Buzz

The Marches weren’t the only ones raking in the profits from their dildos. Reuben Sturman was, too. His Sovereign News was distributing nearly all of Marche’s sex toys and many of the Malorruses’.⁵⁰⁴ While Marche had gone virtually ignored by the federal government, Sturman was being hounded continuously. Obscenity charge after obscenity charge was thrown at Sturman, but none of them stuck. He always emerged from court victorious. With his triumphs over the government and the huge amounts of money from his distribution business, stores (which numbered around three hundred), and peep-show booths, Sturman was becoming cocky. He was living large in his Tudor mansion in the swanky Shaker Heights neighborhood of Cleveland, dating a series of young women who worked for him, smoking fancy cigars, and tooling around town in a Mercedes.⁵⁰⁵ And he wanted more.

Sturman saw how successful the Marches were becoming, how their sales were increasing year after year, and he wanted a part of it. Even though Sturman controlled the sex-toy and porn distribution and retail business in the United States (and was influential in Europe too), it was not enough. Sturman preferred to control every aspect of his business, from production to distribution. Vertical integration was what he was after. So in 1976, when Braverman returned from running Sturman’s stores in Europe and realized that he loved merchandising sex toys, Sturman saw an opportunity.⁵⁰⁶

Depending on who you ask, either Sturman or Braverman decided to buy out their biggest supplier, Marche Manufacturing. The details on this sale are murky. Sturman’s son claims his father bought Marche Manufacturing, while Braverman’s son says his father bought it. Why did the Marches sell the business? Marche’s son hinted that the equipment for the factory, like the automatic lines, was getting too expensive. The Malorruses were able to buy factory equipment on the cheap, he said, because Sturman was purchasing industrial equipment at a discount and then selling it to the Malorruses. However, Sturman wasn’t offering the same lower-priced machinery to the Marches.

How much Marche sold his company for or what the conditions were will probably never be known. Braverman soon moved out to L.A. and began running the Marches’ company in 1976. While most of Marche Manufacturing’s thirty-two employees stayed on, Ted and his son left the sex-toy business entirely. Was this a condition of the deal, that they would never compete with Sturman? It very well could have been. Soon after selling Marche Manufacturing, Ted went back to being a ventriloquist, and his son started a new career as a hypnotist. Their debut was “a double gig at the L.A. athletic club.” It may seem like a weird move, to go from designing dildos to lulling people into a hypnotic state, but Ted’s son made the transition well. He was a skilled enough hypnotist that he paid his way through the California State University–Long Beach on gigs alone.507

Now that Sturman’s company owned Marche Manufacturing, Sturman controlled both the production and distribution of most of the sex toys in the United States, and he owned the bulk of the retail outlets where sex toys were sold. He and Braverman began to revamp the sex-toy industry. Braverman says that, in the mid-1970s, sex toys were virtually ignored in adult bookstores. Most of the toys were kept in a glass case by the register, without any names or packaging. Marche’s dildos sat alongside Malorruses’ United Sales Company sex toys and those of smaller companies. Even though Marche or United Sales would create lines of hundreds of products, each store would only carry a few. In a typical adult store, there were “five or six [sex toys] wrapped in frosted plastic bags” in the case “and somebody really had to know what they want to get,” Braverman said.508 There were only a few styles of vibrators or dildos. Most of the vibrators were ivory “flesh-colored” hard-plastic phallic shapes.⁵⁰⁹ And even the few available sex toys were not ideal. Many of the dildos in the stores were huge because when men buy sex toys they are thinking of only one thing: size. Nearly half of all men think their penises are too small, and they assume that women do too.⁵¹⁰ “The basic understanding was that if the guy was six inches his significant other wanted eight inches,” Braverman said. “The common thinking was that people wanted something bigger, wider, stronger, larger.”⁵¹¹ At the time, most adult stores “were about the 25-cent machines, magazines, paperback books, and eight millimeter,” Braverman said.⁵¹²

Those peep show machines were a problem: They were preventing half of the population from coming to adult stores, aside from Eve’s Garden and the handful of Pleasure Chests. Anywhere there was a so-called 25-cent-machine, women stayed far away. They didn’t want to be near the masturbating men in the little wooden booths. “It was an all 100 percent male business,” Braverman said. “There were no females coming into the stores. There were no couples coming into the stores.” Braverman wanted to change that.⁵¹³

If Sturman had treated Marche Manufacturing like the porn companies that he bought, he would have simply folded it into his empire with little impact on the sex-toy industry. But Reuben Sturman, his son David, and Braverman decided to do something different. They decided to create a sex-toy brand that appealed to both men and women. In retrospect, this seems to have been an obvious thing to do. At the time, however, it was revolutionary. Although Marche had designed sex toys with women in mind, he didn’t have a brand. Reuben and David Sturman were going to change that.

