April Flores' Voluptuous Cyberskin Pussy: What Took Us So Long?

The Wildfire® Celebrity Series April Flores’ Voluptuous CyberSkin® Pussy (whew!) functions exactly the same way as any other simulated celebrity snatch: it’s essentially a hole (what the marketing gurus at Topco have curiously dubbed “an open-ended love tunnel”) in a rubber mold cast directly from the starlet’s nether regions. And that is its primary selling point. Unlike, say, the Tenga series, which focuses more on internal doodads designed for pleasure and less on external simulacrum, or the Fleshlight, which packs realistic and interchangeable human orifices in what looks like an oversized flashlight, these lifelike toys are all about starfucking in the truest sense of the word.

What sets April’s twat apart from the rest, however, is the fact that April is a woman of size, and the detailed reproduction of her crotch is accurate right down to the last gentle roll of her tummy. It’s truly a sight to behold, not just because BBW lovers now have a sex toy to call their own, but also because it marks a turning point for sex toys—and our sexual culture as well. Think of it as a 7.9-pound socio-political statement, a testament to the fact that the world is made up of more than just ludicrously emaciated übermodels with plastic tits. And yet this is no gag gift—far from it. Its very existence serves to remove yet another layer of taboo and shame from a repressed and overweight culture still coming out of the closet about its plus-size lust.

But one need not be a chubby chaser to appreciate the significance of this particular product, which is marketed without the sniggering derisiveness that accompanied most fatty fare since it first hit the specialty market decades ago. Ms. Flores herself is a far cry from late ’70s porn icon Bad Mama Jama, an enormous African-American woman who usually swallowed up skinny, pale white guys in loops with sadly laughable titles like “Bang An Elephant.”

Cut to 2009 and a totally different world. Beyond the unprecedented achievement of committing her queen-sized beauty to rubber, April and her significant other, artist Carlos Batts, took the molding process one step further with an eye-opening art exhibit at L.A.’s renowned La Luz de Jesus Gallery. Eight prominent L.A. artists—Axis, Coop, Jim Mahfood, Kime Buzzelli, Kozyndan, Misha, Small Paul and Batts himself—used plaster casts of Flores’ crotch as a blank canvas to bring their own visions to life. As the old saying goes, “I don’t know art, but I know what I like.”

Spanning niches from slightly chubby to downright gargantuan, big girls are admittedly not everyone’s cup of tea. Yet you can rest assured that BBWs of all shapes and sizes are desired by more men than are readily willing to admit it, thanks to the long-standing stigma our society places on the obese. It comes as no surprise, then, that our desire for Big Love is all too often couched in the kind of disarming frat-boy humor that would spawn a title like “Bang An Elephant.” None of that is to be found in the marketing of April Flores’ Voluptuous CyberSkin® Pussy. In fact, there is a kind of gentility in the web copy, with lines like “Gents can live out their Big Beautiful Woman fantasies” and “Soft, ample thighs unlike anything else on the market.” We can’t recall the last time we saw the word “gents” used in promoting sex toys, or an invitation to “get lost in my fleshy folds of love,” as the back of the box implores.

Just as big gals are not for everyone, it also takes a special perspective to truly enjoy humping a disembodied groin—or ass, for that matter. This applies to all celebrity and non-celebrity moldings that celebrate a particular anatomical asset, from Audrey Hollander’s Cyberkin Pile Driver Pussy and Ass to Penthouse® Pet Collection Kimberly Williams PleasureSkin® 36DD Breasts (which weigh in at an impressive 8.5 pounds). If porn parodies can be construed as the sincerest form of flattery, then one can only imagine the degree of accolade ascribed to having your sexual organs replicated for global consumption.

Congratulations, April.

This article originally ran in the December 2009 issue of AVN.

For more, read Darklady's essay on big beautiful women and Tony Lovett's column on AVN's first BBW cover story.