F O U R

Fake Vaginas, Female Masturbation, and Porno Empires

Faced with increased competition from the Malorruses, the Marches branched out into a new product: strap-on prosthetic vaginas.¹⁸⁶ Like dildos, artificial vaginas also have a long pedigree, dating back to at least the 17th century with Japanese versions made of velvet.¹⁸⁷ But artificial vaginas, or pocket pussies as they’re more commonly known, have nearly always been less discussed and feared than dildos. Women, it seems, aren’t afraid their spouses will leave them for a rubber vagina. Artificial vaginas were marketed the same way prosthetic penises were: as devices that allowed married people to have sexual intercourse. The Marches sold Caucasian flesh– colored vaginas that were designed to be worn around a woman’s waist almost like underwear. They had a tube that simulated a woman’s vaginal canal and an attached bulb that allowed the vagina to be inflated so it could be tightened to the man’s specification or to simulate orgasmic spasms.

Following soon after the Marches, the Malorruses added artificial vaginas to their sex-toy line. According to Marche’s son, Fred and Farley copied everything they did. “We only had six months lead time on a product before he would duplicate it.” And because they used cheaper materials, the Malorruses were able to sell them at a lower price than the Marches. As D. Keith Mano wrote in Playboy, United Sales “doesn’t excel in sex innovation, but it’s superb in cut-rate marketing.” Farley claims that the copying went both ways, and the Marches copied them too. But the Malorruses weren’t the only ones the Marches had to worry about. “One of our competitors copied [our artificial vagina], sent it to Hong Kong, and ordered 10,000 in flesh color,” Marche’s son told Playboy. “They came back yellow. And when they looked at the sleeves—instead of three inches in diameter so you have plenty of room to move around in—they came back the size of a quarter.”188

While the Marches sold their vaginas the same way they had sold their penises, as prosthetic devices, the Malorruses initially went the novelty route. They called their strap-on vaginas a “Silly Millimeter Longer” to ensure that the vaginas were seen as gag gifts. But soon they took a cue from the Marches and began selling prosthetic vaginas and penises under the guise of medical marital aids. Like strap-on dildos, strap-on vaginas were another product designed and marketed to improve marital sex. For legal reasons, a typical brochure claimed that the purpose of a prosthetic vagina was “to provide a substitute means of physical gratification to the husband when the wife is unable to perform sexually for physiological or psychological reasons.”¹⁸⁹ Of course, this was not how they were always used. “Men would strap them on to an inflatable doll or pillow or whatever, and masturbate with them,” Farley said.¹⁹⁰

Selling fake vaginas as marital aids was no guarantee that legal action wouldn’t be taken. In 1967, one seller of rubber vaginas was reported by the AMA to the post office for possible indictment under laws prohibiting sending fraudulent products through the mail, one of the laws used to indict sex-toy sellers.¹⁹¹ The Malorruses and Marches seem to have escaped indictments, but it was impossible to not be affected by the climate of censorship. Even during the manufacturing process, things had to be done in secret. When there’s no regulation and a business is conducted on the margins of society, there are bound to be complications. By going after sex-toy makers, the government helped push the industry underground.

Since strap-on vaginas required different manufacturing materials than strap-on penises, the Marches had to outsource the work to another maker, a man in Santa Fe Springs, California, who created a high quality, thin, plastic vagina with foam. Because what he was making was potentially illegal, he hid it from the rest of the workers, running the production line only after 10 p.m. Marche would then arrive early in the morning to retrieve the vaginas before the factory opened. The vaginas were popular, although not as popular as the dildos. Still, Marche began receiving a flood of letters of thanks. Many of the letters were written by men who wrote how relieved they were that they were finally able to have sex with their wives, who had had medical conditions like vaginismus that didn’t allow them to have sex. There were significantly fewer letters from the men masturbating into vaginas for fun.192

The success of their strap-on penises and vagina spurred the Marches to expand into vibrators. Even though Masters and Johnson’s research had shown that masturbation was more pleasurable for women than sexual intercourse, the Marches didn’t market their vibrators for masturbation. As they did with their dildos, the Marches sold their hard, plastic, whitish phallic vibrators as marital aids.¹⁹³ Vibrators like these were usually used for masturbation, so why sell them as marital aids? It wasn’t just due to the law. From a marketing point of view, selling vibrators as couples toys made sense.

