by David Levy
By the beginning of the twentieth century, vibrator advertisements were appearing regularly in the press. Rachel Maines quotes an explicit advertisement for a five-dollar vibrator from a 1908 issue of the National Home Journal:
To women I address my message of health and beauty…. Gentle, soothing, invigorating and refreshing. Invented by a woman who knows a woman’s needs. All nature pulsates and vibrates with life.
while a rival manufacturer, the Swedish Vibrator Company of Chicago, advertised its product in the April 1913 edition of Modern Priscilla as:
a machine that gives 30,000 thrilling, invigorating, penetrating, revitalizing vibrations per minute.
In the United States there appears to have been something of a hiatus in the publicity given to vibrators from the 1930s until around 1970, but this might well have been due to a prurient attitude exerting its influence rather than any reduction in their sale and use. By the early 1970s, this attitude had largely worn itself out, and writers on sexual matters had become far less reluctant to extol the virtues of the vibrator. In addition, in 1952 the American Medical Association declared that hysteria is not really an ailment, and since the vibrator would then no longer be used as a medical device, it had to be acknowledged for its real purpose. Furthermore, the advent of 1960s feminism and the accompanying sexual revolution opened up whole new worlds of sexuality for women. Suddenly it was acceptable for women to demand more and better sexual gratification. Thereafter some writers on sex reported on the popularity of achieving sexual satisfaction with the aid of a soft-bristled electric toothbrush (remember Granville’s “light brush”!), but in her 1974 book The New Sex Therapy, Helen Kaplan expressed no doubts whatsoever and wrote:
The vibrator provides the strongest, most intense stimulation known. Indeed, it has been said that the electric vibrator represents the only significant advance in sexual technique since the days of Pompeii.
Clearly, one of the strongest sexual trends of the twentieth century was for women to embrace electromechanical devices as an alternative and sometimes more reliable form of achieving sexual satisfaction. And as modern woman has taken an increasingly independent view of her absolute right to enjoy her sexuality to the fullest, so the vibrator has played an increasingly important role in satisfying women’s sexual needs. With the advent of the Internet, advertisements can be made absolutely explicit—one company offers a product that gives “clitoral stimulation from 0 to approximately 6,000 oscillations per minute, and vaginal and G-spot stimulation from 0 to approximately 200 rotations per minute.” Vibrator sales have soared, partly as a result of the ease and popularity of making purchases from behind the anonymity of the Internet, and in turn this increase in their popularity has made them respectable. In 2005 the largest British pharmacy chain, Boots, belied the traditions of the company’s Methodist founders, announcing that it was planning to stock vibrators and place them on its open shelves with no embarrassment.
But while the vibrator was gaining in market acceptance, there were still many who believed and still believe the devices to be the epitome of obscenity. In 1998, for example, the state of Alabama amended its Obscenity Statute, making it “unlawful to produce, distribute or otherwise sell sexual devices that are marketed primarily for the stimulation of human, genital organs.” So although the sale of Viagra was perfectly legal in Alabama, achieving sexual satisfaction through the use of certain other products was not. And the penalty for a first offense could be a fine of up to ten thousand dollars and/or one year in prison or one year of hard labor. All this for reaching orgasm in a way that could bring no possible harm to anyone.
