Valentine’s evening and I am propping up the bar at the Sanderson hotel in Central London with girlfriends, knocking back lavender martinis. The conversation turns to matters sexual, as bar-room conversations are wont to do, and it transpires that they all are sleeping with the same chap. “Course, we are, darling,” chirps Nessa. “Who isn’t? He’s discreet, available, and heaven between the sheets .” He is also six-and-a-half inches (16.5cm) long, plastic and equipped with bunny ears, and the only one of us who won’t be enjoying him as her Valentine is me. “It’s a wabbit,” I marvel in the manner of Elmer Fudd in Bugs Bunny.

Perturbed, I spend the next couple of days conducting a straw poll. Of the subsequent ten women I run into, only two refuse to confess to the same predilection, and one of these does so with a definite twinkle in the eye. Intrigued, I seek out female friends, colleagues, relations and, in the twenty to thirtysomething age bracket, the attitude is unabashedly “every home should have one”. Some of these women are in, er, “animate” relationships, some are not, but more of them keep pet rabbits now than when they were girls.

Rebecca tells me airily that, like Charlotte in Sex and the City, she “rather fell in love with hers” and “didn’t leave the house for weeks”. Sunita proffers pictures of friends singing into theirs on her phone. One colleague recalls that her housemate did not bother concealing hers when buyers came to take a look at their flat; another explains that it is better than microdermabrasion for the skin.

My neighbour, a student at Cambridge, reveals that she has friends who boast a wardrobe of bunnies, a hop for every occasion, as it were. More than one woman I consult expresses the opinion that I should be more embarrassed for not owning one of these things than for possessing such an apparatus. It is no longer merely socially acceptable to lay claim to a sex toy, it would seem. It is socially unacceptable not to have one.

Moreover, these women are not having it away with sex toys per se, they are having it away with the same brand: the Rampant Rabbit, aptly named. The not-so-little fella has not only been the subject of the above-mentioned Sex and the City episode, but in the summer it also becomes a film, Rabbit Fever. Last month’s issue of Good Housekeeping gave the Rabbit the G H seal of approval, and now it turns out that more — many, many more — of my friends own them than own hair straighteners. I feel as if I am the only non-zombified character in a Fifties B movie: The Vibrator that Took Over The Earth.

And vibrator isn’t the half of it; or rather, vibrator is, very specifically, only the half of it. In addition to the Rabbit’s trademark buzzing ears, the device comes equipped with a pretty girthy dildo. None of your euphemistically entitled “back massagers” here, or artsy affairs created by the Habitat designer Tom Dixon for the lingerie emporium Myla. These toys are garish, all-singing, all-dancing, whizz-bang affairs of the sort that Thomas Nashe’s harlot in The Choise of Valentines might have envied. God only knows what the reaction would be if the majority of men of my acquaintance kept faux vaginas. But somehow these penile contraptions are de rigueur.

I brooded. Broad-minded though I am about most things, the thought of making the beast with one back with an appliance that resembles a hand-held food blender has never really appealed. Nor have I ever been that interested in claiming myself as a sexual partner. Not every woman is clitoris-obsessed. And then there was the appalling naffness of it all, not least its name — coy, cutesy, rendering us all bunny girls. Thanks, but I’d rather have sex.

Still, for a woman who takes pride in parading the right Zeitgeist-aware accessories, matters had gone horribly wrong. There was a curve and I was lagging lamentably behind it. I used to be a sex columnist in this very organ, for pity’s sake. Was I a closet prude? Or worse, a closet geek? I got myself down to Ann Summers pronto.

I would like to say this was where the fun really began. It wasn’t. I dispensed with the fiction that I was buying a Rabbit for a hen night. Damn it, I would be as loud and proud as my comrades, or at least, louder and prouder than the assembly of awestruck Asian boys hanging around the shop’s perimeter. “I’d like a Rabbit, please.” “Of course, Madam, which one?” There was a warren-full of the bloody things. “Er, the Platinum,” I replied as instructed, the Platinum being the deluxe version. “Right, that’ll be £40,” she retorted briskly. “Plus you’ll need your batteries, toy wipes and lube.” The discovery that I would be requiring toy wipes to refresh the device was more distressing than purchase of the toy itself. All in, the cost was £56.50. Still, I wouldn’t be buying it dinner.

If the Platinum Rabbit were a man, he would be the kind of man about whom my mother would say: “You wouldn’t want to run into him on a dark night.” The shaft is penis-shaped, helmet et al, but with extra lumps and bumps that nature neglected to include and an interior of whizzing balls. It is six-speed, more gears than most cars. The rabbit ears have five functions: fast, really fast, coronary, throb and super-throb. If the Platinum is the quietest model, the others must sound like a symphony of garden mowers.

My boyfriend went rather glinting-eyed porn maniac when I told him what I’d bought. Until he saw it, that is. “Hmmmn, there’s a lot going on there, isn’t there?” he mumbled. And certainly, for many men, the Rabbit might prove something of an education, reliant as it is on swivelling rather than thrusting, varying degrees of athleticism, and an additional appendage that not even the most accomplished lover can boast.

But still, a battery-operated bit on the side? I’d had better propositions. A week later the Rabbit remained in its hutch. Two weeks later, I began having nightmares about it: Rabbit looms imposingly around a corner; Rabbit takes on the proportions of a nuclear warhead; Rabbit hops rampantly after me in the street. And so, reluctantly, I embraced the challenge. Three weeks later (yes, I was that keen), I embraced the challenge again.

Reader, I haven’t married it. In fact, the Rabbit is an appliance that I would happily part with, if only it were the kind of thing that one could pass on to a jumble sale. About its deficiencies I will draw a veil; suffice to say that friends who claimed that bunny-hopping brought them to orgasm in 20 minutes must have pants of steel. The Rabbit has six speeds, but one mode: rampant.

And thus the moral of the story is that I still get to feel inadequate: the woman who resisted the allure of bunny ears. Still, I can talk the talk at cocktail parties. Even if, in reality, I’m faking it for all I am worth.

Page 2: Rabbiting on

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Rabbiting on

Lucky Ann Summers has hit the jackpot with the Rampant Rabbit: the product’s name has become a byword for the whole gyratory genre. The store chain shifts more than two million vibrators a year. Although it owns the “Rampant” trademark and sells three different models — the basic (£28), Deluxe and Platinum (£40) — it does not own the manufacturing rights.

So you can buy remarkably similar electric friends with names such as the Buzzing Bunny and even the Dirty Dolphin.

But thousands of women don’t because girls want a must-have brand, even for something that they plan to use only in private.

But it’s not been a smooth ride. Two years ago Ann Summers got into a spat with the Dogs Trust after it co-opted the charity’s slogan for an ad campaign: “A Rabbit is for life, not for Christmas.” And in 2002, it recalled 150,000 Rabbits — an owner had an incident with the vibrator, where the “sensual beads” in the shaft fell out.

John Naish