Since Sturman was still being regularly indicted on obscenity charges, they needed a brand that was not very sexual. They brainstormed for a while and came up with the name “Doc Johnson.” A number of myths have emerged around the origins of the name. Some believe that Johnson was chosen because it’s a euphemism for penis, while others say that it was an homage to the Johnson commission’s obscenity report. But Braverman said that neither story is true. Braverman just wanted a familiar name. “He didn’t really want to call it doctor, but he wanted it to be a little more friendly . . . like the neighborhood doc . . . a nickname,” Ron’s son Chad Braverman said.514

Following the model of McDonald’s and other prominent brands, Braverman and Sturman decided to create a fictional character to embody their brand. The character had to legitimize sex toys and telegraph a sense of trust. An upright penis with a stethoscope hanging from its neck just wouldn’t cut it. They came up with a genial, mustachioed male doctor, wearing a 1950s-era-style doctor’s coat with a Nehru collar and barely a hint of a smile on his face. “You go in to buy toothpaste, you don’t say toothpaste, you say ‘Crest,’” Ron Braverman told Forbes magazine in 1978. “We want people to say ‘Doc Johnson.’”⁵¹⁵ Although in the UK and Germany, mainstream sex-toy brands had been named after women—Ann Summers and Beate Uhse—in the United States this was not to be the case. Perhaps it was because a woman’s name conveyed feminism and niche markets.

Choosing a male doctor to represent a line of sex toys and other products made sense not only because it conveyed authority but also because giving sex toys a medical sheen is an old American tradition dating back to the 19th and early 20th centuries when butt plugs, vaginal dilators, and vibrators had been sold as medical devices as a way to get around obscenity prosecutions.

Sturman and Braverman wanted Doc Johnson to be mainstream because their goal was to get sex toys into all sorts of retail environments, from supermarkets to drugstores, where vibrators were already being sold, albeit not as sex toys. “I was hoping my products would go everywhere. I was hoping that the audience would go beyond the men in these stores,” Braverman said.516 Doc Johnson saw their main competition as Hitachi with the Magic Wand that feminists loved, as well as General Electric, which sold a line of vibrators, and Water Pik.⁵¹⁷ One way to get more retail stores to carry Doc Johnson was to sell them in carded packages that could hang from the wall, so they could be prominently displayed.

Another way Braverman and Sturman made sex toys seem more socially acceptable was by referring to them as “marital aids.” Doc Johnson wasn’t the first company to call their sex toys marital aids, but they were the most prominent company to do so and the first to create a real brand around the idea. Unlike Eve’s Garden’s liberatory vibrators, which were meant to free women from relationships with men, Doc Johnson marital aids were framed to keep women tightly connected to their male partners. Although it’s hard to imagine a nine-inch vibrating dong being bought to improve matrimonial bonds, Doc Johnson’s strategy worked.

Even though this was the supposed era of porno-chic, the culture was still conservative, at least when it came to female sexuality and gender roles. In 1976, when Doc Johnson was founded, it had been only four years since unmarried women were legally able to access birth control, and only two years since women were able to open a checking account without a man cosigning. It is not surprising that, throughout their first catalog, Doc Johnson nodded to marriage and sexual convention, while also selling the unconventional. The cover featured a naked man and woman embracing on the beach during the sunset. Underneath the couple, the words “Marital Aids” was placed in bold type. While Betty Dodson was telling women that sex toys could drive them to sexual independence, Doc Johnson was telling them the opposite. If the cover didn’t send the message clearly enough, then the inside of the catalog did. On the third page was a silhouette of a male and a female face with the text underneath reading, “Sit by my side. Let us view the ways of love together. Discover our fantasies. Create our future.”518

Sex toys soaked up the meanings of whoever was promoting them. In one context, they embodied liberationist radical feminist values, while in another, they symbolized traditional gender and sexual roles. Feminists championed them for masturbation while traditionalists promoted them for monogamous heterosexual sex. Sex toys symbolized gay liberation in the Pleasure Chest and disability rights through Gosnell Duncan’s newly renamed company Scoprio Products. Sex toys were always political, but the politics they embodied was up for grabs.