Masturbation was still widely taboo, even among health professionals. Psychologist and sexologist Albert Ellis wrote in 1966 that when he spoke at a symposium a few years earlier, “several prominent psychologists and psychiatrists objected strenuously to my statement that masturbation is quite harmless.” Few women would have been comfortable admitting to masturbation, let alone purchasing a special tool for it, during a time when even many sex manuals said that “masturbation while not completely harmful, is still not ‘good’ or ‘desirable’”—statements that according to Ellis, had “no scientific foundation and constitute a modern carryover of old antisexual moralizings.”¹⁹⁴ And especially because many female-centric sex toys were bought by men, the appeal to marriage and partnership worked because it was less threatening.

Around the same time as the Marches began selling vibrators, the Malorruses entered the vibrator business. Instead of creating their own, they bought the rights to a Japanese vibrator called the Stim Vib, thus beginning what would become a big business of importing sex toys from Japan. It looked similar to the standard white vibrator sold by Marche, except that theirs was curved at top and it was marketed in a nonsexual way, as a scalp and facial massager.195 In the 1970s, Japanese products didn’t have the cache that they have now. They were considered low quality. But the Stim Vibe was a powerful vibrator made of soft and flexible plastic, and it was rated as one of the best vibrators in Playboy’s “Sex Aids Road Test.” Vibrators remained controversial, though, even to the Playboy testers. The testers noted that vibrators still possessed a “bad image.”¹⁹⁶

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Although the Malorruses aped many of the Marches’ medical-style sex toys, they never aspired to be taken especially seriously in the business. They just wanted to make money. And if it was money you were after, it didn’t matter too much what you were selling as long as it was cheap to make and somebody was willing to buy it. After all, Fred Malorrus had entered the business as a novelty salesman, selling Makin’ Bakin’. So Fred and Farley Malorrus began producing more sexual novelties, including penis-shaped lighters and “Time to Fuck” watches. They cost pennies to make, and they were absolutely ridiculous, but thousands of people bought them.

Soon after, the Marches joined in the novelty game with a penis pencil topper. They decided that if they were going to make a penis pencil eraser, it would be the best-made adult novelty the world had seen. Constructed out of high-quality medical-grade plastics, the penis pencil topper was a gag gift that was small enough to not be too upsetting to those with a more conservative streak. Ever the entertainer, Ted Marche used penis erasers as props for his gags. He’d ask a person for a cigarette, they’d hand him their pack, he’d place a penis eraser on one of the cigarettes and hand it back to them. Marche would watch in amusement as the person looked in horror to discover that his cigarette was now bearing a penis emerging from its filter. The penis erasers were a hit. Penthouse bought one hundred thousand of them. The Marches expanded their line of novelties. And the war between the Marches and Malorruses was on.197

A penis gear shift. A penis key ring made of leather. A light switch cover that made the switch look like a fat man’s penis. Marche and his son dreamed up a phallic wonderland. They saw the world through penis-shaped glasses, which were another product they made. There’s a reason why bachelorette parties are full of penis trinkets and not vagina ones: It was men who created the mass market in genitalia jokes. While feminists made vagina art to be hung in museums, it was the men who monetized their genitalia as commodities.

