Last December, mommy blogger Megan Zurn posted a TikTok video about the “cult” surrounding a piece of furniture called the Nugget, an unfathomably popular “children’s couch” made of foam cushions and blocks. Branded as “half-furniture, half-toy,” they’re often referred to as the “best things” people have “ever bought for their kids,” and have a rabid following of parents, who go absolutely bonkers for their easy disassembly, removable covers and endless potential for playtime.
They’re real cash cows, too. “The demand for them is so high that the resale value for them is insane,” explains Zurn in her video, which promptly went viral. “They cost $229, but you can resell them for up to $500.”
It’s true — there’s been a steep increase in demand for Nuggets since the pandemic began, and price-gouging attempts by resellers looking to profit off the “Supreme of the parent world” have been skyrocketing. Nugget has attempted to deal with this through online lotteries and limited “drops,” but that hasn’t stopped third-party sites from selling them at mind-boggling markups. Currently, there’s one for sale on eBay for a whopping $975. Meanwhile, Input Magazine found another for $10,000 on Facebook Marketplace.
This is all pretty amazing considering that a Nugget is nothing more than a foam kid’s couch. But what made Zurn’s video so viral wasn’t the phenomenon of the Nugget itself — it was the parents who supposedly fuck on it.
In her TikTok, Zurn goes on to describe the strange world of Nugget-themed Facebook groups where moms photograph their husbands sitting on top of Nugget delivery boxes like smug trophies lording over their squishy spoils. The less clothes these husbands are wearing, the better, apparently — one mom posted a photo of her betrothed “ass naked” astride such an unopened box. But, as Zurn continues, certain moms get to take it a step further. If they’re the right combination of lucky, well-connected and horny, they get to join Nugget After Dark, a mysterious, private Facebook group for the so-called “upper echelon” of Nug owners. “Basically,” says Zurn, “it’s where people go to talk about banging all over their children’s furniture.”
@pushingastrollerinheels #stitch with @gabbgoudy #greenscreen #nugget #MakeItMagical #Productivity #VivaCleanHacks #TheProm
Although there’s some evidence that parents fuck on their exclusive foam couches, Nugget After Dark’s invite-only status and sexual purpose shrouds it in an inaccessible mystique that borders on suburban folklore. Without a line into these horny parents’ worlds, it’s difficult to say who they are, what kind of sex they’re having on their precious modular blocks or why their kind are protected with illuminati-like security. One thing’s for sure, though: Everyone and their couch-ordering mothers are trying to find out — including me.
But as you might expect, joining Nugget After Dark isn’t easy. The group is private and you can’t search for it, so I hatched a plan to try the next best thing — join other groups that might have members who could show me the way.
Facebook is the mecca of Nugget mom groups, so I started there. Much to my surprise, though, pretty much every Nugget group on it is private as well. Even the more innocuous-sounding ones like Nugget Comfort B/S/T & Babble and Nugget Comfort FUN are under lock and key — apparently, admins want to limit the amount of non-Nugget talk that happens on them, and as I discovered when I asked them for Nugget After Dark connections, they’re sick of people using their pages to access the Nugget underworld. As such, most of these groups also require you to answer screening questions before you join, usually about what your favorite Nugget color is (mine is “dewdrop”) and how you heard about the group.
Ultimately, I was able to join both, but I was sorely disappointed at what I saw — mostly, they’re used by parents to buy, sell and trade (the aforementioned B/S/T), share cute photos and swap ideas for “builds,” which are just different configurations for the couch’s components. Occasionally, people post photos of their husbands sitting on top of the box like Zurn’s TikTok claims, but most of the time, it’s just boring photos of kids and couches and tame, typical mom stuff.
I thought my luck had started to change when I stumbled on Nugget Comfort and Blocksy FUN Uncensored, a smaller group with about 900 members and a banner photo featuring a naked dad — hand on ass cheek — lounging atop an orange Nugget.
This ended up being a fringe page for inter-Nugget-group gossip and drama and not the sexy Nugget central that I’d hoped for, but it did lead me to Lindsey Marion, a Massachusetts mother of four and the proud owner of two Nuggets. It took her two years to get both, but her kids love them, and so does her husband, who has a bad back.
She doesn’t use her Nuggets for sex, but she was a Nugget After Dark member until she “told them all they were gross” and got kicked out. However, she’s not completely opposed to getting physical on her special couches — she’s planning on making two more Nugget wedge pillows from scratch, and read that their shape is similar to the Liberator Wedge sex pillow. “I’ll let you know how that goes,” she tells me.
This was a good start, but I obviously couldn’t stop there. Thankfully, a Nugget After Dark knock-off page with 5,800 members blew up on Facebook shortly after Zurn’s TikTok went viral. Their membership is a healthy mix of self-described “sexual deviants” and “meme teens” who make fake accounts with profile pictures featuring people they think are old (like Allison Janney), and their group administrator is a woman named “Monica Soup.” True to form, her profile picture is of soup.
Upon joining, I was added to a private group chat of aforementioned sexual deviants in hopes of finally talking to someone who fucks on the Nugget. Someone’s vagina in a non-Nugget location was the only sexy thing I saw, but I did meet a single guy — code name “Daddy” — who uses Nuggets for sex. He told me that “single moms are hornier than normal girls,” and explained that sex on the Nugget is exciting simply because “it’s not on the bed.” He was also unmoved by the disbelief and abhorrence surrounding Nugget sex, saying that people “literally change their kid’s diapers on the same bed they fuck in.” Then he asked me what the weirdest place I had sex in was, so I sent his messages to spam.
Through all of this, I couldn’t find anyone willing to add me to the real Nugget After Dark page and was almost starting to believe that the horny Nugget mom described by Zurn was a myth. Then I met one in the fake After Dark group.
She wanted to be identified as “Mama Rager,” and told me that she and her husband “began having sex on the Nugget within the first week of having it.” She also revealed how sleeping in close proximity to her son, who is just over a year old, had been preventing her and her husband from connecting sexually (it even made snuggling difficult). But the addition of the soft, spacious Nugget to their relationship allowed them to have “more than just a quickie” by providing a place more comfortable than the couch to fuck on while their baby was sleeping. In fact, she says the Nugget helped them maintain a “loving sex life.”
As for Nugget After Dark, per Input, all the buzz that Zurn’s TikTok created around it seems to have gotten the group removed from Facebook, and it appears that the secrets of its carnal couch-ing are lost forever. But while the original Nugget After Dark may be gone, it’s unlikely that parents’ desire to fuck on their children’s “play furniture” will ever die. As one redditor points out in a frenzied thread about Nugget sex, the couch is “like a Trojan horse for getting sex pillows into suburban homes,” and is only popular because Nugget “lowkey know[s] parents bang.”
Anyone know what a Nugget is? Why are people fucking on top of children furnitures? What is Nugget after Dark? I have so many questions from TikTokCringe
That very well may be. With babies crying, a hectic new schedule and the physical and mental changes that come with new parenthood, parents often struggle to maintain their sex lives. Both mothers I talked to described having to get more creative with sex, both in terms of location and timeframe, so while I never made it to Nugget After Dark before its demise, my quest to join it made clear that its members were probably better left alone anyway. Most of the moms in Nugget Facebook groups are probably just parents trying to keep their kids happy and occupied, not cultish members of a sex club like the viral TikTok insinuated.
Why not step back, have a seat on a cushy, microsuede foam block and let them fuck?
Ashley Bardhan
Ashley Bardhan is a writer in New York who covers entertainment, food, sex and other things that people like.