Good capitalists that they were, Braverman and Sturman crafted the Doc Johnson brand to appeal primarily to the widest demographic: monogamous heterosexuals. As their catalog read, in the section on penis extenders and French and German ticklers, “Doc Johnson has devoted many years to creating . . . devices for the purpose of bringing diversification to the monogamists.”⁵¹⁹ That’s not to say that they didn’t sell products for gay men, but those were a smaller part of their inventory, and they were marketed in gay magazines like The Advocate.⁵²⁰

Soon after the purchase of Marche Manufacturing, Sturman and Braverman began opening more adult stores in the United States and overseas. These were the first chain stores devoted to sex toys and porn in America; the nation’s first sex supermarkets. Like other chain outlets, Sturman’s stores were uniform, with similar layouts, peep-show booths in the back, and shelves lined with porn videos, and Doc Johnson dildos and vibrators. Nevertheless, the stores were not always popular with the neighbors. In London’s Soho neighborhood, they caused consternation because of the “men in dirty trench coats, and occasionally a woman” who browsed their wares.⁵²¹ Doc Johnson wasn’t just about the rebranding of Marche’s sex toys; it also involved the rebranding of some of Sturman’s adult bookstores. According to FBI notes about one of the early meetings at Doc Johnson, it was decided that the first store “will be a pseudoscientific type of establishment (white coats, etc.) More rubber goods. More professional-type advertising; bondage-type clothing and items.”522

Thanks to Sturman and Braverman, Marche Manufacturing had finally overtaken their nemesis the Malorruses. Fred Malorrus was none too happy about this. Years later in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Malorrus attributed Doc Johnson’s success to Sturman’s “near-monopoly on distribution.”⁵²³

(*)

It wasn’t just the Malorruses’ company, United Sales, that was facing tough times. Farley Malorrus was too. Around the time that Marche Manufacturing became Doc Johnson, Farley Malorrus found out his wife was a lesbian. The blow to his ego was enormous. Even after they divorced, he found himself unable to manage his blow-up doll company, Bosko’s Oso, and it started to fall apart. He shut down the company and came limping back to his father at United Sales. Fred took his son back; he needed the help because he had a formidable competitor on his hands in the form of Reuben Sturman.

Malorrus’s relationship with Sturman’s company was complicated. Through Doc Johnson’s wholesale catalog, Sturman was distributing a wide variety of United Sales products, from their bogus Spanish Fly Sugar to their dildos. But now that Sturman was in the manufacturing business, he had become a direct competitor.⁵²⁴

Fortunately, Farley had an idea for a new product he wanted to introduce to the American market. It would be new to the United States, but it was actually one of the oldest sex toys around: ben wa balls. Farley suggested they add the new toy to their line. Malorrus said they were too expensive to import. Farley told Fred they could do it on the cheap by gold-plating ball bearings. “They won’t chime, but we’ll put them in a jewelry box, cost us a dime to gold plate them, a nickel for the box,” Farley told his father. “Wholesale them for two bucks and retail them for twenty.”525 Because ben wa balls rarely gave women orgasms, they weren’t an ideal sex toy from a woman’s point of view. But from a man’s point of view, they were a good toy. They came in a nice gift package and they weren’t threatening. No woman was going to replace her man with two small balls that sat in the vagina like weights.

(*)

When it came to vibrators, there was some reason for men to be concerned. Their fear was not completely unfounded. As one customer wrote to Eve’s Garden, “P.S. My lover is afraid a vibrator will replace him—he may be right!”⁵²⁶

Did vibrators cause women to end their marriages? At least one letter to Dell Williams points to yes. Can the vibrator be solely to blame? Probably not. As Louis C.K. says, “No good marriage has ever ended in divorce.” But vibrators may have offered the push to get women to open their eyes to another world of sexual possibility. Vibrators did change women’s lives for a very simple reason: They gave women the first orgasms of their lives. These weren’t teenagers either; they were women in their thirties and forties. A first orgasm is memorable at any age, but to have one after years of sexual relationships is even more profound. These women began to question why, after decades in a relationship, they had never felt sexual satisfaction. And they began to wonder what else their lives had been lacking, which led them to question the gender roles that had defined their lives.

“I am 40 and left my husband of 20 years recently. I might add, I left him after masturbating to orgasm for the first time in my life,” a woman in Texas wrote to Williams in 1976. The woman said that she had stayed sexually unsatisfied for twenty years because she was waiting for her husband to “turn a magic key and all my sexuality would be reborn, my family would not condemn it, neither would the church, nor society. It would be ACCEPTABLE!” When that magic key never appeared, her sexual frustration mounted, and it led her to become “bitter about him, my role in marriage, and the whole world in general.” Yet she stayed married, even as she realized that “keeping a spotless house and doing all the expected and ‘proper’ things simply didn’t cut it—something was ghastly, horribly wrong.” Her revelation had echoes of Betty Friedan’s “problem that has no name,” the dissatisfaction of being a housewife, but her epiphany that she would no longer settle for these stultifying gender roles came not from a political awakening but from an orgasmic one. It was only when she “started masturbating to orgasm” that her “new life began.” Not only did she leave her husband; she was in no rush to get a new one. “I have had a lot of overtures from men,” she wrote, “but I’m determined that I will never have another man if he doesn’t love and desire sex like I do.”527

