt with whatever came out of the Blade, you have to struggle to deal with its insides. Remember that small screw cap I mentioned a few paragraphs ago? It really made clean-up a breeze. Instead of that, the Blade has a stubborn circular plug that barely gives you access to the bottom of the case; not only does this make washing and drying harder, it's nearly impossible to get the sleeve back in the case because you can't pull it through. Some people use the phrase "like trying to push toothpaste back inside its tube," but I think that's a bit dramatic. This is more like trying to fit a Twizzler in your nostril in that it would be much easier if you could pull the Twizzler from the other side.

The Ugly: This thing is ugly. It's built like a thick, unwieldly ninja sword, accented with flames and something that looks like lizard skin. Does this belong to He-Man?

Maybe you're the kind of person who doesn't care what his masturbation sleeves look like—because when you get down to what this is for, appearance isn't nearly as important as utility—but I, for one, am absolutely obsessed with finding out why the front cap of this toy has a low relief of a topless Asian woman fanning herself in front of a cherry blossom tree. Am I supposed to want to fuck her? And why does the Blade font (which also appears on the cap) look vaguely like kanji? Did Fleshlight really need to make their revolutionary new toy a flaming sword of Asian stereotypes?

More importantly, will someone tell me what the Fleshjack Sword has on the cap? I'm dying to know. This whole thing is even weirder when you consider that the Blade came out not long after Asa Akira's signature texture debuted with Asa in geisha makeup for the promo pictures.

Ugliness aside, I think the Blade is a brilliant step forward for Fleshlight as a company, and I can't wait to see what else they do with the soft case. At the moment, the Blade is $5 cheaper than other Fleshlights, and if you're looking for a solid masturbation sleeve that respects your dexterity, this is a good option. However, I'm one of those people who cares what his masturbation sleeves look like, so I'm hoping that Fleshlight takes the technology and presents it in a more aesthetically pleasing fashion.

· Blade - Fleshlight (fleshlight.com)