Get Off to the Races: The Whippersnapper's Weekly Dildo Races Create Good Vibes

The Whippersnapper (1806 McMillan Ave.) in Knox-Henderson is known for unique and irreverent one-off events, such as Barbieland and Willy Wonka pop-ups and ‘90s-themed parties. With the bar's weekly dildo races, however, it might have an unlikely longstanding tradition on its hands.

Yes, you read that correctly. Every Thursday, The Whip invites customers to race dildos — vibrators, to be more specific. Contestants choose from the bar’s in-house selection of dildos, which come in a wide variety of vibrant prints ranging from roses to aliens, and they pick the intensity setting they think will be most effective. They then place the device at the top of a sloping track and let it buzz and jerk all the way down.

The first dildo to cross the finish line wins, and its operator makes it to the next round. The champion of the evening takes home a cash prize, which was $100 when we went on Thursday.

And don’t worry. These vibrators were purchased just for this event and have never been used for their originally intended purpose. The Whip’s general manager and host for the evening, Ryan Chriss, did promise free drinks to anyone who brought their own vibrator. Nobody took him up on that.

This whole event was Chriss’ idea. The Whippersnapper is no stranger to esoteric competitions, having raced Roombas and goldfish before, but when Chriss came across the idea of racing dildos on social media (he doesn't remember exactly where), he knew it was just the event he needed to up the ante. And the public reaction has proven him right.

“We’ve had a growing and steady crowd with the vibrator races,” he says. “We’ve got one person who’s been here four or five times out of the weeks that we’ve done. We’ve had one person who’s won it and then finished second another time. It’s pretty cool.”
The games are advertised with a start time of 10 p.m., but we caution against holding your breath on that one. This is a Knox-Henderson bar, after all, and it was just us and the DJ there until about 11 p.m.

We took this time to familiarize ourselves with the track, which Chriss says was custom-built for this event. There are five lanes, all painted in glow-in-the-dark neon colors. The glaring colors make the event impossible to ignore in the small, dark bar.

At around 11:15 p.m., people started steadily trickling into the bar, and Chriss and the bartenders started pitching the race to them. Understandably, some people were weirded out when asked to participate in a dildo race. It’s not for the faint of heart.

We knew Chriss’ fortunes were about to change when an already-drunk bachelorette party stampeded into the bar and started belting along to hits such as Kelly Clarkson’s “Since U Been Gone” and Katy Perry’s “Last Friday Night.” We were sitting at a table facing away from them and didn’t have to turn around to know that at least one of them was following Perry’s instructions to “dance on tabletops.”

(We did check anyway, though, and there were actually three.)

Chriss hopped on the mic to announce that it was the last chance to sign up for dildo races at 11:25 p.m. The bachelorettes cheered. We had our bracket.

What happened next was a heartwarming display of women supporting women. While some onlookers tried to take bets (and tried to rope in Chriss, who declined due to the conflict of interest), the posse of the future Mrs. Loseman (according to a custom purse she was wearing) cheered each other on and seemed genuinely happy regardless of the outcome. Nobody seemed upset about losing.
We’re not discounting the possibility that the group was happy just to have organically stumbled upon a dildo-themed event during a bachelorette, but that doesn’t make it any less wholesome. Their delight at watching those little vibrators go was infectious.

Though the individual races are usually over in a matter of seconds, Chris compares the process of setting up the next one and deciding who proceeds to which next round to “herding cats.” He says that as many as 30 people, all drunk and none of them taking it very seriously, have participated in a single night, making for a tedious wrangling process. We were treated to an abridged version of the game with about 10 contestants.

The final champion of the evening was a woman named Megan, who claimed victory in three rounds. She was one of the few contestants who was not with the bachelorette party and instead heard about the games through a friend who wanted to go.

When asked for comment on her victory, Megan kept things short and sweet: “I was bullied into it.”

This current run of the weekly dildo races will wrap up in three weeks with the opening of another pop-up event, but Chriss says it won’t be gone forever.

“I’m sure we’ll bring it back,” he says. “It’s something fun and it creates a good vibe.”