Not all women who bought vibrators wanted to leave their relationships. Others were trying to save them. Barbara wrote to Eve’s Garden out of desperation because her hysterectomy had left her unable to have an orgasm and the hormones her doctor had prescribed didn’t help. “I have a husban [sic] that don’t want to be marry [sic] to me anymore because of my condition,” she wrote. “I still love him but can’t please him, please send me your catalog or some advice.”⁵²⁸

Williams, though, was not as interested in saving marriages as she was in enlightening women. So even though Barbara was writing to Williams for advice on how to fix her marriage, Williams suggested that Barbara purchase books on masturbation along with a vibrator. Ignoring Barbara’s plea for advice on how to “please” her husband, Williams implied that Barbara should become orgasmic for her own sake, instead of her husband’s.⁵²⁹

Williams wasn’t against women using vibrators to improve relationships, but it wasn’t her main goal. Like Marche, she received multiple letters from customers who claimed vibrators had salvaged their marriages. “Thank’s [sic] to you my marriage is back together. I love you all so much,” a woman wrote to Eve’s Garden.530

Eve’s Garden didn’t just cause women to reevaluate their relationships. The nonjudgmental pro-sex message of the store and catalog also inspired women to explore their sexual orientation. Though Williams herself was bisexual, Eve’s Garden’s catalog wasn’t overtly bisexual or lesbian focused. Yet Williams made sure that lesbians knew they were welcome by advertising in lesbian magazines like off our backs.⁵³¹ And lesbians made up about half of Eve’s Garden’s customers.⁵³² “I still remember, (when I was first coming out of the closet) out of curiosity ringing the bell to the first Eve’s Garden,” wrote K.C., a New York City–based woman, to Williams in 1977. As the store moved locations around New York City, K. C. came to visit, becoming progressively comfortable with sex toys and her sexuality. “You have helped me realize [my] coming out everywhere,” she wrote, adding that she could now purchase a “Magic Wand without any embarrassment.” For K.C., masturbation, sex toys, and sexual identity were intimately intertwined. Because Eve’s Garden helped her to shed the shame surrounding sex toys and masturbation, she was also able to come to terms with her lesbianism. “You helped me hang up the heterosexual rules and made my life the happiest it’s ever been,” she said.⁵³³

Other newly out lesbians who were struggling with feelings of isolation saw Eve’s Garden as a beacon that gave them a sense of community and acceptance that they were unable to find elsewhere. A woman named Debby wrote to Eve’s Garden to share how sex toys had allowed her to finally have an orgasm after years of struggle. An incest survivor with multiple sclerosis, Debby “had no [sexual] feeling for close to three years.” She was also struggling with her newfound openness about her sexual identity. “I’ve just come out two years ago and am proud to say so,” she said. However, in spite of her openness about her sexuality (or because of it) she was “very lonesome.” The Eager Beaver vibrator she bought from Eve’s Garden did not alleviate her loneliness, but it did bring her sexual pleasure, which was revelatory. “I had the most beautiful flow of feeling and warmth I never thought possible [sic] my love goes out to you all.”534

These letters proved to Williams that sex toys could possibly lead to social change—that the tagline on the buttons that she sold in her store, “Orgasmic Women Can Change the World,” might actually come true someday.⁵³⁵ She decided it might be time to spread Eve’s Garden throughout the nation. If Sturman could create a successful chain of sex-toy and porn stores for men, surely there was room for a female equivalent.

Williams needed to find someone to open a second retail store, and she knew just who to ask: Lynette Brannon, who lived in Austin, Texas. Williams had met Brannon a few years earlier, and they had become fast friends; Williams had taken Lynette with her to Dodson’s workshop. Brannon loved it. She too was transformed by Dodson’s class. Williams adopted Brannon into the progressive feminist sex fold. “I unlearned a lot of the negative messages about my sexuality that I grew up with,” Brannon wrote. Inspired, Brannon decided that she wanted to make a difference too in women’s sex lives; she just wasn’t sure how.⁵³⁶ So when Williams suggested she open Eve’s Garden in Austin, Brannon saw it as the perfect opportunity.

