This mantra has guided us since Good Vibrations came into being in San Francisco in 1977, at a time when sex education and community were a vital part of the city’s legendary alternative culture. Believing that we all deserve pleasure and permission to explore self-love and self-pleasure are still radical—and important—ideas and acts.
Good Vibrations was America’s first sex-positive, women-friendly store. We became a beloved institution to millions of people because the Good Vibrations difference is embedded in its history. Our founder, Joani Blank, had a master’s degree in public health; she’d worked with San Francisco Sex Information and at the pre-orgasmic women’s program at the University of California-San Francisco Medical School. From this experience she knew that selling sex toys to women required an aesthetically pleasing and comfortable environment, but it would not truly be a successful endeavor unless she could also provide information to customers about the toys themselves and using them safely, as well as about arousal and their own and their partners’ erotic anatomy. She wanted to provide all this in a setting where customers would feel safe. Thus, from the beginning, Good Vibrations specialized in providing knowledge as well as high-quality products. What she may not have foreseen was that Good Vibrations’ customers would also give us plenty of information along the way.
Almost forty years later, this book is based not only on our history of providing knowledge to our customers—though that is part of its heritage—but our perspective has also been vastly informed by decades of being told what our customers want and need. Just as we have designed toys, made movies, and written books inspired by these customer exchanges, we’ve also learned from them what we didn’t already know. Customers tell us about new ways to use the toys we sell, gaps in their sex lives, their ideas for products, their identities and communities, and their responses to the erotic books and movies we carry. They have plenty of questions for us, too, and problems they want solved. Oftentimes we have answers and solutions; when we don’t, we research the issues thoroughly. In turn, this information makes its way into our Sex Educator Sales Associates training. “SESA” is the phrase we use to describe our customer service staff; they get more informational training about sex than many medical doctors do. This perspective also influences our outreach to community experts who teach in-store classes, people in charge of further product development, and those who decide the content of our online blog. It’s our goal to be able to talk to any adult about their sex life, and we honor the trust of our customers, who tell us about their lives, desires, and sexual dilemmas. We’re grateful to all those who’ve shared information and questions. We’re inspired by the communities of erotic affiliation that surround us. Especially during the pre-Internet era of our history, our Call Center SESAs took calls from people all over the USA and the world, so we know that people everywhere have sex questions—and interesting sex lives. We’ve always prided ourselves on meeting the customer “where they are,” and in doing so we not only ask questions but also listen with a non-judgmental ear about the innermost sanctum of their private lives.
Most of us weren’t given an operating manual for our wonderful bodies and the myriad sensations we can experience with them, especially not in the “sex education” classes we took in school. Can you imagine if Driver’s Ed consisted of a teacher saying, “Here’s a car: Now don’t drive it!”? That’s the way much sex education is currently taught! Pleasure products can be purchased in all kinds of places now, but one thing most venues do not provide is trained personnel who can talk to customers comfortably and frankly, giving information about most anything related to sex toys and their use. In a world full of fabulous pleasure items, most consumers still walk into an adult-oriented store ill-prepared due to the limited sex education they received, wondering what’s most popular rather than what’s suited for them in particular. In order to achieve optimally pleasurable and healthy sex lives, it’s left to each one of us to learn what we need, toy choices included—and Good Vibrations has prioritized making that kind of information available since we first opened our doors.
When I started working at Good Vibrations in 1990 I was working on my doctorate in sexology, and I’m sure Joani Blank hired me because of that sex education focus. I attended the Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, whose greatest impact on me was an introduction to the notion of “sex-positivity.” After a lifetime growing up in, and dealing with, an often sex-negative culture, it was a breath of fresh air to hear sex and sexuality described as fundamentally positive forces—at least potentially—in our lives. I took this new knowledge as a call to action, determined to help make this perspective more widely available. Negative messages can be insidious, affect us deeply, and are hard to shake. I want every single person to have access to a sex life that is right for them, with all the elements they need for it to be truly sex-positive: appropriate information and health services, understanding of and adhering to consent, healing from shame, compatible partners, communication skills to speak their truths, desires, and boundaries, and people around them who respect all of that. These are just some of the elements that would make up a sex-positive world.
That’s not the world most people live in now. But we’ve tried to assemble all these elements in this book, or at least information about them. We’ve tried to impress upon readers that each of us is unique, with varying interests and needs; to make diverse information available that is relevant to people across the sex and gender spectrum.
Speaking of which, if you are transgender you might look at some of the sections in this book and wonder if they’re relevant to you. You might notice that sometimes we use very specific language and sometimes our gender references are more general. Our primary goal is educational; with that in mind, we’ve tried to be as specific as we can, yet still be as inclusive as possible. In some chapters it will be easy for people to imagine or apply to themselves whatever we are discussing. In fact, if you can relate to a particular statement, it might have nothing to do with your gender identity but be more relevant to your age, your religious upbringing, to whom you are attracted, or any other attributes that make you the person you are.
Gender and gender identity are important—but they are not always the most significant ways that we identify or experience certain elements of sexuality. We’ve tried to strike the right balance, aware that language and ideas about identity and inclusivity are in a constant state of flux. We hope we have managed to achieve that balance, or that we’ve come close, throughout this book. We want you to know, at least, that we have not mindfully sought to exclude anyone.
Besides bringing over two decades of experience in the unique profession of Good Vibrations Staff Sexologist, I’ve tried to impart a big-picture perspective about sex and culture to these pages. “Sexology” is an academic or professional focus that can be described as “what people do sexually and how they feel about it”; it implies diversity and multiple perspectives, and carries the message that our attitudes, as well as those of our families, friends, partners and communities, color our sexual choices, feelings, and experience. Thus, while we’ve included a lot of details about specific sex acts, toys and positions—way more than overt discussion of sociocultural issues—we also include this sexological perspective, as well as Good Vibrations’ own point of view, to all the information in these pages.
There’s nothing simple about sex; I’ve found it to be an endlessly fascinating topic to explore and to learn more about all the time, and if you too are bitten by the sexology bug, we include a fabulous recommended reading list to give you a leaping-off point to explore more deeply the topics that call to and interest you.
Many staff members at Good Vibrations have helped make this book a reality over a span of many years. We’ll call some of them out in our Acknowledgements, as well as the many experts we relied upon for information. The cultural wisdom of our original home, San Francisco, is also part of what we’ve put together here—particularly the San Francisco we’ve known during impactful decades from the 1970s onward in regard to sexual freedom and diverse perspectives. I am perfectly happy to acknowledge that if I’d been a sexologist, or sold sex toys, in a place where people were afraid of their own desires, pleasures, and diversity, we’d have way less to bring you in these pages.
Wherever you live, whatever your desires, I hope you find in these pages relevant information for a more fabulous sex life. That’s what inspired this book: the hope that we can take the conversations on sexuality that occur in Good Vibrations staff trainings, on the sales floor, and in our educational programming—and in many other contexts in our unique home, the San Francisco Bay Area—and bring that to you wherever you are.
—Carol Queen, PhD, 2015