Chapter 20
1900 was a good year for self-abuse. At the Exposition Universelle in Paris, man-made wonders were dispensed to a wide-eyed public like Halloween candy: talking films, escalators, Rudolph Diesel’s eponymous engine running on peanut oil, even Campbell Soup Co. winning the Gold Medallion for its condensed broth. But those sensations, mechanical in nature or mainstream in appeal, seem more like the expected marvels at a fair drawing 48 million visitors in an era when the telegraph and telephone were effecting what historian Tom Standage called the “Victorian Internet.”
What was unexpected was the appearance of more than a dozen vibrators at the expo. Their inclusion reflected a surprising range of such venereal technology available to the masses given that just three years before, the Supreme Court, in Dunlop v. United States, ruled that print literature—including information on birth control—may be considered obscene under what was known as the Comstock law.
Vibrators’ moment in the sun had been a long time coming. Thirty thousand years before, men were busy domesticating the first dogs in Siberia and painting the first rock art in India. Women, however, had their hands at the time full masturbating with the first primordial dildo. Exhumed in a German cave, the stone ur-Hitachi perhaps kept female nethers warm in an epoch of marauding mammoths and encroaching ice sheets in the big freeze-up.
Dildo technology was slow to progress. Around 400 BCE, the ancient Greeks invented olisbokollikes—aka, “dildo breadsticks”—whose phallic shape and caloric utility would put the Olive Garden’s to shame. The Hellenes’ efforts at flesh replacements also included instruments of sleek leather and smooth wood. These exertions were likely unimproved upon (Cleopatra’s supposed vibrator, a hollow gourd filled with furiously buzzing bees, was probably as spurious as it was smutty) for centuries until the invention of the Tremoussoir, a handheld, wind-up device that generated a pulsating motion, in France. Surpassing the ingenuity of Gallic artisans, however, the collective genius of the Industrial Revolution that fueled James Watt’s steam engine and Robert Fulton’s Clermont steamboat also powered the Manipulator. Patented by physician George Taylor in 1869, the Manipulator was a steam-powered, motor-operated padded table in the center of which was a hole and a ball.
According to one hypothesis, women who came to the doctor with pelvic grievances were hoisted on the slab and vibrated to quell their nervous dispositions, a symptom of the vague but pervasive “hysteria.” The first mental disorder ascribed just to women, hysteria was a catch-all for symptoms including emotional outbursts, fainting, anxiety, cantankerousness, and lethargy—plus undue vaginal lubrication and excessive amatory fantasies.
Sexual excitement in the female was de facto proof of a mental unbalance. Women have an “almost nonexistent sex drive; only truly deranged females would succumb to the temptations of masturbation,” said Henry Hanchett, the author of 1887’s “Sexual Health: A companion to ‘Modern domestic medicine.’ A Plain and Practical Guide for the People on All Matters Concerning the Organs of Reproduction in Both Sexes and All Ages.” Still, hysteria was as common as poverty. French physician Pierre Briquet claimed in the nineteenth century that 25 percent of women suffered from hysteria, a misogynist worldview sealed by Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer’s 1895 book “Studies on Hysteria.”
The story has a kind of “Pizza boy special delivery” structure of prosaic services turning pornographic: If women’s sexuality ranked a lowly one on a scale where men’s libido hit a Spinal Tap-like 11, the sole effective cure for female hysteria was, paradoxically, pelvic massage prompting cathartic orgasms, a kind of healthy burp below the waist—induced by men, specifically medical doctors. But such pubic kneading was labor intensive and distasteful to medical professionals, even when able to supplement their handmade orgasms with ones produced by high-pressure water hoses. More practicable solutions, such as a portable floor-standing vibrator doctors employed for house calls, was a marginal improvement.
Help arrived in the 1880s when Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville patented the first electro-mechanical vibrator. Running on a 40-pound battery, the device was first promoted by Granville for use on male skeletal muscles only. But its form supposedly found its true function—inducing “hysterical paroxysm” in an efficient five or ten minutes, relieving physicians who complained the procedure took them as much as an hour (no word on how long their patients took when left to their own devices). The rapid resolution meant more time to see other patients, for hysteria and other ailments, and thus greater profits.
Like the G spot, interpretations and understanding of vibrators shift over time. More recent research suggests medical professionals likely used vibrating massages for emotional and physical complaints (including hysteria), but not on women’s genitals to purge them of their feminine distress. Additionally, vibrators received neither clinical mention from sex researchers Havelock Ellis and Richard von Krafft-Ebing nor salacious salute from Victorian pornographers, making their use as a pleasurable prescriptive unlikely.
