The Flip Hole is the top of the line masturbator offered by Japanese manufacturer Tenga. It’s intended to be a durable multi-use product, and rival to the American-made Fleshjack. What’s interesting about the Tenga Flip Hole masturbators is that the colour of the case isn’t simply a matter of aesthetics, each one in fact has its own completely unique texture inside.
The Flip Hole is quite compact, standing at 7″ in total, and with a 9″ circumference, so it’s easy to grip onto and feels nice to hold in the hand. It’s made of two separate pieces, the major of which is the main body of the toy. The body is made from solid plastic, with an oval-shaped viewing window cut out of each side. These windows allow you to see and feel the soft clear material which the interior of the masturbator is made from. The problem I found with this is that the material is very sticky in nature, and I wasn’t too keen on having to touch this during use. The simple solution to remove the stickiness is to dust the area with a thin coating of corn flour, much like you might with a Fleshjack, but it’s an inconvenience. (Update: this stickiness was not present in the later White Flip Hole that I reviewed, and I believe it may have been a result of the way the product was treated before I was sent it to review, as I received it sans packaging and it may well have been exposed to a cleaning solution.) Inside the material on either side is embedded a thin sheet of white plastic, which protrudes from the surface in the form of six buttons. These “buttons” can be squeezed during use to apply pressure. The other piece of the Flip Hole is the end cap, which serves a number of functions. When the Flip Hole is not being used the cap covers the soft orifice and protects it from damage and also dust, but when the Flip Hole is being used the cap fits onto the opposite end of the toy, and helps hold the two halves of it together.
Both the strengths and the weaknesses of the Flip Hole lie in its one key feature, the ability to completely open it up by unfolding it into halves along a hinge at one end. This seemingly clever adaptation unfortunately causes as many problems as it solves.The first issue surrounds the orifice of the toy. The opening is only 2cm in diameter, which isn’t incredibly wide, but this only extends into the toy for a depth of 2cm, before it is completely blocked off by a section of material which acts like a diaphragm. When you insert yourself into the toy, instead of the material stretching to accommodate the girth of the penis like it would with a Fleshjack, it stretches slightly and then the two halves split apart, with the material around the opening bursting outwards and down the shaft. This doesn’t affect performance, but it does look unusual, and like it’s not supposed to happen. The next issue is with the interior of the Flip Hole itself. Inside it has a good 6″ long cavity, but when using it you don’t get a sense of the penis being fully enveloped. There is sensation on the top of the penis, and on the bottom, but none along the sides. Due to the way the raised texture is laid out there’s no real canal moulded into the material, and combined with the propensity of the two halves to divide towards the edges, the overarching sensation is that of having your penis being sandwiched between two halves of something, rather that it being fully encompassed. The final drawback is that the toy leaks air all along the divide, reducing the sense of suction that you get when using it. The benefits of having the toy open up are obvious when it comes to applying lube; instead of having to squirt some through a tiny aperture, you can simply open the Flip Hole and spread lube copiously over the interior. Likewise when it comes time to remove any lube from the inside you can simply open the Flip Hole up and rinse any fluids from the inside under a tap, without the worry of submerging it. In this instance the end cap can also be used as a drying rack to balance the toy on.
The toy is perhaps a little more awkward to warm up than a Fleshjack, because the material inside is permanently attached to the hard outer case, so you need to submerge the whole thing in a basin of hot water. Personally I wouldn’t bother as they never seem to hold their heat for long, and it just creates more hassle and mess.