The Packer Gear harnesses ((I have the boxer-briefs, but I can’t imagine the standard briefs being dramatically different)) are everything I wanted out of the rodeoH and didn’t get. They’re an awesome alternative to SpareParts Tomboi and in some cases, actually better. Yes- Packer Gear is made by CalEx. I’m as surprised as you are. I still don’t like CalEx as a company but of the “big four” major sex utensil companies they’re far from the worst. I give them some modicum of credit for recognising at least part ((now let’s see if we can get trans women to be included too eh?)) of the transgender community by starting to make packing products which are surprisingly good and affordable.

I have the boxer-brief style which is really a bit more of a trunk cut on me, but I appreciate that. True boxer-briefs can come down a little far on my thighs which can bunch up inside my 501’s (which, let’s be honest- if I’m packing I want that shit to get noticed). Despite being unable to find a size chart anywhere online [UPDATE! SheVibe now has waist size-range measurements available on their site], and the sizing options being XS/S, M/L, or L/XL, they fit fantastically. I got the L/XL and they fit me just right. For reference I wear an XL in my Vagina Dentata American Apparel Hot Shorts, a Large in Jockey Cotton Stretch Low-Rise, and I’m a solid size 16 in Lucky Jeans. I’d say someone a size larger than I am would still be quite comfortable in these, two sizes up might be a little snug depending on where you carry your weight. 95% cotton/5% spandex and a nice wide waistband means these are comfy enough to wear all day, and not just on days when you’re in a pinch because you forgot to do laundry.

There’s a bit of a lovechild of rodeoH and SpareParts Tomboi thing going on with these, and I like it. Inside you’ll find a vertical flap system akin to SpareParts designs. The vibe pockets are a little weird but also smart- there’s a horizontal one on the inside flap near the top (placed above where the base of a cock would be), and there’s a vertical one in the middle of the top flap. I thought this was strange until I realised that this put one bullet squarely on a potential fuckee’s clit and one squarely wedged into fucker’s junk pressing against the base of your cock. It works surprisingly well to add pressure bio-feedback with thrusting on top of vibration. Someone actually thought about this really intelligently! Slightly less well thought out is the placement of the packer-nutsack-securing-strap. This is located on the inside of the innermost flap, which is great for being able to keep your whole packer inside your underpants, but won’t work with STP style packers. In contrast SpareParts’ Tomboi puts this feature directly below the o-ring, which means your cock is dangling outside your underpants when packing- it’s a little odd. Win some you lose some I suppose.

The o-ring on Packer Gear harnesses is firm, firmer still than that on rodeoH. It also looks smaller when I compare them side-by-side. Surprisingly though it held up to and accommodated a much wider variety of sex utensils than rodeoH ever did for me. Headier cocks like Shilo and Woody/Mustang were a little tricky to get back out, but worked just fine. Silk Large, Leo, and Curve all worked beautifully. You’re definitely not going to get Maverick or Randy in here though, which I can wrangle into SpareParts ((with the help of the plastic baggie trick)). The stitching has held up through my game of Will It Fit?, something which rodoeH failed on the first round. The stitching on these all-around is really well done, and even has enough give around the thighs where some underpants get that weird thing where the thread is tighter than the fabric.

So about that “better than SpareParts in some cases” statement. I love my SpareParts harnesses, and I have nearly all their designs (I don’t have Bella, and while I own Sasha it’s been missing for over a year. This is what you get when you lend out sex utensils without making a card-catalogue checkout system first). The problem I have with most versions of Tomboi is that they’re made out of that swimsuit fabric which is really great for the standard harness styles but when worn as underwear and you sit for any period of time? They make you get a bit swampy. The exception to this is that they make a micro-modal version that is REALLY HARD TO FIND but is my favourite of the underpants harnesses. The fact that Packer Gear is 95% cotton means no swamp-crotch no matter how long I wear them or how many vinyl diner booths I sit in, and for me that’s kinda a deal breaker.

I’m really stoked that these exist. Being CalEx also means a higher likelihood of these being available in areas where there aren’t any so-called “progressive” sex shops ((yes, I’m putting that in quotes. I have some Opinions about how progressive places actually are when “gender expression” seems to completely forget about the feminine side of the trans spectrum, where gay male sexuality seems an afterthought, and where men (with the exception of trans men) feel generally unwelcome.)). For those of you who live in the breadbasket states or rural areas that only have big chain sex shops or strip-club annexes, there’s a decent chance you’ll be able to find these there. Given how difficult life as a person with A Case Of The Genders can be, in this case it’s almost a blessing that these are made by one of the big sex corps.