The Malorruses and Marches continued to churn out novelties and sex toys, with the Malorruses not caring too much about quality, as was illustrated by their new line of aphrodisiacs. Aphrodisiacs are ancient and have always held a certain appeal throughout the centuries, and some have actually shown to be effective, such as ones containing ambergris, a lump found in sperm whales’ stomachs.¹⁹⁸ Until the 1990s, some doctors did prescribe aphrodisiacs such as Yohimbine before drugs like Viagra were available.¹⁹⁹ Medical literature has shown Yohimbine to be effective.²⁰⁰ But aphrodisiacs have also been the province of hucksters. Pills and potions that purportedly increase lust are nearly irresistible to humans because they make the amorphous and complicated process of sexual desire seem concrete and within a person’s control. But, as with illegal drugs, with over-the-counter aphrodisiacs it’s difficult to know just what you are getting because they aren’t regulated. Of all the aphrodisiacs in the world, perhaps the most famous is Spanish fly, which the Malorruses sold. Although Spanish fly, or cantharidin, has been used as an aphrodisiac for thousands of years, it is one of the most dangerous of its kind. Spanish fly is not, in fact, made from flies but from another insect: the blister beetle. The same properties that supposedly make it an effective aphrodisiac—the fact that it causes irritation in the body—also make it potentially toxic. It can cause the stomach to bleed so severely that it results in death.201

But what the Malorruses sold as Spanish fly was related to the real thing in name only. What they were selling was a mixture of cayenne pepper and whey in the pill version, and sugar water in the liquid version, known as Spanish fly drops. The drops came in eight different flavors, including chocolate and coconut. And as Farley points out, the pills did actually heighten people’s sexual desire, if only via the placebo effect. Another possible reason the Spanish fly “drops” were so effective? They instructed customers to rub the drops “on her love place, massage them in, and lick it off.” What they were really asking their male customers to do was perform oral sex on their female partners. Of course the drops worked.²⁰²

It was selling bogus products like sugar water as Spanish fly that gave sex-toy producers a bad name in the 1960s and 1970s and continues to give some of them a bad name today. If one of a company’s products is fraudulent, how is a consumer supposed to trust the rest of them? Then again, if the Malorruses had sold the real Spanish fly, they could have killed their consumers, and if they’d said it was sugar water they were selling, it wouldn’t have had the placebo effect. The Malorruses probably helped many people’s sex lives with their fake Spanish fly. Most certainly they raked in a lot of cash. The sugar water cost ten cents for them to produce, and they sold it for a dollar to the wholesaler. Consumers shelled out ten dollars for it. But this time the Marches didn’t follow them into this new line of products. They just didn’t have it in them.

The fake aphrodisiacs and penis gearshifts undermined the credibility of the sex-toy industry by literally making sex seem like a joke. But you can’t just blame the Marches and Malorruses. America’s laws and social mores were more to blame. Novelties were less likely to be considered legally obscene. They also didn’t threaten gender or sexual norms. While decorating motorcycle handles with penis sheaths may have been in bad taste, it was considered boys just being boys. Some people even argued that these sex novelties were a response to women’s liberation, a pushing back against newfound female power in the bedroom. A penis golf-club topper was a way to assert sexual dominance.203

It is these laws and cultural norms that have caused the sex-toy industry in America to swing between these two disparate poles of purely medical device to novelty, from a medical prosthesis to a wind-up jolly jumping pussy. Sex toys sold for masturbation fell in the middle: They were the most dangerous. A dildo or artificial vagina sold for masturbation was undermining traditional values and promoting singledom a retreat from social norms, a furtive antisocial masturbation practice.

The legal gray area that sex toys lingered in required manufacturers to hedge their bets by producing products that were least likely to be prosecuted: those that upheld heterosexual family values and those that were gag gifts. To make a profit, usually the same companies would produce both types.

But a big difference existed between the Malorruses and Marches. Malorrus saw little distinction between the novelties and the prosthetics. They were all products that turned a profit. For Marche, all his products—even the penis erasers—were made to exacting specifications and the same medical-grade plastic as the dildos. But from an outsider’s perspective, both companies looked similar. And it was hard to take seriously a company that designed prosthetic genitals for Johns Hopkins (which Marche Manufacturing did later) if, in the same factory, they also churned out a penis ring-toss game.

