“The story, which did not go out on the wire to our customers, didn’t go through our standard editing process. We are looking into how that happened,” AP spokesperson Nicole Meir told The Verge in an email.

News reports (and fact-checks specifically) are often worded in a way that carefully threads a needle — there’s a difference between saying something definitively didn’t happen versus saying there’s no evidence of it. My guess is that the AP headline was the problem here because it claims to debunk something that is unknowable.

  • @some_guy
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    254 months ago

    When I was in high school, a guy devised a sex toy from a rolled up towel, a food service disposable glove, a bed, and lotion. He called his invention a Fifi. We were at a military academy where bad kids with whits-end parents got sent. I wonder what happened to him. Maybe he invented real dolls when he grew up.

    • @Notyou@sopuli.xyz
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      4 months ago

      Haha. I forgot all about a Fifi. I found out about Fifi’s while deployed on ship. Glove, towel, lotion, and belt. The belt was to wrap around the towel up so it doesn’t unravel in the middle of using it. A couple dudes made them and was showing them to the rest of us. I ended up making one later.

    • ᴇᴍᴘᴇʀᴏʀ 帝M
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      94 months ago

      My brother’s best friend was at University in the early nineties and it was the birthdays if one of the guys he shared a house with so they all rushed into his room and shouted “surprise” but they got the surprise as he was humping a cut off shampoo bottle lined with a warm, wet flannel that he’d jammed between his mattress and bedframe.

      I imagine they’ll eventually find an ancient, improvised Fleshlight at Pompeii because as long as there are have been horny teenagers, there has probably been homemade vaginas.

    • Drusas
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      4 months ago

      When I was in high school, we carved a hole into some sort of melon and one of my friends took it into the bathroom for $5. I doubt he did anything to it, but who knows. He was like 16.