“It’s way better than a boyfriend,” my friend said as we walked out of the store. “You can do it any time you like and it won’t ask for anything in return.”
On the phone with Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm, I asked her if other young women tend to see the vibrator as a convenient alternative to sexual relationships.
“When I was young, all we had to worry about was pregnancy, but now there’s not only the regular STDs but AIDS too. The rewards for teenage girls to have sex are minimal. What, four minutes and then it’s over?” She laughs. “What’s the risk for?”
Vibrators have literally brought women’s sexuality into their own hands. After centuries of sex being seen in the light of men’s pleasure – that is, male ejaculation being the apex of the activity – these battery-powered tools enable women to reach orgasm in as little time as men, and on their own terms. In the famous Kinsey Reports of the 1940s, after centuries of the notion that women were not as sexual as men, it was shown that using vibrators, about 50% could climax within four minutes. The fact that around 75% of women can’t reach orgasm from penetrative sex alone simply shows how many dissatisfied women there have been for centuries.
Why was the vibrator invented? It was a tool to aid doctors in the manual massage of women’s external sexual organs. For centuries this was the accepted treatment for hysteria, a so-called disease that affected somewhere between half and three-quarters of all women, maybe more. The symptoms of this disease look suspiciously like those of chronic sexual arousal. So in a culture where women’s pleasure simply didn’t come into the equation, they were getting it off in doctors’ offices.
As this malady was so widespread, doctors were doing a lot of massaging. Turning to labour-saving devices in the late 19th century, vibrators became a common appliance in doctors’ offices. And with the electrification of cities in the early 1900s they moved into the home.
“If you had only one outlet in your house you had to unscrew the lightbulb and screw the vibrator cord into the lightbulb socket,” Maines told me. She laughs, “ I guess it didn’t matter if it was dark…you knew where everything was located anyway.”
By the 1920s, vibrators were commonplace and being advertised in magazines like Woman’s Home Companion and Home Needlework Magazine. But while the advertisers never came out and said what they were for, some of the text was pretty telling.
“In an ad that appeared in Modern Priscilla in 1910 it said ‘thrilling, penetrating, invigorating, all the of pleasures of youth will throb within you.’ It was left to the purchaser to figure out what these things were really good for.”
Then people caught on. In the late 1920s vibrators began to appear in porn. They instantly disappeared from the local Sears-Roebuck, and the respectable magazines dropped the advertisements. Then came the depression when nobody could afford them and the Second World War when metals were needed for more “important” purposes.
In the 1950s, they reappeared, but under a new guise: as a tool to help women to lose weight. In the seventies, however, feminists like Betty Dodson began taking up the cause. Why should women be faking orgasms when all it takes is a bit of clitoral stimulation? The vibrator became a feminist icon. Unsurprisingly there was backlash from the powers that be.
In many southern states of the US it became illegal to sell vibrators, or own more than five. In Alabama it still is.
A recent study showed who the owners of these vibrators are.
“Middle-aged, church-going Republicans,” Maines told me. “It’s a toy for grown ups, it shouldn’t be that surprising.”
Inside La Capoterie, I ask the red-haired, sixty-something saleswoman about her clientele.
“Oh, lots of couples. Often women by themselves. When the girls come in they look around, take their time. They want to touch them, get a sense of what they’re like. With the guys? They come in, see a big cock. ‘Ten speeds! Lots of power? She’ll love it!’”
When I tell this to a friend later that evening, he laughs.
“So from all this, what you’ve learned is that men are men?”
I guess some things will never change.