Unlike the Sturman stores, Brannon’s store was planned as intimate and low-key. Brannon set the store up in her apartment in late 1976, as Williams had done a few years earlier. The setup was minimal, and it seemed to only involve hanging “a golden brown batik bedspread” from the ceiling “to separate the kitchen from the boutique.”⁵³⁷ Williams then sold Brannon sex toys to stock her store with, and in January 1977, Brannon opened up the first Eve’s Garden franchise, Eve’s Garden Austin. Like the first Eve’s Garden, it was for women only, so Brannon took out advertisements in local women’s papers and hoped for the best. Williams had one major stipulation: that Brannon not process any mail-order sales, because that would compete with Williams. But Brannon pleaded with Williams that she needed to at least sell one product by mail to stay afloat, Dodson’s Liberating Masturbation. “I make so little on the other books [that I sell in store], that I would like to do this one thing,” Brannon wrote to Williams.538 Williams gave in and let her sell Dodson’s book. Brannon also began holding sex therapy workshops in the store, where she focused on topics including lesbian sexuality, erotic art, and masturbation. Her workshops had one big difference from Dodson’s: the women remained fully clothed.⁵³⁹

In her catalog, Brannon also gave her store a catchy nickname, the Good Vibration Store, perhaps in homage to one of her inspirations, a sex educator named Joani Blank, who’d written two books that Brannon adored: A Playbook for Women About Sex and a more recent book about vibrators, Good Vibrations, which Brannon sold at Eve’s Garden Austin.

(*)

Meanwhile, more than a thousand miles away, Joani Blank had spent years teaching women to masturbate. Born on July 4, 1937, in a Boston suburb, Blank was born to a mother who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family from Lithuania and a father of German descent whose paternal grandfather was a Torah scribe. Although both parents were raised religiously, they chose not to raise Blank that way.⁵⁴⁰ After Blank graduated from college, she trained as a public health educator. She bounced around the country working in Michigan, New Hampshire, and West Virginia, before moving to San Francisco in 1971.

By the time she moved to San Francisco, the sexual revolution was well under way, and Blank began working at Planned Parenthood.⁵⁴¹ One of the first women she met in the city was Maggi Rubenstein, a professor, sex therapist, and bisexual activist who urged her to join the new consciousness-raising group she had started. At the time, Rubenstein was working as a nurse and medical school instructor at the University of California–San Francisco, but within the next five years Rubenstein transformed the Bay Area into a sex-positive mecca, cofounding three seminal groups in rapid succession: San Francisco’s Sex Information Hotline (1973), the San Francisco Bisexual Center (1976), and the Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality (1976).542 Her influence on Blank was profound, as she inspired Blank to begin her sexual advocacy, installing Blank as one of the first volunteers at SFSIH, where she dispensed sexual advice to local callers.

Like Williams had, Blank also attended one of Dodson’s workshops and became inspired—so inspired, in fact, that she even let Dodson draw her labia for her book Liberating Masturbation.⁵⁴³ Blank began working as a sex therapist with Dr. Lonnie Barbach at UCSF, who was a codirector of the Human Sexuality Program. Barbach had created a series of sex workshops for inorgasmic women, and she went on to publish a successful book based on her workshops in 1975.⁵⁴⁴ In the ten-week courses that Blank cotaught with Barbach, the two would teach women to orgasm through masturbation. Although they were similar to Dodson’s workshops, these courses had one main difference: Participants did not masturbate in front of one another; masturbation was their homework. After completing their homework, they would return to the group and discourse on whether or not they had orgasms and describe what their orgasms had felt like.⁵⁴⁵

For women who struggled with having orgasms, vibrators were not the first recourse. “Now we didn’t start out with vibrators for very good reason. We did not want people to use the vibrator as a way to avoid touching themselves. We wanted them to practice with their hands first,” Blank said. Only if other methods did not work did Barbach and Blank recommend vibrators.⁵⁴⁶ Although they did not suggest vibrators as a first step, Barbach and Blank were both strong advocates of vibrators. Barbach overcame women’s objections to vibrators by using a transportation metaphor: “A vibrator may be equivalent to using training wheels to learn to ride a bicycle. You get the feeling of what the experience is like and then, if you want to, you can practice without the machine. However, there is no reason to stop using a vibrator, either alone or with a partner if you enjoy it.”547

Vibrators were a new technology to most of the participants. “Very few of them had tried any sex toys. If they had, they had tried perhaps a dildo. They were trying to simulate intercourse and they weren’t touching their clitorises necessarily. So needless to say, they weren’t coming,” according to Blank. And the course worked. “Virtually everybody who went through the groups starting having orgasms,” Blank said. In fact, they stopped calling the participants “inorgasmic” and started calling them “preorgasmic.”⁵⁴⁸

