Can My Neighbors Hear Me Masturbate? (Ways to Make Your Cheap Vibrator Quieter)
For all women who hold either a modicum of sex drive or particularly personal interest in handheld technology, vibrators are a godsend. They provide quicker, more enthusiastic orgasms, the opportunity to grow your fingernails long, and are a great alternative to the pre-adolescent method of shoving a Nokia 3310 down your knickers. But, despite their best efforts, the cheap ones usually appear with a myriad of downsides - specifically, the question as to whether or not your very close next-door neighbors can hear you masturbate.
Often, the combination of wet skin, a poor quality vibrator that is about as functionally orgasmic as a remote-controlled cat toy, and the wild abandon of a sweeping orgasm can make it difficult to silence the pesky little buzzing noise. At first, you decide to continue your adventure amongst the pulsating commotion, thinking, I doubt anyone can hear me anyway. Then, later in the day, you find yourself stumbling into the Romanian family of five in the hallway below you, who shoots you a bouquet of disapproving glances despite your best efforts to play it coy and mention the new “cooling fan” you bought for your apartment (a genius excuse, right up until you realize that it’s mid-winter and the only reason you’d choose to make your draughty little flat any colder is if you had a particularly delightful bear carcass in which to clamber inside).
Soon, you find yourself leaping from room to room, closing and opening doors like the world’s worst game of Whack-a-Mole, while testing your vibrator to see how ear-splittingly loud the “BRRRR” sounds from distant corners of your apartment. Upon realizing that your odds of covertly “petting the cat” are about as likely as you investing in a sex toy costing more than £20, you suddenly begin to wonder whether your Slightly Strange Neighbor George can hear you masturbate, and if he can, does that on some deeply perverted level tempt HIM to masturbate, or does it, in fact, mean that your masturbatory tendencies have now officially infected your brain and turned to full-blown narcissism and you need to immediately tuck your vibrator back into your bedside table and pray your head doesn’t fall off under the weight.
However you choose to do the deed, your only chance of narrowly avoiding noise-related eviction is to masturbate while remaining perfectly still, lest you accidentally rotate the goddamn thing a quarter of a degree and are suddenly accosted with a brief stint of what sounds like The Stunning Debut of The Midnight Lawnmower - coming soon (but most likely not) to a bedroom near you. Then part of you thinks, There’s gotta be some merit to the greatly acclaimed bathtub wank, until you realize that the odds of your cheap £10 pocket vibrator surviving any more liquid than your presently bone-dry vagina, aren’t quite reliable enough to merit getting yanked out of a bathtub in the nuddy by some poor paramedic who has to try and restart your electrocuted and equally mortified heart.
Alternatively, you could try timing your masturbation sessions to whenever you end up loading your dishwasher. God knows whoever installed it couldn’t tell which part of your kitchen was level. You’d like an appliance that doesn’t feel like it’s concluded the Richter scale to be a personal challenge, and the odd twenty-minute interval to have an orgasm? Oh no, dear, you misunderstand - that’s only for the bourgeoisie. Your best bet is to have a wank in whatever neighboring dive bar, fast food restaurant, or crabs-infested petrol station bathroom from which you originally crawled. That’s the fun part of living in a £500 per month apartment - none of the sex, yet all of the STD checks.
Whatever you do, just don’t make the fatal mistake of following Google’s recommended advice and covering the thing in a towel or piece of fabric - there’s nothing that can wreck a pre-orgasm rush faster than your vibrator deciding to nuke your clitoris like it was built by Samsung. What women everywhere could really use is vibrating oven gloves - perfect for plausible deniability in case you’re caught (quite literally) with your hand in the cookie jar, and with a bit of a rinse, ideal for tenderizing a thawed chicken - maybe even both, depending on how comfortable you are playing the role of a 1950’s housewife. In a similar vein, under no circumstances should you ever frustratedly launch the vibrator at the wall and ring up a local male suitor… they’re usually twice as loud and only as effective around 37% of the time.
I suppose if you wanted to get practical, you could always throw away the crappy vibrator you sneakily purchased at fourteen, and instead replace it with the internet’s latest and greatest Clit Annihilator 9000 - it’s usually quieter, more efficient, and less degrading to pull out of the crunchy corner of your handbag when you inevitably find a sexual partner. Make sure to decide your strategy fast though, else you end up lying on your back, suddenly stuck in the never-ending brain loop of thinking about how if walls didn’t exist, you’d probably be castrated and thrown off into some far-off Pervert’s Prison, and then suddenly the dream’s dead, the vagina’s dry, and Neighbor George has to return to his nightly viewing of internet porn.
No matter how you choose to “choke the chicken” (or whatever the vaginal equivalent of that is, straying away from the all-too-meatless “flick the bean”), just know that masturbation is normal, using a vibrator is normal, and aggravating your neighbors seems to be part-and-parcel of living in an apartment block. Remember that time they spilled all that yellow-green soup in the hallway and for some reason decided not to clean it up, and then your hallway smelled like wet cabbage for at least six months, and you thought, “Who eats soup in a fucking hallway anyway?”. Yeah, you get to have a noisy wank. You’ve earned it. At least until we reach the era of the silent vibrator, or Elon Musk invents a sentient electro-powered Tesla sex doll.