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Hey guys, if your mom took thalidomide and you won a hoard in damages, the Venus II masturbation machine is a must-have, an appliance maybe as essential as a refrigerator or prosthetic arm. If you don't have flippers for limbs and the bank account isn't flush, you have to ask: is it worth $969 for a helping hand at doing what comes free and naturally?

If you've set your heart on mechanical masturbatory assistance, however, the Venus II is probably the machine to get. Manufactured and sold by the 3S Corporation of Wheeling, Illinois, this is an intelligently designed, solidly engineered device. Gasping and blowing like an iron lung though it may, the Venus II really gets you off, as its KY-coated, surgical-latex lined "receiver" vacuum-sucks your cock. The feeling is indeed something resembling a sucking mouth, a puckering asshole, or, so I am told, a juicy twat. On the bleak horizon of flimsy plastic Accujacks and cheap blow-up fuck dolls, the Venus II brightly shines.

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I've had a soft spot for powered sex toys ever since I discovered dad's electric sander while preparing my seventh-grade science project. Much more fun than planing the wooden base of "Volcanoes of the Pacific" was pressing the sander's knob against my crotch, yielding eruptions of a different sort. Around this time I found out that a nine-volt transistor battery, its positive and negative poles connected by my scrotum, gave a nice tingly sting. Later, my mom's Dr. Scholl's foot massager got pressed into masturbatory service. In college, a friend and electronics wizard showed me his prize invention, an electrified metal cock ring that, with a turn of the voltage dial, gave sensations ranging from gentle frisson to excruciating throb.

Purists may look askance at the thought of electro-mechanical contrivances polluting the natural communion of a boy with his penis. But what is orgasm except electric impulses shooting across neurons, and the peristaltic waves of urethral muscles? Amplify sexual signals with a little help from the laws of mechanics and the local power company is just a case of gently nudging nature along.

With that mindset, I was predisposed to be intrigued by something like the Venus II. When I heard that the 3S Corporation offered a loaner to any reporter intrepid enough to write about its product, I stepped forward, pen and penis in hand. After faxing the latter's length and circumference off to 3S headquarters, I was fitted from afar with one of the ten standard sizes of latex-lined receivers the company stocks (good for 95 percent of their customers, says a 3S spokesperson).

Over the next few days, I awaited the UPS truck eagerly. Besides the aura of its price tag, the Venus II asserted clear superiority to the powered sex toys I'd enjoyed previously. It was not just a condiment to jerking off (like the battery or the electric cock ring), but the main course. And unlike the sander and the foot vibrator, which are quite capable of getting one off on their own, the Venus II claimed sensations resembling actual interpersonal sex. It promised to free the hands from masturbatory drudgery, so that they could be free to roam forth and do their own thing: stroke one's balls, pinch one's nipples, grip one's Honcho. If civilization progresses through reduction in repetitive manual labor, the Venus II could claim to be truly an historic advance.

Finally, it arrived. Since no one was in the office that afternoon, I quickly retired to give it try. The Venus II turned out to be a red metal box, about the size of a mini vacuum cleaner, the machine's not so distant cousin. The box is bolted into a nondescript brown plastic case which, when closed, might be taken for that of a slide projector. Three lines run off the box. One sucks the juice from any three-pronged electric outlet (don't fudge with the grounding, instructions caution). Another is a rubber hose that attaches to the "receiver," which sucks the juice from your cock. The third line is the "stroke controller," a narrower, valved rubber tube that helps you fine-tune the air pressure in the receiver, so you can get your cock into the thing in the first place, and then keep the plastic tube from flying off once the suction starts.

It all takes a bit of trial and error. First you attach the hoses, then you coat the receiver's insides with KY, then you blow into the stroke controller so you can squeeze your erect cock in, then you turn on the machine, then you adjust the stroke controller's valve so that the receiver doesn't go careering off on the upstroke, or so that the pressure doesn't get so high that the receiver's snap-off cap goes flying across the room like a champagne cork. After half an hour of practice, you find your cock sporting a milking machine that purrs. Now it's a matter of reaching back to the metal box, and tuning the dial, which offers everything from a leisurely 25 to a frenetic 350 strokes per minute. When everything's finished, it's time to unhook and clean out the receiver. The Venus II thoughtfully comes packed with a bottle brush.

