If you read the rest of this review, you're going to see I didn't love this toy very much. In fact, I didn't like it at all. To me, it's nothing of what an anal toy should be. The look and feel of it doesn't do anything for me. The ring at the end is next to useless, and if anything, it prevents you from playing in any position other than doggy style (not to mention that it throws up a potential flag for me safety-wise - more on that below).

Still, if you already own this toy or want to try it out anyway, it will work for anal - namely to give you a slight feeling of fullness and perhaps that nice little pop of pleasure if you have someone pulling on it via the "key ring" end of it.

I would say it's good for beginners, but I think there are lots of other anal toys out there that will serve beginners better than this one.

The toy, rightly called an anal probe, is long and thin and is made of, of all things, PVC. While I've had a few toys that I really liked that were PVC based, this toy gives the impression of being cheaply made. It feels hollow when you squeeze it. Or not hollow, perhaps - more like it's filled with just another roll of thin PVC to give it a little bit of substance.

Check out the pictures here to see what is really inside it. I couldn't resist cutting it open!

As I mentioned, this toy is long and thin, perhaps surprisingly so for an anal toy. It's about 4.5 inches of insertable length with a small bulge in it. The red color is more of a pinkish-fire-engine red than a brick red. Not horrible, but nothing special either.

The end that you hold, inexplicably, is a metal-looking plastic circle, shaped something like a really large key ring. When I first saw this online, I thought it might actually BE a key ring. Which would be kind of cool - after all, who wouldn't want to sport their penchant for anal sex on their car keys. Or, better yet, their work keys? Think of all the conversation openings something like that would create.

But, alas, it's not a key ring at all. It's merely a circle that is stuck to the toy. It's a big circle, big enough for at least a few fingers to grasp onto, but other than that, it doesn't seem to have much use.

"I'm afraid I'll break it," is the first thing the Boy said, when he slid his fingers inside it. Now, granted, he's hard on toys, so he says that about a lot of things, but in this case, I feared he might be right. Before we even got to use the toy, I was already having bad images of the end coming off, which is one of the things that always makes me nervous about anal toys - I like my anal toys to have a big, solid base or a really wide, sturdy handle.

Still, we decided to give it a go. After washing it, the material still retained some of its sticky-like feeling, but not as much. You can use either water and silicone lubes with it, and we chose a water-based one, which seemed to work fine with it.

First, I have to say, the end of this probe is pointy. Granted, most toys have a point on the end, but this one actually felt pointy going in, and kind of hard. The toy is also fairly inflexible - it doesn't bend so much as it folds, which makes an odd crease in the plug. When it's inserted, it feels long, maybe too long for me.

After our first attempt with it, I wondered if maybe I'd gotten spoiled by using plugs and perhaps I didn't understand exactly what an anal probe was for. Is it very different from a plug? Is it supposed to illicit a different response?

I didn't know the answers, so I did some searching online. Of course, most searches for "anal probes" bring up a bunch of stuff about aliens, but I finally found a couple of definitions that made sense. Not surprisingly, Wiki did me a good turn, teaching me that "Anal probing is the insertion of an instrument into the anal cavity of a human or animal to assess the condition of the lower bowel." Close, but that wasn't really what I was looking for. Then I came across something that was more helpful: That anal probes are designed to give a feeling of fullness, and that they come in a variety of sizes and shapes.

With that in mind, we played around with it for a while - inserting it and pulling it out, trying to get a feel for how it was supposed to work. Overall, it's long enough to hit the prostate, but doesn't have hardly any girth to it. The bump near the base is a nice touch, however, and that was my favorite part of this toy. Over time, the Boy got less nervous about the base coming off. However, the ring wasn't all that comfortable to hold onto over time, and the pointed end never did lose that feeling of being just a little too sharp for my body.

In the end, we decided that they could have made this probe better in three ways: Using a softer material that had some more give to it, making it just a little thicker around, and providing a handle that was both comfortable and secure.

As with most PVC items, the probe can be cleaned with water and antibacterial soap, or with a pre-made sex toy cleaner. If you do use soap and water, be careful because there is some space between the toy and the metallic ring where water could seep in. I can't get a feel for whether the ring might rust or flake off, but I'm going to keep an eye on it over time.