I'm a professional sex swing tester. Yes, that's a real job. Yes, my husband is devastated by how hard he has to work.
Everyone loves sex. Everyone wants more sex. Most people spend a lot of time wishing they were having better sex, or sex at all.
And then there's me. My job is to have sex in a swing with my husband. Try new positions. Test new products. Figure out what works, what doesn't, and occasionally discover things that nobody warned us about because, frankly, nobody has done this as many times as we have.
I get paid for this. Someone decided this was a career. That someone was me, but still.
My husband, for the record, considers himself a victim of circumstance. A reluctant hero. A man who simply had no choice but to come home and have adventurous sex with his wife because his wife's boss told him to. His wife's boss is also his wife. He has made peace with this.
How the Job Actually Works
When we get a new product, it goes up in the shop. Then it gets used. That's the job. Not paperwork. Not a focus group. Not a committee. Someone gets in the swing and we figure out what it actually does.
Before we release anything to customers, it goes home with our team first. Every single product, and every single person gets their own, because we are not in the business of passing things around. (This is also why we don't do returns. A swing that left this building and came back is not a swing we're putting back on the shelf. We take that seriously.) The conversation at the office sounds normal until you think about it for a second: ‘Can you take this home and test it, give us a review on monday?' Husbands across the team have been told by their wives that their boss is requiring them to come home and have creative sex with them. Nobody has ever complained. We don't have an HR, but still, no one has asked for the HR contact.
The shop currently has more hardware in the ceiling than a CrossFit gym. Different swings, different slings, different spring setups, all hanging, all tested, all with a story. My husband walks through this room and sees his happiest place on earth. I walk through it and see twelve product reviews and a Tuesday.
What Testing Actually Finds
Here's the thing about product photos: they are taken on models who weigh about a hundred pounds and are shaped like a lowercase ‘l'. Which is great for the photo. Less great for the review.
We had a leather sling in the collection, beautiful thing, looked incredible in the shots. The model in the photo would never have noticed anything wrong with it. We noticed. Why? Because we were actually using it, the way actual humans use it, and there is a corner on that leather edge that will absolutely find your outer thigh if you have any curves? Not a design feature. A design oversight. The kind of thing that only shows up when someone with curves gets in the thing and starts moving around.
That note goes in the review. That's how the review gets written. Not from a spec sheet. From the sling.
The cheap swings have the same problem every time: whoever designed them has clearly never been in one. You can feel it immediately. The angles are wrong, the straps hit in the wrong places, and the whole thing assumes you are a very specific shape that most people are not. This is useful to know before you spend two hundred dollars.
Some products are exactly what they claim to be and we report that happily. Some products are not, and we report that too. Some products make us laugh so hard we can't finish the session, and those get their own category.
The Things That Do Not Go According to Plan
Not everything works the way it looks in your head. This is true of cooking, home renovation, and absolutely true of sex swings.
We had a fetish yoga swing come in, very clever design, handles and stirrups connected through a sliding system so when you push down on one side the other comes up. Elegant in theory. I sat in it to test it and immediately became completely stuck. Not ‘this is uncomfortable' stuck. Truly, physically, cannot-get-out stuck. Everything I tried to fix it made it worse. The more I shifted, the more committed the swing became to keeping me exactly where I was.
I had to scream for help.
My mother-in-law came to rescue me. I was fully clothed, because this was a testing session in the shop and not an at home private moment, and that is honestly the only part of that sentence I am proud of. She is epic an laughed so hard she could hardly rescue me. We still crack up about it all the time. The swing got a very thorough write-up.
This is the part of the job that sounds funny in the retelling and was significantly more funny in the moment. It's also the part that matters, because if I hadn't sat in that swing, a customer would have. And they would have been alone. And they would not have had a mother-in-law nearby.
You're welcome.
The Sacrifice
People hear about this job and they have one of two reactions. Either they think it's hilarious, or they think it sounds like the greatest job ever invented.
Both are correct.
What I will say, sincerely, is this: somebody has to actually use these things. Somebody has to get in the swing, try the position, figure out what pinches and what doesn't, discover that the weight rating is optimistic, notice that the buckle placement is slightly wrong, and then sit down and write all of it up so that the person reading the review actually knows what they're buying.
That person is us. My husband and I, making the sacrifice, so you don't have to figure it out alone in your bedroom on a Saturday night with the instructions open on your phone and one foot stuck in a stirrup.
We are selfless people. Truly. The amount of sex we have had in the name of consumer research is almost embarrassing. Almost.
The shirt says ‘Professional Product Tester.' It should probably say ‘You're Welcome.'
Both are accurate.