Almost immediately after this amendment to the Alabama law came into force, and incensed by its stupidity, four Alabama women, with the support of the American Civil Liberties Union and a few vibrator retailers, filed a lawsuit against the state’s attorney general, Bill Pryor, admitting that they had themselves used vibrators “either for therapeutic purposes related to sexual dysfunction, or as an alternative to sexual intercourse.” The attorney general argued that vibrators were obscene. The plaintiffs brought forward various expert witnesses, one of whom was Rachel Maines, who testified by affidavit that, inter alia, genital massage technologies “have been available to the citizens of Alabama with or without medical advice and/or supervision, since before the Constitution was written”; that “the FDA* explicitly recognizes massage of the human genitalia as a legitimate therapeutic use of vibrators”; and that the “massage of the genitalia to orgasm has been used as treatment of female sexual problems since the time of Hippocrates, 5th–4th century B.C.”4†
In deciding on the suit, the court supported Maines’s arguments against the 1998 amendment, partly on the basis that “obscenity,” the very title of the statute of Alabama law, means something that appeals to “prurient interest,…shameful or morbid interest in nudity, sex or excretion.” The court found that if the law were to be upheld, then “users of these devices will be denied therapy for, among other things, sexual dysfunction” and that the law “interfered with the very sexual stimulation and eroticism related to marriage and procreation with which the State disclaims any intent to interfere.” On this basis, on October 10, 2002, the court overturned the 1998 amendment to the Obscenity Statute, ruling that the law was “overly broad,” that it bore “no rational relation to a legitimate state interest,” and that it thus violated the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.5
So vibrator sales are now legal in Alabama within the confines of marriage, which is just as well, because their sales are thriving there as everywhere in the United States.* But it is not clear whether the pursuit of orgasm by artificial means would be ruled legal in Alabama for unmarried couples or for gay or lesbian couples, nor have I been able to discover any indication that any or all of Connecticut, Georgia, Louisiana, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Dakota, or Texas have yet repealed laws similar to the Alabama statute that were on their books as of 1998. Bearing in mind the massive sales of vibrators, one can only assume that the law in those states is being broken by huge numbers of women (and even by men, heaven forbid), a conclusion that many will find truly shocking. Enjoying sex? How disgraceful.
In 2003, and undaunted by the Alabama attorney general’s convincing defeat in court, the state of Texas attempted to prove once again that the law is at fault, as reported by the San Francisco Chronicle:
A Texas housewife is in big trouble with the law for selling a vibrator to a pair of undercover cops, and the Brisbane vibrator company she works for says Texas is an “antiquated place” with more than its share of “prudes.” Joanne Webb, a former fifth-grade teacher and mother of three, was in a county court in Cleburne, Texas, on Monday to answer obscenity charges for selling the vibrator to undercover narcotics officers posing as a dysfunctional married couple in search of a sex aid. Webb, a saleswoman for Passion Parties of Brisbane, faces a year in jail and a $4,000 fine if convicted. “What I did was not obscene,” Webb said. “What’s obscene is that the government is taking action about what we do in our bedrooms.”
The arrest of Webb in Cleburne, a small town 50 miles southwest of Dallas, was the first time that any of the company’s 3,000 sales consultants have been busted, said Pat Davis, the president of Passion Parties. She said the company was outraged by the charges and stood behind Webb. “It makes you wonder what they’re thinking out there in Texas,” Davis said. “They sound like prudes, with antiquated laws. They must have all their street crime under control in Texas if they’re going to spend tax money arresting us.”6
Joanne Webb’s troubles were not limited to her being arrested and charged. A few prominent citizens in her hometown of Burleston, citizens with strong Christian beliefs, not only lodged the complaints with the local police that led to her arrest, but they also created trouble for Webb and her husband at local churches, two of which asked the couple to leave. Gloria Gillaspie, a pastor at Lighthouse Church in Burleston, ex
plained that “they didn’t want to comply with what was really Christian conduct and that is why they were asked to leave those churches.”
Webb was duly charged under a Texas law that allows the sale of sexual toys as long as they are billed as novelties but makes one subject to obscenity charges when they are marketed in a direct manner, showing their sexual role. Webb’s lawyer, BeAnn Sisemore, described the Texas obscenity laws as being “so vague that they could be used to prosecute anyone who uses or sells condoms designed to provide stimulation for sexual pleasure.” Fortunately, a Texas judge had the good sense to dismiss the case in July 2004, before it could go to trial and waste more of the taxpayers’ resources.