The sensations are indeed interesting. The fit is snug, and the cock's entire shaft, as well as the head, gets plenty of attention. The secret of the Venus II, says inventor Rick Gellert-- who thought up the device because his wife likes sex far less often than he-- is moving lots of penile surface all at once. But the experience is different from fucking, where you have active control over thrust and rate, and it's not quite like getting a blow-job, where there is a subtle dance of feedback and response between sucker and sucked. Coo with delight or groan with boredom, and the Venus II will plod along deafly and dumbly until you change the settings. The machine will be enjoyed most, I suspect, by bottoms, for whom the mechanical inevitability of the stimulation and the enforced passivity will all be part of the turn-on.

Onward to Venus III

There never was a Venus I. Or more accurately, the first Venus was just the Roman goddess of love. The Venus II, waxes 3S's sales literature, is the goddess of self -love. Hey, whatever. But should the Parthenon ever admit of a Venus III, there's room for improvement.

--The documentation sucks. The machine itself has a stolid, no-nonsense feel to it. Somehow it's not surprising that it was a Russian-emigré engineer who Gellert hired to put his invention together. But the written instructions read like they were barely translated from Soviet bureaucratese. If you rely just on them, receivers will be popping off hither and thither for quite some time before any successful stimulation happens. The Venus II does, however, come with a clear, straightforward instructional video that shows a humpy model putting the machine through its paces (or is it the other way around?).

--The thing doesn't know when to quit. Mankind can be divided into those who like their cocks vigorously attended right after orgasm, and those who would rather get punched in the stomach. For the latter, the Venus II's receiver, bobbing merrily upon one's dick, transforms in the flash of an instant from a Love Tube to a Penile Torture Chamber. The victim is left groping desperately for the off button. Maybe the Venus III could have an ejaculation sensor, perhaps a little switch that's thrown when a burst of semen closes a live electrical circuit. Oh, on second thought.... At least, the device needs a remote control or a more readily accessible dial.

--It makes a racket. I spent my boyhood sleeping on a bed that, with the slightest motion, let out the squeal of a thousand squeaky springs. To jerk off without broadcasting this fact to everyone in my family required almost breath-holding stillness. That sex needs to be silent is a notion burned into my lovemap. This is idiosyncrasy. But my dislike of the Venus II's raucous, tuburcular wheezing is not. If one of the uses of the machine is to aid partners with mismatched sex drives, the mates had better effect a separation before one sates himself with the Venus II, and the other, say, tries to sleep. A Venus III could use a muffler.

What about raw liver?

If masturbation by hand is getting boring, it's probably not more hardware that you need but a refresh of the erotic software. Go out and screw around with someone hot and new so you can relive the experience later solitaire. Invest in really good pornography. Experiment with fantasy, breathing, pace, touch. Dial up for some phone sex. If the hand satisfies not, try fucking a pillow, a ripe cantaloupe, the proverbial beef liver. Dispense with vaseline or Jergen's for talcum, spit, olive oil. These at least are vastly cheaper ways to spice up spanking the monkey.

But the Venus II makes sense for people, who for some reason, can't manage auto-stimulation. Quite seriously, no hospital traction ward or paralysis unit should be without one. Erectily challenged? With a saint's patience, the Venus II will gently milk a flaccid dick for hours. And though masturbation bears, unfairly, the stigma of being a necessarily lonely pursuit, the Venus II could in fact be a real ice breaker at a sex club or bathhouse.

Sexual likes are famously diverse. For some people, a mechanical masturbator may be just the road to a certain sort of erotic satisfaction. After all, at last count, 1152 presumably rational fellows have each plunked down about a grand to own one of these things. When it comes to automated onanism, you have to give the Venus II a hand: it does pretty much what it promises. **

Editor's Note: From The Guide, September 1995. For more information, contact the 3S Corporation of America, Department G1, 830-11 Seton Court, Wheeling, Illinois 60090 USA; telephone 708-808-0732

Author Profile:  Bill Andriette
Bill Andriette is features editor of The Guide
Email:	theguide@guidemag.com