Although the Marches and the Malorruses were vicious competitors, there was one thing they agreed on: They needed better distribution for their products. And they knew just who to turn to—a charismatic wholesaler based in Cleveland, Ohio, named Reuben Sturman. He controlled the distribution of pornography and sex toys for nearly every adult bookstore in the country and owned many of the stores too. To have Sturman distribute your dildos was like winning a contract with Walmart today. The only problem was that Sturman took a big cut. How was Sturman able to have such a big monopoly? Because distributing sex toys and porn was a quick way to get arrested, few people wanted to do it. Most of the other people willing to take such a risk were members of the mob.

Sturman hadn’t always aspired to be the largest porn and dildo distributor in the United States, but he had always wanted to be rich. Sturman was a first-generation immigrant, born in 1924 in a Jewish immigrant community in southeast Cleveland to communist Jewish parents who had recently immigrated from Russia. He spent three years in the U.S. Air Force and then enrolled in Case Institute of Technology, graduating in 1948 with a business degree. After graduation, Sturman’s neighbor suggested that he join his cigars and candy distribution business.

In 1951, Sturman persuaded his neighbor to add comic books to the line. It was the height of the comic book craze, and their comics were so successful that Sturman broke off from his neighbor’s company to start his own wholesale business, Premium Sales Company. Because Sturman was incredibly charming and skilled at schmoozing with retailers, his business was immediately successful. For the next five years, Sturman peddled the comics from the trunk of his old Dodge.204

Around this time, Sturman married a woman he’d met a year earlier during a trip to Los Angeles. Esther was a strong New York–born woman with a six-year-old daughter, Peggy, who Reuben adopted. Soon they had two more children, Lee and David, and Esther joined Sturman in the business.²⁰⁵ They weren’t rich, but they were comfortable. Then one day at work, one of Sturman’s employees, a man named Wally, came in clutching a sex-themed paperback. Wally wanted to start adding sex books to their line. “‘Wally, we’re busy,” Sturman told him. “If you think it’ll sell, take it but I don’t want to pay any attention to it.” Wally’s instinct was right. The book sold and sold and sold. Suddenly sex books seemed appealing to Sturman. And once publishers found out that Sturman was distributing sex novels, they began seeking him out because Sturman had what they needed: an extensive distribution system he’d created when distributing comic books. Sex books were just another product to him.206

Even though he claims to have felt no real affinity for sex books, once he started selling them, he never really looked back. Soon he moved onto other sexually themed materials, including cheap black-and-white sex magazines that distributors began creating to compete with a new men’s magazine called Playboy. Then “he realized that you could make a ton more money from pornography,” said his son David.²⁰⁷ Sturman’s wholesale business was so successful that he was distributing girlie magazines all across the country to wholesalers. He changed the name of his company to Sovereign News to make it seem regal, and in his three-story brick warehouse in Cleveland, he began creating a porn empire.

By the early 1960s, with his wife Esther’s blessing, Sturman had graduated to distribution of hard-core porn, and he had added another product category to the line, a type of good few others would touch: sex toys. As he had with pornography, Sturman very quickly became the go-to distributor of sex toys in the Uunite States. And he wasn’t just distributing his product outside of Cleveland; he was also setting up distribution centers across the county with grandiose-sounding names, including Crown News and Majestic News.²⁰⁸

Sturman had it all: a happy family, a successful business, and a large Tudor home. He was well-loved by many in the community thanks to his generous gifts to charities. But building a big sex empire in the early 1960s was risky. The country was still stuck in quaint notions of sexuality and gender. A woman’s place was in the home, abortion was illegal, and birth control was impossible to obtain without a marriage license. Pornography didn’t sit well with a large portion of the populace. Even books like James Joyce’s Ulysses were deemed obscene.