The Popularity of Vibrators: Orgasms on Demand
In 1976 as few as 1 percent of the American population used vibrators, but in 1982, only six years later, 25 percent of Cosmopolitan readers confessed to doing so. More recently, the day after a particular model of vibrator was used by the character Charlotte on Sex and the City, stores across North America were sold out of the item. Even those women who have never used one to bring themselves to orgasm cannot deny the popularity of the vibrator, which is being purchased in increasing numbers both on the Internet and in retail stores.*
So the sales of vibrators are booming. The United Kingdom’s leading sex-shop chain, Anne Summers, sold 2.5 million in 2004. In Australia, 1 million are sold per year, with 8 million already purchased by early 2005. Americans in 2001 were estimated to be buying 12.5 million vibrators every year, to add to an estimated 50 million plus that were already in the bedrooms of American women at that time,* and by 2005 one of the leading manufacturers, Good Vibrations, estimated that annual sales had risen to 30 million plus.
It is not difficult to understand why vibrators have become so popular with women. The reasons are succinctly, if somewhat drily, explained in a 1996 paper published in the Journal of Sex Research, which summarized the opinions of women who used them:
A majority indicated orgasms triggered by vibrator stimulation were more intense than others. Nearly half experienced multiple orgasms when using a vibrator. Most were very satisfied with their orgasmic experience in autoerotic activity and were either moderately or very satisfied with their orgasmic experience in partnered activity.7
Vibrations for Men
No matter what use is made by men of female vibrators, the differences between the male and female genitalia obviously call for sex toys for the boys that are different to those made for women.
The first two patented devices designed to help in providing sexual relief for men were both the product of German inventiveness in the early 1950s. The very earliest was the Gymnastikapparat (Gymnastic Appliance) designed by Emil Sprenger of Munich, who applied for a patent for his device in May 1949 and had it granted in November 1951.†
EMIL SPRENGER’S “GYMNASTIC APPLIANCE”
Following closely on Sprenger’s heels came Ernst Raeder and Ludwig Hanemann with their Massageapparat zur Behebung acuter nervös-muskulärer Schwächeerscheinungen (Massage Device for Relieving Acute Nervous Muscular Debility Symptoms), for which the patent was granted in February 1952.* The symptoms to which the patent title refers are those “arising specially during sexual intercourse.”
The first such device developed in the New World appears to be a bagel-shaped penis ring invented in 1966 by Cesareo Barrio of San Leopoldo, Brazil.
The ring was actually a pneumatic or hydraulic chamber with flexible walls. Connected to this chamber by a tube was a pump arrangement that alternately supplied and withdrew fluid from the chamber, thereby causing the walls of the chamber to expand and contract, squeezing and relaxing whatever might be in the bagel hole.*
ERNST RAEDER AND LUDWIG HANEMANN’S “MASSAGE DEVICE”
CESAREO BARRIO’S SEX BAGEL
In 1972 a Dutch inventor, Robert Trost, developed a “technological partner” designed to enable the physically handicapped of both sexes to “attain complete sexual orgasm in an inconspicuous way.”8 The system, called the Coïtron, comprised electrodes that attached to the handicapped person’s genitals, which allowed for the adjustment of a pulse generator by means of knobs on a control box. The system was battery-operated, both for portability and for “psychological (fear of electrocution) reasons.” By the end of 1972, a working prototype was offered to medical and rehabilitation specialists for further research and testing, and initial results on nonhandicapped men and women were said to be very encouraging. A Dutch Ph.D. student experimented with the Coïtron and wrote his thesis on the basis of these experiments. But the system was never mass-produced because of “the taboos on handicapped people enjoying private sex (i.e., masturbation) which last until today, even in free-thinking Holland.”9
Another device designed to excite any penis was a gripping system patented by Peter Sobel of Miami Beach in 1975. This invention had attachments covered “with a soft yieldable material, such as rubber or fur” for gently stroking the penis. “The gripping arms of the first and second gripping members are placed on opposite sides of a male genital organ [another patent application that avoids the p word], and one side of the three-way switch is depressed. The variable-speed motor is energized to cause the first and second gripping members to oscillate back and forth and thereby stroke the male genital organ. Again the speed at which the first and second gripping members reciprocate back-and-forth can be gradually adjusted.” What fun!*
