I live in a city that has an active trading community. People will post a picture of something they no longer value and what they would be looking for in return. For example, I got a sweet antique drop leaf table for a $12 bottle of wine. It's a community sharing and caring kind of place that lots of people are involved with. Last week, a self-professed sex toy tester posted that she had dildos and butt plugs only used once to test them. She professed as a sex educator she wouldn't do anything to promote the risk of STI's and that the pieces have been sterilized. She also claimed it's very common in her community to share these things. A lot of people gave her a hard time and were fairly aghast at the idea. To me, I know a lot of people won't hesitate to get down and dirty and swap a mix of bodily fluids with someone they've just met online, at a bar, restaurant wherever. Fucking a stranger like that seems to me to be riskier than fucking a piece of plastic. What do you think?

Desperately Inserting Large Dickish Objects

More than 100 years ago, DILDO, a brave group of women launched the First War On Christmas. WOC1 began when a group of female activists, fed up with just the expensive and waste of Christmas, founded The Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving (SPUG). They urged other women around the country to start SPUG clubs to protest unnecessary gift gifting. (There isn't a national SPUG memorial but there ought to be—a lavish and gaudy one, IMO, with an attached souvenir shop where we could all buy limited-edition, collectable SPUG ornaments for our trees.)

Lord knows gift gifting has never seemed quite so... unnecessary, what with all the fucking awful garbage happening in the world. We should take all the money we're spending on gifts this year and send it to the American Civil Liberties Union, Lambda Legal, the National Immigration Law Center, Planned Parenthood, and other orgs fighting the good fight.

Online trading groups like the one in your city are a nice idea—a good way to scrounge up gifts without wasting any money—but swapping dildos... yeah, most people are gonna have a problem with that. Even people who've sat their holes down on dicks that have been in ten thousand other holes are gonna get all aghast at the thought. (Necklaces, pearl and otherwise, will be clutched.)

I get this question a lot—can used sex toys be passed along—so that means there must be lots of open-minded, sex-positive, broke/cheap/anti-capitalist/eco-friendly readers out there contemplating similar swaps. And there are legit health concerns when it comes to swapping sex toys or sharing used ones, as you can never really know a used sex toy has been or, more worryingly, what the hell many of them are made of. To quote Hannah Jordan, a senior staff sex educator at Smitten Kitten who gave advice on sex toys in my column back in 2014, "Sex toys aren't regulated like food when it comes to packaging. There's no list of ingredients on the back. It could be latex, some other porous rubbery substance, or even a nasty, rash-inducing, endocrine-disrupting, cancer-causing mixture of PVC and phthalates."

I don't wanna make sex toys sound scary, DILDO, but many are just plain toxic. That's why you wanna buy quality toys from quality retailers. If your penetration toy is made of silicone—more expensive, yes, but you're worth it (and so is/are your hole/holes)—you can easily sterilize them by putting them in boiling water for a few minutes or running them through a hot dishwashing cycle. (Same goes for stainless steel.) When thoroughly sterilized, silicone or steel toys can be used and reused without risk. But buyer beware: low-quality sex toys may not be made out of what they say they are.

So, DILDO, while your neighborhood's self-professed sex toy tester may know exactly what she's doing, it really comes down to trust. Trust and three due diligence-y questions: What are these toys made out of? Where is she getting them? Does she have the original packaging?

If your local sex toy tester knows what the toys are made of, if she obtained them from reputable manufacturers/dealers, if she still has the original packaging and if they can be sterilized and have been been sterilized (and sterilized again by the new owner), DILDO, the risks are low and the potential rewards are high. (More pleasure in your community's holes, less trash in your community's landfills)

I'm with you, DILDO: fucking strangers—with dicks and tongues and holes that can't be run through extra-hot dishwashing cycles—is far riskier and reasonable people run those risks all the time. If there's any doubt about one of these toys, i.e. if it might not be silicone or stainless steel (or glass!), it should be tossed. But if there's no doubt about a particular toy—quality materials, sterilizable and sterilized—it should be enjoyed.