It was only a matter of time before Sturman got in trouble with the law. One day in 1963, the Detroit police raided his Royal News warehouse, seizing his stock of nudist camp magazines, which they believed were obscene. It turned out that the magazines weren’t obscene, at least not by any legal definition. A few months later, the police showed up again and destroyed twenty thousand magazines. Sturman responded by suing the police for $200,000, claiming that not only had he lost money in his business but that the cops were harassing him.209 His lawsuit didn’t end the raids, however. It had the opposite effect: It began a war, and not just with the Detroit police, but also with the FBI. ²¹⁰

In the 1960s, Sturman’s businesses were raided all over the country.²¹¹ He was dragged into court on obscenity charges in California, Michigan, and Ohio. He always beat the charges; he even sued J. Edgar Hoover at one point.²¹² But being hounded by the federal government took its toll on Sturman. He began breaking up his company into smaller corporations, incorporating them in the United States and internationally.^{213 214}

Sturman wasn’t deterred, however. Instead, he expanded his business. He was always on the lookout for new products to distribute. One day, a friend of his showed him a few wind-up machines that displayed films. They were usually placed in bars, where customers could put a quarter in and flip through them. Sturman had an idea: He would put the machines in his stores, but he’d place them in private wooden booths with a lock on the door. That way, male customers could masturbate while watching the films.²¹⁵ Soon Sturman was not only distributing the films but also distributing the machines and building the booths through his company Automated Vending. He set up these peep shows in the back of adult bookstores and stocked them with eight-millimeter sex films. Men would put a quarter in the machine to watch a minute of a short film.216 Peep shows became wildly popular and profitable because most people had no way of watching pornography at home since VCRs hadn’t yet been invented. One other great thing about the peep-show business? Most of the profits were in cash. On a per-week basis, a store could earn up to $10,000. Sturman’s associates would travel from store to store, draining the machines of their quarters, giving the owners a percentage, and placing the rest of the heavy loot in bags.²¹⁷

As his businesses succeeded, his marriage to Esther was crumbling. Sturman began sleeping with women he met in a calisthenics class he was teaching.²¹⁸ Reuben and Esther separated, and Esther moved out of the house. Esther wanted to continue in the business, but Reuben disagreed. He barred her from the office and forged documents so her name was removed from the board of directors of his companies. When they finalized their divorce, she had one request: Don’t let the kids join the business.²¹⁹

Post-separation, in the late 1960s, Sturman was the king of the peep show and the largest pornography distributor in the United States. He also owned a huge number of adult bookstores. Although he’d been indicted several times on obscenity and his businesses were controversial, he had always beaten the charges. He was a man on the rise, with an empire built on the phenomenon of male masturbation.

As Sturman was profiting from male masturbation, Betty Dodson was making art out of it. She’d already had the first one-woman erotic art show at the Wickersham Gallery in New York City in November 1968.²²⁰ Because it went over so well, she was asked back. For her next show, she created a series of “Sex-Role Cartoons.” Each painting featured a dichotomy of traditional women’s roles like “Madonna/Whore,” which showed a woman nursing her child on the top half of the image, with the bottom half showing her reddened genitals getting penetrated by a penis. To contrast the cartoons, she decided to create a complementary series of women masturbating. One of these was a six-foot-tall portrait of Dodson’s girlfriend masturbating with a vibrator, which was the most contentious of them all.