None of these patented inventions designed for men ever reached commercial viability.* But although the vibrator was invented with women in mind, and sales of vibrators to women heavily outnumber sales for men, this imbalance has begun to show some signs of a revolution. Since the 1990s, vibration devices have come onto the market designed specifically for men—for example, the Venus line, which was launched in October 1993,† from the manufacturer of the Sybian sex machine described later in this chapter.‡
A more recent idea, combining penis vibration with synchronized stimulating videos, was launched in December 2004 on the Web site Virtual Sex Machine News,§ which displays as its banner headline “The Future of Virtual Sex.” The site presents an image of what it described as the “Newest Virtual Sex Machine,” one that was first announced on the Martin Sargent program Unscrewed on the Tech TV network in the United States. This is a suction device with an interface that responds to the activity on screen, allowing the user to watch videos of women porn stars while fantasizing that the women are participating with him in the action. The physical experience generated by the device is thus linked to the visual action by the women, giving the user the virtual-reality experience of having a sexual liaison with a porn star. The operating instructions, as posted on the manufacturer’s Web site, represent the height of simplicity:
Step 1: Put the machine on your penis
Step 2: Choose any of the girls
Step 3: Sit back, relax, watch and FEEL IT!**
Artificial Vaginas and Fornicatory Dolls
Artificial aids for assisting in sexual release for men were first mentioned in Japanese literature in the late seventeenth century, during the Genroku era, in a pornographic anthology entitled Koshoku Tabi-makura (The Lascivious Traveling Pillow). The device was an artificial vulva, or azumagata in Japanese—meaning “woman substitute”—and was made of thin tortoiseshell with an opening lined with velvet to imitate a woman’s labia major. In later times azumagata were also made of silk and leather and developed into a complete female body called a doningyo—a “doll body.” Paul Tabori provides a description of these fornicatory dolls from the erotic Japanese work Jiiro haya Shinan (The Art of Quickly Seducing a Novice).
A man who is forced to sleep alone can obtain pleasure with a doningyo. This is the body of a female doll, the image of a girl of thirteen or fourteen with a velvet vulva. But these dolls are only for people of high rank.* Another name of the doll body is even more outspoken: tahi-joro—“traveling whore.”10
Employing fornicatory dolls while traveling became p
opular in Europe during the late nineteenth century, particularly among sailors. The sexual life of sailors has never been an easy one, living and working as they used to do in an entirely male environment, their trips ashore to the red-light districts of various ports providing just about their only female sexual comfort. Wives and lovers at home could only rarely be visited, so long were the voyages to and from the ships’ destinations on other continents. Hence the need for dames de voyage (traveling women) as the French called them, and known in Austro-Germany as “sailors’ sweethearts.” These were dolls in the female form, most often made of cloth and used as sexual outlets by sailors on board ship.
Sex dolls of a less primitive form gained a certain measure of popularity in late-nineteenth-century France.† In 1922 Henry Cary privately published Erotic Contrivances: Appliances Attached to, or Used in Place of, the Sexual Organs, a book in which he reproduces and briefly discusses two French advertising circulars, one selling artificial vaginas and the other an entire artificial man or woman.
There is manufactured and sold in Europe today an imitation of the female private parts, even to the pubic hair. These are inflated to give them the desired amount of tightness to the vagina and they are deflated and folded up after using. Circulars describing them usually call them lady travellers, and recommend them for the use of naval officers and others who are deprived of female society for long periods of time. They also advertise that upon receipt of photograph, height, weight and other necessary data, a complete woman will be manufactured to order.