When you hear what Rick Gellert has been doing with himself the past few years, you may want to give him a hand.
When that got boring, he started feeling around for alternatives, first hitting on swimming pool equipment. “I played around a lot trying to see if nozzles and jets could do the trick,” Gellert says in the matter-of-fact tone another person might use to direct you to the bread aisle of the grocery store. It’s the same tone Gellert uses to recount every step of his evolution from part-time masturbation hobbyist to full-time president of 3S Corporation of America, the Wheeling-based manufacturer of Venus II, the industry leader among men’s masturbation machines. “You hear about women using the bathtub spigot to provide a clitoral orgasm,” he says. “So my idea was to make a suction device that produces the same effect for men.”
A year after perfecting Venus II the partners say they have sold close to 500 machines–which, at $1,095 a whack, is pretty remarkable. Especially when their top competitor, the hand, costs nothing and doesn’t have to be cleaned out with a bottle brush after each use.
Even though he’s an investor in the Texas company that makes Miracle Mate, Venus II’s leading mechanical competitor, Griffin admits that “I always tell people, if you want the genuine sensation of a mouth or vagina, go for Venus II. I’m not in this for the money.”
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In the college journalism classes I teach, I tell students that a good reporter takes every story to the wall. Whatever you have to do to get the story right you do. I once sat for 90 minutes in the rain outside a North Shore mansion with a Siberian husky sniffing my crotch while I waited for the woman inside to sober up and sit for an interview. I howled at the moon late at night with a smarmy nightclub owner. I interrogated a weary and troubled AIDS patient who was accused of setting fire to the Iowa hospice where he had gone to die.
“Oh, just give me the medium-sized one,” I blurted out as casually as I could manage.