I’ve long struggled to have a good answer to someone who wanted a harness that didn’t trigger their dysphoria, that wasn’t marketed towards “lesbians”, and that wouldn’t break the bank. rodeoH seemed so promising and I know some people love them but I’ve had zero success with them. SpareParts are great but they’re not cheap. Making your own is an option, but not everyone is handy like that.

So now there’s an answer, and that answer is: Packer Gear.

Thanks SheVibe for carrying these and providing me with a pair. 

Ok, so pose-able dildos aren’t new. They’ve actually been around for quite some time. For as long as I can remember, seeing Craigslist and Freecycle listings for “pack-and-play” cribs always made me cringe a little as I immediately envisioned prisons made of weird bendy penises. I don’t care how sex-positive you are, that’s just weird. Up until a year or so ago though, bendable dildos were at best made of porous “real skin” or elastomer and at worst made of jelly. Their bases were strange, if you bent them too much the wires exploded out of their sides, and they weren’t really something you wanted to have in your pants all day.

New York Toy Collective changed all that by making the first silicone pose-able dildo on the market- Shilo. I first found Shilo through Sinclair Sexsmith during a Cock Confidence workshop. I was thrilled. I’d had Vibratex’s Silky for a while, but hated the texture of it and the porous material. Here was a beautifully sculpted, dual-density silicone toy with a bendable core, which was designed specifically for packing AND fucking. Not to mention- it didn’t have a face on it! So I asked New York Toy Collective to send me one.

I love the texture of the silicone on Shilo- it reminds me of an ever so slightly firmer VixSkin, but less “sticky” to the touch when freshly washed. Unfortunately for me, Shilo has a really pronounced head. This would be great for most people, since that paired with the ability to bend it to the perfect curve means a lot of g-spot action is a guarantee. G-spot stimulation isn’t a pleasing feeling for me though and toys with pronounced heads have a tendency to get stuck behind my pubic bone on the out-stroke, which feels really unpleasant. I’ve tried flipping it upside-down, but I seem to unconsciously rotate toys as I use them, and inevitably I end up with the same pubic-bone fish-hooking going on. It makes me sad, because if it weren’t for the head I’d probably love the daylights out of it.

New York Toy Collective has a companion product though which I absolutely ADORE- a pair of removable testicles on a cockring. That vibrate. Do you love the ball-slapping feeling? Disappointed that the balls of your cock are forever doomed to live out their lives inside your harness? Want to be a weird multi-scrotumed monster? Fancy fisting someone with bonus balls? All of this and more can be yours with the Love Bump! Yes- I said fisting with bonus balls. Hey- if rednecks can have truck nuts, I can have wrist-nuts, OK?

I do find the the cockring portion of the Love Bump is a bit too big- it’s pretty much the diameter of most toys you’d be wanting to put them onto AND it’s stretchy, so it tends to slip down. There’s nothing more awkward than getting a blowjob, looking down, and realising your nuts have migrated to the head of your dick. Using a stretchy elastomer cockring or a ball-stretcher can help prevent them from shifting in use, and can look pretty hot. The bigger size of the ring is a boon though for wearing as wristnuts, but I feel like since they’re stretchy silicone that even if the ring becomes snugger you’ll still be able to rock the look. The vibe pocket is also a little too roomy, and vibes tend to slip out pretty easily. I wonder if adding ridges to the inside of the vibe pocket might help, or maybe just making it snugger. Vigorous ball-slapping with these as they stand tends to cause the bullet to eventually go flying across the room. Wrapping a rubber band around the bullet helps prevent this in a pinch though.

Both Shilo and Love Bump come in four really well thought-out skin tones, as well as some fun colours (you might even still be abel to find it in a black-and-blue swirl, which I had a hand in making happen). The colours tend to vary a bit, and I do find that the lightest tone can be a bit too opaque and peachy for a lot of folk, but the tan tones and dark brown are great with wonderfully realistic undertones. Probably the best skintones of any dildo company out there, that I’ve seen at least.

So- if you want a dildo that you can stuff into your trousers during the day, then fuck someone with at night (or vice verse, if you’re a day-sleeper), you want a pair of balls to accessorise your favourite outfit/dildo,  or you want to emulate Jiz Lee pornstar extraordinaire– I really can’t recommend New York Toy Collective‘s offerings enough.

The Anthro Dragon has a few features which I found particularly attractive- most notably that it’s one of the few toys I’ve seen that not only has a foreskin, but has a foreskin that is not fully retracted. I like this. Not that I have anything against circumcised cocks, one of my favourite penises of all time happens to be circumcised, I just have an appreciation for toys which offer up a bit of variety. I also liked how the base design provided a nice flat plane to blend up against the body, but that the balls still had some dimensionality to them. Not huge dangly balls, but not weird partial balls either. Nice balls ((For reasons I cannot explain, I can’t read “nice balls” and have it not be in the voice of Worf a la “Good tea. Nice house”)).

