A brief content warning: this post contains the word ‘edging.’ I am going to use it several times. I have spent the last two weeks saying it out loud to see if it gets less uncomfortable. It does not.
Edging, for the purposes of this blog and my own lingering embarrassment, is the practice of approaching climax and then not. Deliberately. On purpose. As a strategy. The idea — and the research on this is, annoyingly, extensive and credible — is that staying in the approach for longer produces a conclusion that is qualitatively different from the usual one. More of an event, less of a formality.
I became aware of this concept because of a product called Flick. Specifically, because of what happens when you use Flick and the sensation is so simultaneously two different things that your brain is too busy trying to process both of them to get where it was going, and then suddenly you’ve been at this for forty minutes and you have to be up early.
This, it turns out, is edging. Not by design. By distraction.
I have feelings about this.
What Flick actually is
Flick is huxi’s £54 dual-stimulation vibrator. One end has a silicone tongue that flickers and licks with three adjustable speeds — a sensation that I am not going to describe further because I have some remaining dignity, but which I will say is not like anything else I have used and is considerably more realistic than I was prepared for. The other end is a smooth shaft that vibrates across ten settings, deep and rumbly in the way that a good vibrator should be.
You can use them together. You can use them separately. There’s a remote control. It’s waterproof. It’s whisper quiet at under fifty decibels, which is quieter than a normal conversation, which I know because I looked it up at eleven pm on a Thursday and then sat with that information for a moment.
It is also, and I want to note this because it matters to me, fifty-four pounds. After Thunder & Lightning, which is a genuinely extraordinary piece of engineering that costs considerably more and is worth every penny, Flick is what huxi looks like when they turn their attention to something accessible. It does not feel like a fifty-four pound product. It feels like a product that has been priced fifty-four pounds as a matter of principle.
The licking is not like anything else I have used. The vibration is not like anything else I have used. The combination of both simultaneously is not like anything I have a word for.
The edging problem, explained
Most products in this category are decisive. They go directly to the point. This is fine. Sometimes you want something that is decisive. Sometimes it is Thursday evening and you have a meeting at eight the next morning and you need sleep, not a sensory odyssey.
Flick is not decisive. Flick poses a question and then immediately poses a different question and your nervous system — and I am using that phrase now, for which I blame the Kinsey Institute and my own catastrophic curiosity — cannot quite settle on an answer before the next question arrives.
The licking is not like anything else I have used. The vibration is not like anything else I have used. The combination of both simultaneously is not like anything I have a word for, which is why I was forty minutes in before I noticed, which is why I looked up what edging was, which is why I am writing this blog post at ten forty-five on a Thursday.
The effect is not that the product withholds. The effect is that there is too much happening for anything to be withheld. You cannot rush toward a conclusion when you cannot decide which sensation you are rushing toward. This is, I have now learned, the entire principle behind edging. It can be achieved deliberately, by people with more self-discipline than me. It can also be achieved accidentally, by anyone who uses Flick and forgets to check the time.
Why this is better than every other approach to the same thing
I want to be careful here because I have been accused, in the past, of being uncharitable to products made by other brands. I am trying to be a better person.
So: there are other products that do a version of the licking thing. Some of them tap. Some of them suck. Some of them do something that the manufacturer’s copywriter has described in language I found personally mortifying. None of them — and I am being precise here, not merely brand-loyal — do the licking thing while simultaneously doing the vibrating thing across ten different settings with a remote control for £54.
The edging effect, specifically, comes from the dual stimulation. A product that only taps or only sucks is asking one question at a time. Flick asks two simultaneously, which is what produces the sensation of time moving differently — of being entirely present in a way I have only previously managed accidentally, by forgetting that I was trying to be somewhere.
There is also the remote. I have not yet established a context in which the remote is essential, but its existence means I have thought about it, and thinking about the remote has produced approximately forty minutes of additional reading that I will not be detailing here.
You cannot rush toward a conclusion when you cannot decide which sensation you are rushing toward. This is edging. I achieved it accidentally. I recommend it entirely.
The reluctant conclusion
Flick is fifty-four pounds. For fifty-four pounds it gives you a licking tongue with three settings, a vibrating shaft with ten, a remote, IPX7 waterproofing, whisper-quiet operation, body-safe silicone, and the accidental discovery of an entire category of extended pleasure that people pay considerably more to find in other ways.
If you want to stay in the build for longer — and the research suggests, emphatically, that you should want this — the most straightforward way to do it is to give yourself too many things to pay attention to at once. Flick does this. It does it by design, even if I arrived at the insight accidentally.
This is the best product in this price category. It is not close. It is also the best edging product I have tried, which is a sentence I genuinely did not expect to write when I woke up on Thursday morning, but here we are.
I had a very good meeting at eight the next morning, as it happens. I think there might be a connection. I am not going to examine it.
— Charlie