Still, life—and lust—find a way. Whatever their early medicinal use, vibrators quickly became a socially camouflaged technology—their agreed-upon purpose was therapeutic, not sexual, a compulsory fiction in an era when authorities distorted sex the way strokes garble the brain. In her 1889 book, “What a Young Woman Ought to Know,” Dr. Mary Wood-Allen explained how standing on one foot led indirectly to masturbation. John Harvey Kellogg, the quack doctor, enema advocate, and cereal co-creator, warned that masturbation had an impact such that neither “the plague, nor war, nor small-pox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity . . .” As a source of public anxiety, masturbation was comic books/rainbow parties/cell phone radiation/Dungeons & Dragons rolled into a threat more fearsome than the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the Yellow Peril combined.
Despite science and religion censuring the practice, masturbation would survive and thrive. As Baudelaire said, “But what is an eternity of damnation compared to an infinity of pleasure in a single second?” Vibrators grew in popularity so far and fast, they even preceded the electric vacuum and electric frying pan by nearly a decade. By the time of the 1900 expo, more than a dozen companies were making steam-powered, battery-powered, or plug-in versions. While there are no photographs or contemporary illustrations of the devices on display at the expo extant, the machines nonetheless left a cultural impact crater that rivals Chicxulub.
Costing $15 and up, the choices included The Chattanooga—styled “the Cadillac of vibrators” by historian Rachel Maines, it stood about 6.5 feet high, cost $200, and required two men to shovel coal into it to power the beast.
Like competing smartphones following the introduction of the iPhone, vibrators proliferated as fast as fire can devour paper. Some, manufactured around 1900, claimed they had the additional benefits of curing sniffles and flatulence. In 1902, Hamilton Beach Brands Inc. patented the first electric vibrator for home use, followed rapidly by the Detwiller Pneumatic Vibrator, the Vibro-Life, Dr. Johansen’s Auto Vibrator, and a multitude of others. (Vibrators’ rapid shrinkage made their socially camouflaged status even easier to maintain.) No less an authority than Kellogg, who viewed sexual congress with the horror others would a Bosch tableau (he refused to consummate his marriage, and advocated sprinkling the clitoris with carbolic acid to discourage the “solitary vice” of masturbation), informed attendees at the International Electrical Congress in 1904 that pelvic muscle contractions produced by electric gizmos were ideal for treating neurasthenic females, i.e., easily fatigued, highly skittish women prone to repair to their fainting couches.
Original work by Barbara Epstein Gruber
Brazen advertisements for vibrators packed periodicals such as Modern Women, McClure’s, Needlecraft, Woman’s Home Companion, Modern Priscilla—and the Sears, Roebuck & Co. catalog, which in 1918 listed a vibrator attachment for a multitasking home motor that would also power a churn, mixer, or sewing machine. Other ads promoting the devices were the equivalent of knowing winks. The prose of American Vibrator Co.’s ads was colored a rosy flush: “American Vibrator . . . can be used by yourself in the privacy of dressing room or boudoir, and furnish every woman with the essence of perpetual youth.” Further blandishments from other companies declared, “Relieves All Suffering. Cures Disease” and ‘‘All the pleasures of youth . . . will throb within you.”
But when the vibrator appeared in pornographic movies in the 1920s, its cover was officially blown as if a referee had whistled a foul on it. Keeping a low profile for the next several decades, vibrators demonstrated a Darwinian ability to adapt, becoming more portable (models were made of lightweight aluminum and plastic) and more colorful (reflecting their repurposing as beauty and weight-loss products).
In 1952, after the American Psychiatric Association removed hysteria from its Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the vibrator staged one of the most triumphant comebacks since Napoleon returned to France. In the 1960s, sex therapists began treating some sexual dysfunctions with vibrators, and in 1968 Hitachi Ltd.’s Magic Wand arrived, the classic rock of vibrator technology.
American feminist activist Betty Dodson starting pushing the vibrator to a tipping point at the 1973 National Organization for Women’s Sexuality Conference. Vibratex Inc.’s Rabbit Pearl’s appearance in a 1998 “Sex and the City” episode, plus its endorsement by Oprah, made vibrators as much a part of the urban arsenal as juicers and yoga mats. Even Church & Dwight Co. Inc., the maker of Trojan condoms, tried to break into the $23 billion worldwide sex toys market at the 2011 International Consumer Electronics Show with its Vibrating Twister.
Vibrators have evolved from blunt instruments to specialized tools, subdividing into egg, bullet, rabbit, G-spot, and clitoral varieties. The apps for the OhMiBod vibrators allow one partner to control the machine from a long distance, observe the corresponding partners’ heart rate, and even keep tabs on the number of orgasms accrued. Besides appearing at the electronics expo, many makers of vibrators tour their carnal wares at the Adult Entertainment Expo, among 250 other brands and a total of 30,000 industry and consumer attendees. Even with attempts like Alabama’s 2008 effort to enforce a sex toys ban, at least 52.5 percent of women nationally have used a vibrator, no longer reliant solely on the penis and its 50 shades of meh.