Anthro Dragon is also probably the best introductory toy to anthro toys, for someone who is curious but not sure they’re ready to go full-on animal lifecast or fantasy gryffin dick. It’s firmly in the more humanoid realm, with a slight bit of anthropromorphication by way of shallow horizontal ribbing, which makes me think a bit of the tummy of the dragon in Pete’s Dragon.

I got my Anthro Dragon in Bad Dragon’s #3 or “soft” silicone. Side by side with my VIP Supersoft, the Anthro Dragon is just slightly squishier. Not by much though. Unfortunately, the soft silicone is still too firm to really work for an everyday wear packer. It definitely gives you the look of a poorly concealed erection. Not quite trouser snake, since I got the small size this time ’round, but still a bit of a chub. For a pack-n-play at a sex-positive event or play party though? This might work.

As a non-packing dildo though? I really rather like it. It’s a demure cock, with about 6″ of usable length if you really bottom-out on it, and just over 1.5″ diameter through the shaft (Bad Dragon says 1.75″ but my measure has it lesser, which I’m rather OK with really). The swell of the head gives me a bit of a stretch on insertion/removal, and creates a gliding sensation of fullness with thrusting. It’s a great toy for a laid-back jerk-off session where I don’t wanna assault my cunt. Kinda like the difference between “making love” and “fucking” or “banging”. My cunt can’t quite take the size or vigor my ass tends to enjoy, at least not with toys.

The texture on this is so subtle that you don’t really notice it at all, at least I don’t. It really does feel very similar to my Tantus Supersoft VIP, and that’s not a bad thing. When I want the sensation of something in my cunt and nothing to distract from the feeling of thrusting? I reach for the VIP. Anthro Dragon is easier to grip though, with a more substantial base and those nice balls.

Antrho Dragon is also one of the few Bad Dragon toys that will be easily harness-able. Where a lot of their toys have very large bulky bases, or long un-flanged bases, this one is almost ideal for those who want a harness toy with balls. Even the largest size should still clock in at a shaft diameter which can be accommodated by most harnesses.

Overall, I’m rather pleased with my Anthro Dragon, even if it doesn’t bring my anthro-packer tentabulge dreams to life. I enjoy it’s modest size and demure texture more than I initially expected I would. It’s the lazy-river of dildos.

The rodeoH comes in this little microfibre pouch which, I must admit, reminded me a bit of the 90’s. Remember Oakleys? Know anyone who had them? They came in, you guessed it, a small microfibre pouch. Now it makes sense to me for sunglasses to come in such a pouch. It protects the lenses, gives you something to clean them with, I get it. A harness on the other hand? If it’s gonna come in a pouch of some sort I need it to fit stuff. Yes, if I pay attention and fold the rodeoH up I can get it back into its little pouch. But if I’m in a hurry, packing up my toybag and headed off to a play party I don’t want to have to fuss over it. I’d also like to fit other things in alongside my harness. Things like, oh I don’t know, maybe the cock I’m going to use with it, condoms, lube… y’know, things that go hand-in-hand with strap-on use. Also, since the pouch is small, I promptly lost it. It’s buried somewhere in a pile of laundry I’m sure, or it ended up going through the wash and is stuck inside a trouser leg. I’ll find it eventually.

The rodeoH also comes with a dogtag. Yeah, I don’t know why either. There’s this trend right now of toys coming with silly accessories. PicoBong and their weird little D6. Lelo with their cufflinks and pins. Because that’s just what you want when you buy yourself a new dildo or vibrator- a new tie pin. WTF? Most of these are luxury toys at that, and priced rather highly. Cut the crap and drop the price y’all. Anyhow, back to the rodeoH and its silly dogtag. I have nothing against dogtags. I wear one every day (it’s from my Daddy), but why I would want to wear one branded with the harness/underpants I’m wearing is beyond me.

So, silly trinket and too-small storage pouch aside, I’m still not sure how I feel about the rodeoH as a harness but I do know that they rock as underwear. The other day I found myself to be out of clean underwear, sorely in need of doing laundry, but no time before work. I figured why not, and put on the rodeoH, afterall they are designed like underwear. Gotta say, these are probably one of the most comfortable pairs on underpants I’ve worn. Easy to forget that I even had them on, which is a feat of underpants engineering if you ask me. I’d love to go commando, it’s super comfy, but my self-cleaning oven is just a bit too efficient, so it’s not really feasible in my world. Oh well. I’ll gladly wear the rodeoH instead!