These women wanted to know where to buy vibrators, and Barbach and Blank just did not have a good answer. The only female-friendly store was Eve’s Garden in New York. According to Blank, she asked her friend and fellow therapist Toni Ayres to start a vibrator store. Ayres declined, encouraging Blank to start a store instead. Blank seriously considered the prospect. Yet as a self-proclaimed anticapitalist “commie,” she hesitated. She wanted to further her career, spread her knowledge of sexuality wider, but she wasn’t sure a vibrator store was the best way to do so. After weeks of indecision, she decided that instead of starting a vibrator store, she’d form a publishing company.⁵⁴⁹

In 1975, she opened Down There Press, a publisher devoted to women’s sexuality. A few months later she came out with her first book, A Playbook for Women About Sex. Playbook was a workbook that focused on masturbation, body image, and partnered sex. There were only a few mentions of sex toys, in a checklist of things to masturbate or have sex with and in the myths section. Weirdly, the one sex-toy “myth” she mention was that “Vibrators are stupid.” The reader was supposed to check one of the three boxes listed next to it: “True,” “False,” or “I dunno.”550 Although there were a lot of myths about vibrators, this wasn’t really one of them. Playbook sold fairly well for a small-press workbook focused on masturbation, but not enough for her to quit her day job. However, she discovered that she loved publishing. Maybe that was the best way to share her sexual expertise, she thought. A year later, UCSF restructured their program and required all their counselors to have PhDs. Although Blank had two master’s degrees in public health, these weren’t enough and she was laid off.⁵⁵¹

Dejected, she flew to New York City to visit Williams and Eve’s Garden. Although the store was small, Blank was impressed with its inventory. In addition to vibrators, Williams was stocking a series of books: Blank’s former co-teacher Lonnie Barbach’s book For Yourself; the Boston Women’s Health Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves; Dodson’s Liberating Masturbation; and a variety of feminist books. But Blank insisted that, at the time, Eve’s Garden was a “showroom” and not a store. This was a key distinction that was important to Blank. She flew back to California and wrote another book, Good Vibrations: The Complete Women’s Guide to Vibrators. In this hand-lettered book, she discoursed on the variety of vibrators on the market and suggested that readers buy their sex toys from Eve’s Garden.

In the meantime, in October 1976, two women opened a feminist store that sold vibrators in San Francisco and called it Old Wives Tales. Although primarily a bookstore, Old Wives Tales wasn’t shy about their sex-toy inventory. Started by Carol Seajay and Paula Wallace (who were lovers), Old Wives Tales was situated in the middle of the lesbian and lefty-centric Mission Dolores neighborhood on Valencia Street, an area populated by a lesbian bathhouse, hairdresser, and café.⁵⁵² “A lot of customers were very pleased to buy vibrators in a women-focused, women-safe environment,” Seajay said.⁵⁵³

Although Down There Press was doing well, it wasn’t enough to support Blank, so she thought back to the idea for a vibrator store. A vibrator store could help support her press, she mused. It wouldn’t take much capital.554 In March 1977, a month after the Eve’s Garden’s Austin branch opened, Good Vibrations opened its doors. “[Williams] was my inspiration,” Blank said. “I gave Dell all the credit for giving me the idea.” Williams’s business model was spreading across the nation. She should have been pleased. Sisterhood and all that. But Williams felt otherwise. She felt betrayed. Why? Well, Williams has a different story.

Williams claims that she suggested that Blank start an Eve’s Garden in San Francisco and that Blank had rejected the idea. According to Williams, Blank said she wanted to focus on education instead. This is a story Blank disagrees with: “I’m absolutely sure that I would have remembered that if she had asked me and I said no.”⁵⁵⁵ Blank said that Williams sent her a postcard with one sentence on it: “I always knew someone would copy me but I never thought it would be you.” What’s the truth? It’s hard to know. According to Blank, when she showed Williams the postcard, Williams said, “I can’t believe I wrote that.’”⁵⁵⁶ One thing is for sure: Blank, like Williams, wanted to make the world a better place, and she wanted to do it through teaching men and women about their sexuality.

