Gag me. Blind me. Have your way with me.

There’s some­thing seduc­tive about relin­quish­ing con­trol to another. There’s some­thing free­ing about giv­ing it all up and open­ing your­self up to the will of another per­son. It can be the ulti­mate sur­ren­der, if you let it. Gag me. Blind­fold me. And you can have your way with me. I’ll do any­thing you want.

Gags and blind­folds are plen­ti­ful in my bag of sex toys. You know I love BDSM and fetish! I have penis gags, ball gags, ring gags — I’ve been gagged with a pair of my own panties. Same with blind­folds — I’ve been blind­folded with silk sashes, with leather and neo­prene, with the leg of my own stock­ing. But I’ve never had a gag and blind­fold all-in-one, so when the lovely peo­ple at sextoy.com offered to let me test out the Lover’s Head­gear Advanced Mask with Gag — I couldn’t wait to try it out, and to test it out on my lover, hus­band, and guinea pig, D.

The Lover’s Head­gear Advanced Mask, unfor­tu­nately has a name that makes me think of the head­gear worn by mid­dle school­ers with braces. But, it’s actu­ally a pretty nifty lit­tle device. The mask and the soft rub­ber ball gag are attached with a series of elas­tic straps which can also be adjusted to get the per­fect fit. The elas­tic means that the mask pretty much fits any­one, and is super com­fort­able for longterm wear with none of the stiff­ness of unfor­giv­ing leather. I loved the mask — it pro­vides a very sen­sory depri­va­tion expe­ri­ence, block­ing out all light so that I couldn’t see any­thing except the skin around the bridge of my nose. The ball gag is soft and squishy, and a very nice size — not too large. It fit into my mouth com­fort­ably, and I found I could sink my teeth into the ball slightly to get a bet­ter fit. The elas­tic straps were very com­fort­able, though the one that goes over the top of my head needed to adjusted or it would slide to one side or another. The only thing that I didn’t like was the strap that went around the bot­tom of my jaw.

The strap that goes beneath the jaw is one of the only straps that isn’t elas­tic, and this is really, really quite unfor­tu­nate, because it’s the only strap that doesn’t stay put. I could fit it under my chin, but because there are no buck­les or straps hold­ing that strap in place, it was all too easy to move my chin and pop the strap and ball gag out of place. Not cool — when I’m being restrained, I like to be restrained. There’s a time and place for self-bondage, but when I want to be held in place — I want to be held in place, dammit!

It was even worse when I tried it on D. He has a very small mouth open­ing, and could barely even fit the ball inside his mouth. He was only able to keep it in place by bit­ing into it, so the ball gag and chin strap were all too eas­ily dis­placed. He was a good sport and tried to keep it in place, but over­all, it proved to be a major dis­trac­tion, and he wasn’t able to con­cen­trate on the scene at hand. I’m not sure why the com­pany didn’t make the chin strap elas­ti­cized — it seems like it would have been a quick and easy fix.

Over­all, the Lovers Head­gear Advanced Mask is a fun all-in-one gag and blind­fold mask, but I wouldn’t rec­om­mend it to any­one who is into seri­ous restraint. While the elas­tic straps would make this a good mask for any­one who dis­likes leather or is new to BDSM, the chin strap is a deal breaker — it’s just too easy to pop loose, and it’s not easy to keep it in place when you’re pay­ing atten­tion to it. We might try jury rig­ging it with another strap that goes from the chin strap, around the back of the head, to the other side of the chin strap, but I don’t think this will be some­thing that we use very often. While it had great poten­tial, we’ll be stick­ing to our other, more heavy duty gags and blindfolds.