As a harness though, the rodeoH falls a bit flat for me. Literally. Putting a cock into the rodeoH, even a small cock, is just too weighty and causes the front of the harness to dip, and my penis to sag. It’s sad really, no one wants a saggy penis. I got the 39-41 inch size in the rodeoH, as I’ve got some hip and thigh, but it’s decently snug. Snugger than I’d normally wear underpants, but not so much that they’re uncomfortable. If I went any smaller I do know that I would have fit issues around the thigh. Also, despite the appearance of standard mens briefs, the rodeoH rides low. Lower than men’s low-rise briefs, and lower than my fancy gay-man underwear from the designer mens underwear store. Once you add the weight of a dipping cock to it, I certainly felt as if the harness was going to slide down my ass mid-fuck. Not cool.  The o-ring on the rodeoH is not as stretchy as I’d expected either. Having tried other integral-ring harnesses which can accommodate some serious dildo-age, I was rather disappointed. Even moreso when I noted that upon inserting (and removing) the first cock I tried with the rodeoH, which was a rather modest 1½” in diameter, the seaming on the o-ring split. Definitely doesn’t bode well for larger toys or rigorous fucking. Lastly, I tried using the rodeoH as a packing harness, but most packys are too soft and slender and slip out through the ring, or dangle most unappealingly as they slip through until the balls block the ring and barely keep the now even more flaccid soft-pack from hitting the floor. This is a place where an extended tab base like that of the Private would be ideal.

I hear that rodeoH has come out with a boxer-brief style harness, and wonder if the addition of legs would give more stability, and allow for getting a size down without being too restricting. I’m curious. As it stands, I liked the rodeoH in theory, but in execution it’s not quite there. Comfy undies though. I think for now I’ll stick to modifying a pair of snug briefs, if I want that look. It’s worked well enough for folk, including Little Brother (who turned me on to the idea). One final note, because it’s been bugging me through writing this whole review. What’s up with the name and the funny capitalisation anyway? I keep wanting to flip it around, hoping it’ll make some cutesey or sexy word, but no- Hoedor. Sounds like the name of a place in Middle Earth. Or a dwarven king. Or something.

There are a number of things I really like about the Private Silicone Packer. It’s silicone. Let me say that again- it’s silicone. I love this about it. To my knowledge this is only the second packer that is made of silicone that is commercially available without special ordering a custom prosthetic from shoppes geared toward transmasculine individuals. Like I said before, I like things being sterilisable, and silicone is that. Prior to the Private, every packy I’ve had has been made of “cyberskin” or some other form of elastomer material. These materials allow for a nice flaccid-cock squooshy feeling, but are not terribly long-lived and are rather porous, to put it mildly.

The design on the Private Silicone Packer is also rather ingenious, I’ve gotta say. The tabbed design above the shaft on the Private means you don’t need a specially designed packy strap or special packing underwear/harness combo to wear the Private. You can wear it easily with any o-ring harness you like. Now personally I prefer underoos or a packing-specific jockstrap for my soft-packing needs, but if you like to use your harness as a jack-of-all-trades as it were, go for it with the Private.

The sculpt on the Private is also pretty unique. It’s got three-dimensional free-hanging balls. The balls are rather slim, and a on the tear-drop/egg-shaped side of the range of testicle shapes, but they’re not too shabby. They are a centre even-hanging pair of balls, so those of you who prefer to dress to the right or the left might have a bit of difficulty with the Private. The sculpt work on the shaft and head aren’t too shabby here either. I find the shaft a bit veiny for a flaccid penis but other than that it’s decently realistic.

Unfortunately, the sculpt on this and the silicone are also probably the biggest downfall of the Private. The silicone is single density standard sextoy silicone, so it’s rather firm. Too firm, in my opinion. I’d love to see this in the softer silicones used for dual density toys, or possibly made dual density all together. As it stands, it’s far too firm to be a flaccid cock, and ends up creating more than just the realistic bulge one generally wants when packing, and crosses the line firmly into erection in your pants land. This wouldn’t be too bad if the curvature of the cock wasn’t so rigidly formed, because then it could become a pack-and-play. Sadly, the materials memory in the curve of the Private is too strong to even hold upright using two hands, let alone trying to do so mid-fuck.

If the Private were made of dual-density silicone, it would be pretty awesome. As it stands, it’s too heavy and too rigid for most soft packing instances. Now, if you’re looking for a packy that’ll give you the look of a hard on in your trousers with the cuckolding effect of being unable to actually fuck anything with your erection? This might just be the packy for you. Overall, I give kudos for the idea, and think it could be a great packy with some tweaks. As it is right now? Not gonna be my go-to soft pack unfortunately.

Huge thanks to SheVibe not only for letting me review this as a precursor to deciding whether or not to carry it, but also for listening to their customers and adding packers and other gender expression resources to their offerings. It is definitely appreciated.