First she had to struggle to find an appropriate space because even in San Francisco most people did not want to rent space to a sex-toy store, no matter how educational it was. Her first choice of a location was in the Noe Valley, a location in central San Francisco full of hip boutiques. Blank found a good space but was turned down because the landlord did not approve of her business. With $4,000 in capital, Blank opened up her store in the edgy Mission District in San Francisco, an area replete with punk clubs, in March 1977. The tiny, two-hundred-square-foot space she rented gave the store a sense of intimacy that larger commercial sex-toy stores owned by Sturman did not have. An oriental rug adorned with pillows covered the floor, and macramé and ferns hung from the walls. Initially, she carried eighteen items and filled up the rest of the space with her antique vibrator collection. She had only two employees.557

Blank claims that hers was the first real woman-owned sex-toy store. “I wouldn’t really call [Eve’s Garden] a store,” Blank said, insisting that Eve’s Garden’s first store was a showroom. Blank says that Williams also didn’t consider it to be a full-on retail outlet. This issue of who was the first never really was settled between them. “For a long time she didn’t even credit me as being the first,” Williams said.⁵⁵⁸ Blank disagreed: “I gave Dell all the credit for giving me the idea for opening Good Vibrations.”⁵⁵⁹

Another thing that distinguished Blank’s store from Williams’s was a try-out booth. (“But I don’t encourage real masturbation trips here,” she was quick to reassure the Berkeley Barb in an interview.) Her store functioned both in opposition to the male-focused adult bookstores dotting the Bay Area at the time and also as a feminist homage to them. Instead of having peepshow booths that encouraged masturbation, she had a try-out booth that discouraged it.⁵⁶⁰ She painted the store chocolate brown in homage to the plain brown bags that sex toys were usually sold in, installing a “plain brown cabinet” to top off the look. A home bar served as a sales counter, and a display cabinet rounded out the space, which melded the do-it-yourself hippie ethos with an aura of sex education.⁵⁶¹

Blank was facing an uphill battle, though, as the very term “feminist adult bookstore” would have been considered an oxymoron among a large swath of San Francisco feminists, as two months after Good Vibrations opened, members of the group Women Against Violence and Pornography and Media (WAVPM) engaged in a “‘May Day Stroll’ through the city’s North Beach district to protest adult bookstores, as well as massage parlors, go-go bars, and XXX cinemas.”⁵⁶²

The centerpiece of her store was the display case featuring four different plug-in vibrators. The plug-in vibrator was already a feminist symbol thanks to Dodson and Williams, and its central location in the store alerted customers to the ethos of the store. Placing non-phallic vibrators front and center made a statement that the store was about women’s pleasure, not men’s idea of how women should experience pleasure. Among the vibrators were the Hitachi Magic Wand, a Wahl vibrator, and a square-headed General Electric model. All had been sold as nonsexual massagers by the corporations that produced them.563 In addition to the prominently displayed plug-in vibrators she also sold a handful of cheaper, less powerful vibrators: phallic eight-inch battery-operated vibrators, bullet vibes, and egg-shaped vibes.

The store was gaining in popularity, but Blank had committed a cardinal sin according to some feminists: She allowed men to shop in Good Vibrations. To these feminists, it was beside the point that only a few men ever stepped foot in the tiny, vibrator-packed store. Just the fact that men were welcome was enough to make them shun Good Vibrations. On one occasion, a male customer’s presence led the female customers to pointedly ask Blank: “What is he doing in here?” She told the customers that he was shopping, just like they were, but he was embarrassed and quickly fled the store. A few weeks later, Blank discovered that Good Vibrations was left off a map of women-friendly businesses. When she asked why, they told her that they’d overlooked it. But the creators of the map were well aware of the store. She suspected it was her male-friendly policy that left her off the map.⁵⁶⁴ What she didn’t realize at the time was that this was only the beginning of her battles with the feminist movement.

To be sure, not all feminists were opposed to her store. But the antipathy to it meant that she struggled to get publicity, which wasn’t a huge problem for Blank since sales were always secondary for her. She was a bundle of contradictions: an anticapitalist with a business, a saleswoman who was philosophically opposed to advertising. In this sense, she was Williams’s opposite. Williams was a former ad agency executive who wholeheartedly believed in marketing, and she used her skills to promote her business, while Blank adhered to a philosophy called “marketing without advertising,” a philosophy co-opted from her association with the Briarpatch Network, a business group founded in 1974 to promote ethical community-focused businesses. Inspired by Stewart Brand of The Whole Earth Catalog, Briarpatch believed that businesses should avoid traditional advertising because good businesses didn’t need to use gimmicks or hard-sell techniques.565

Instead of spending a lot of money on advertising, Blank threw parties, told all the progressive San Francisco organizations about Good Vibrations, and ran seminars. “You must remember, I was running this business on a shoestring. So buying advertising? You’ve got to be crazy,” Blank said. One of her most effective techniques was soliciting her customers to send her lists of the names of their friends who would not be “in the least offended to receive an explicit, honest and comprehensive sex-toy catalog” in exchange for a ten-dollar discount.⁵⁶⁶

She wasn’t too worried about generating business because, like Williams, Blank was not in the sex-toy business for profit. In that way, Blank was the opposite of Sturman and the other owners of adult bookstores who would sell sex toys at 800 to 1,000 percent markups. In other words, they would buy a plastic vibrator for a dollar and sell it for eight to ten dollars to the consumer, which explained why Sturman’s profits were so large. In contrast, Blank would sell the same dollar vibrator for two dollars. She made far less money, but she thought that giving consumers affordable prices was important. “I didn’t give a damn about making any money,” Blank said.⁵⁶⁷ While Sturman was a millionaire, Blank barely got by.