Even knowing that her work would be controversial, Dodson was still surprised at the responses. Some female visitors to the gallery confessed they were afraid of using vibrators because they thought they would get addicted to them. Others mentioned that they thought the drawing subjects had to be single, as women in a relationship would never need outside tools. These reactions led Dodson to a revelation that changed the course of her life. “The two weeks I spent in the gallery made it very clear that repression relates directly to masturbation,” she says now. “It follows then that masturbation can be important in reversing the process and achieving liberation.”221 For Dodson, masturbation was the key to women’s liberation because masturbation was the first stepping-stone to sexual freedom. This was a radical idea then, even among radical feminists. How could touching yourself in private, such an insular and seemingly selfish activity, actually be a form of liberation? According to Dodson’s philosophy, masturbation was liberating because it allowed women to learn about their bodies’ own sexual responses. Until women knew how to bring themselves pleasure, they would not be able to take control of their own sexuality. A woman could not have a successful sexual relationship without knowing how to give herself orgasms because they would not be able to transmit that knowledge to their partners, she said.

“If I couldn’t touch my own body for pleasure, I was a victim hoping to get the kind of sex from a partner who would provide adequate stimulation of my clitoris that lasted long enough for me to have an orgasm,” Dodson says. “Even if that happened, I would still be dependent on each lover for all my orgasms. This kind of sexual dependency led to resentments, which fueled the war between the sexes.”²²²

One major point in Dodson’s argument was her insistence that orgasms were clitoral. Dodson was furious that women were taught to believe in the Freudian view that they should graduate away from the “immature” clitoral orgasm and into the “mature” vaginal orgasm as they became adults. She promoted Masters and Johnson’s research proving that all orgasms are clitoral, and other feminists used those findings as a rallying cry to demolish existing gender and sexual roles.

Feminist Anne Koedt’s seminal 1973 essay “The Myth of the Vaginal Orgasm” argued that both men and women perpetuated the idea that a superior vaginal orgasm existed. Each gender had a different reason for hanging on to this myth, wrote Koedt. Since men enjoyed penetrative sex, they wanted to perpetuate the myth because it ensured that intercourse would be seen as superior to other forms of sex, like cunnilingus. Koedt also said that men wanted to control women’s sexuality. They thought of women as subordinate, and they were afraid that clitoral orgasms would make men expendable. Women perpetuated that myth because they had a desire to please men and were ignorant about the functions of their own genitals, argued Koedt. Although her essay was convincing, Koedt lacked a practical solution to getting the two sexes to agree to retire the myth of the vaginal orgasm.223 Other feminists proffered practical changes. For example, Alix Kates Shulman argued that Americans should transform sex education so that the clitoris, not the vagina, was described as women’s primary sexual organ.²²⁴ But aside from Dodson, few other feminists saw Masters and Johnson’s findings as a call for masturbation.

Dodson’s focus on sexual pleasure was controversial within the women’s movement, where many feminists believed that a focus on orgasms and sexual pleasure divorced from emotional connection was a “male-identified” and antifeminist form of sexuality. The Boston Women’s Health Collective (BWHC) espoused this view while advocating for masturbation in their seminal 1970 booklet “Women and Their Bodies: A Course,” which went on to be published as Our Bodies, Ourselves in 1971. Although they promoted clitoral stimulation and masturbation and argued that that all orgasms are clitoral, the collective declared, “Orgasms are not that important in life. What are important are loving, giving, free relationships between people.” The BWHC’s focus was more on relationships than sexual pleasure, which made the book less sexually progressive than it could have been.225

Dodson then published an article called “Masculine Mystique” in Screw magazine, provocateur Al Goldstein’s weekly publication primarily directed toward heterosexual men. In the article, she explained that missionary sex rarely provided women with orgasms, and she also criticized porn for not focusing on clitoral pleasure. But few feminists read Screw, so her article did not have much of an impact.²²⁶

An article in Barney Rossett’s avant-garde Evergreen Review followed in 1971, in which she spoke out against feminists’ antipornography stance and argued that feminists should create their own porn. It was this article that made the feminist establishment take notice. Ms. magazine called her to ask her to write an article on masturbation a few months later. In the article, Dodson fully articulated her masturbation philosophy and advocated for the use of vibrators. But after commissioning the article, Ms. rejected it. They were afraid that a pro-masturbation article would offend their readers. It was the beginning of the feminist masturbation fight.²²⁷