In other ways too, Good Vibrations was the polar opposite of Sturman’s store. Where Sturman hid his businesses’ financial information from everyone and did most of his business in cash, Blank’s store had open books, meaning any customer, employee, or competitor could take a look at her books. She would even share information with her competitors about the cheapest sex-toy suppliers to use.

Her antibusiness attitude extended to her day-to-day running of the store. “I never pushed product sales,” Blank said, “particularly to someone who came in and said I’d like to get a vibrator for my girlfriend or my wife.” Men coming in to buy sex toys on behalf of their wives was a surprisingly common occurrence. Even after the sexual revolution, women still felt uncomfortable discussing sex. “For [every person] doing free love and free sex, there were [ten to twenty times more] women [who] wouldn’t even talk about sex [even to their partners],” Blank said. Instead of asking the husband a series of questions about what he thought his wife would like, and then selling him a vibrator, she would say, “Do you think your wife would be willing to come in here with you?” If he answered in the affirmative, she’d say, “Take the catalog, go home, buy the book on vibrators or not, have a conversation with her, and if she’s still too embarrassed to come in here, come back and get what she says she wants.” It was the opposite of the hard sell.568

Even though she’d send customers away empty-handed, and the markups were small, Good Vibrations made enough money to keep its doors open and hire a few employees.

(*)

With Good Vibrations on the West Coast and Eve’s Garden in New York and in Austin, women’s sex-toy stores were beginning to spread throughout the country. Still, they comprised only three stores out of the thousands of adult bookstores in the United States. Sturman and the traditional adult bookstores for men were king. It didn’t have to be that way.

In Germany, the women-owned contraceptive and sex-toy chain Beate Uhse had more than twenty-five stores by the mid-1970s, and it had been in existence since 1948, more than a quarter century longer than Eve’s Garden.569 Braverman had seen Beate Uhse stores when he was in Europe, and soon after they founded Doc Johnson they began distributing their sex toys at her stores. Founded by Beate Uhse-Rotermund, a former Luftwaffe pilot and mother of four, Beate Uhse started as a mail-order company like Eve’s Garden and primarily sold contraceptives. Uhse-Rotermund avoided scrutiny from the government because she mostly didn’t advertise and instead gained business through unsolicited direct mailings to customers. Uhse built her first store, the Sex Institute for Marital Hygiene, in Flensburg, Germany, in 1962.⁵⁷⁰

Why did it take so long for a Beate Uhse–type store to open in the United States? “We probably won’t see any stores like Beate Uhse here until the Papal Estates come to terms with Margaret Sanger, and Ralph Ginzburg is elected Chairman of Lady Bird’s Beautifying Campaign,” wrote The East Village Other in 1967.⁵⁷¹ The publication had a point: Stores only gained a foothold nearly a decade after they wrote that, and nearly a quarter century after Alfred Kinsey published his first report on sexual behavior. In fact, Kinsey’s ideas had influenced Beate Uhse more than they influenced sex-toy stores in the United States. For example, Uhse’s catalogs from the 1950s emphasized the necessity of female orgasms and explained how products offered for sale would provide them. American sex-toy companies didn’t make such claims until the mid-1970s.

Why were Americans so slow to accept women’s sex-toy stores but accepting of men’s porn and sex-toy stores? It’s most likely due to Eve’s Garden’s and Good Vibrations’s unabashed focus on female sexuality, particularly masturbation. Focusing a store on female masturbation was radical, and it meant the store owners had to deal with the taboos surrounding it that were much greater than the male-masturbation taboos. They had to deal with the guilt and the shame that women felt about masturbating and about using a device to do so. Hence, the eight-page brochure Williams created for women to both explain how to use vibrators and to help women get over their shame and fear. “As you begin this process of self-pleasuring, you may experience feelings of self-doubt and guilt,” she wrote. To overcome these thoughts, she told women to “Speak to yourself internally or out loud with the following affirmation; I am not bad, I do not need to feel guilty, and I (insert your name) have a right to pleasure.”572 It’s difficult to imagine such an affirmation being placed at the front of a porn store for men. Even though she was selling her sex toys in such a different way than Sturman, she did have a connection with him. Doc Johnson was one of her sex-toy suppliers.⁵⁷³