The Vibrator Comes of Age

The debut season of HBO’s Sex and the City is famous for a scene in which Miranda admits to her friends that she’s found her “ultimate love.” The scene unfolds as the friends gather for brunch and Carrie expresses her anxieties over her boyfriend’s announcement that he never wants to get married.

Miranda offers what she thinks is a comforting argument: In 50 years, she says, men will be obsolete.

Her evidence? Along with fertility treatments that allow women to have babies without men, you don’t even need them for sex as she’d “very pleasantly” just discovered.  

She then introduces her friends to her unlikely lover: the Vibratex Rabbit Pearl.

Such was the subsequent media excitement over that particular scene you’d have thought the vibrator had only just been invented.

“Most women at the time probably didn’t explore sex toys – or at least, anything too out there – until later in life,” says the health and sex writer, Kassandra Brabaw.

Cleopatra, Bees, and Hysteria

In fact, up until recently, people – even women – simply didn’t talk about vibrators. So much so that some now associate that reluctance with a deeply-entrenched cultural fear of female desire.

There are many stories in history and legend where independent-minded, sexually rampant females are seen as posing a particular threat to the social order.

Could there have been a more potent symbol for female sexuality and liberation than the vibrator – which, in some ways, makes the male role in sexual intercourse irrelevant?

Quite tellingly, male-dominated popular mythology has ascribed the vibrator’s fortuitous conception to two aptly scandalous scenarios.  

The first has Cleopatra filling a gourd with bees to stimulate her genitals. The second popular theory says that the device was invented by Victorian doctors as a tool to cure ‘hysteria’ – a condition then believed to be prevalent among women.

While there is no way to prove or disprove the first hypothesis, scientists are still arguing over the merits of the second theory.

A Period of Trial and Error

Many associations have been made between vibrators and the diagnosis of a multitude of health issues in the 1800s, including aggression, fainting, and mental illness. The consensus in the medical community at the time seemed to be that the remedy to these ailments required massages.

“In fact, these women were suffering from straightforward sexual frustration – and by the mid-19th century the problem had reached epidemic proportions, said to afflict up to 75% of the female population,” writes author and journalist Decca Aitkinhead in an article for The Guardian.

However, there is no evidence of any doctor taking pleasure from the titillating medical massage proviso.

On the contrary, according to medical journals, doctors complained that it was tedious, inefficient, and physically exhausting.

Since they were practicing in the Victorian age of invention, the solution was obvious: construct a labor-saving device that would get the job done with less manual effort.

There were some experiments in the mid-19th century with a wind-up vibrator. But the devices proved to be underpowered – with the unfortunate propensity to fizzle out before finishing the job.

In the 1860s, someone invented a pelvic douche that fired the jet of water at the clitoris, claiming it could induce ‘paroxysm’ within four minutes.

But that didn’t prove sufficiently effective, either, perhaps because its operation required the help of another person.

“Too Much of a Good Thing”

History credits the Victorian doctor and writer, Joseph Mortimer Granville, with the invention of the first successful electric vibrator some 20 or so years later, in 1883.

The only similar machine that was on the market at the time was Dr. George Taylor’s steam-powered – and somewhat ominously-monikered – “manipulator.”  

But Taylor wrote in 1869 that physicians had to be careful to limit the “treatment” of women’s pelvic disorders with his device. He noted that some patients were “inclined to demand too much of a good thing.”

None of this plainly suggests a link to female masturbation. What is clear is that Victorian society regarded vibrators as valid medical instruments – as remote from anything sexual as a stethoscope.

One Victorian physician is on record advocating the use of vibrators for illnesses of “the intestines, kidneys, lungs, and skin.”

Granville’s device, in particular, became wildly popular among women – and doctors did try to find uses for his device up through the early 1900s.

By 1915, however, the jig was up and the American Medical Association (AMA) took a stand, calling the vibrator industry “a delusion.”

The AMA’s refutation led manufacturers to gradually change their approach to advertising. Some soon started marketing the devices as “home appliances” for men and women of all ages.

They ran ads in magazines, claiming that vibrators ‘could’ possibly cure everything from wrinkles to malaria.

One company boasted of its wares’ ability to “quicken the pulse” and “stimulate the brain,” which were guaranteed to “bring about a delightful sensation of renewed energy.”

The Vibrator Comes of Age

By the 1920s, however, the vibrator began to appear in pornography, which undermined any social camouflage of the device as medical paraphernalia.

Physicians quietly dropped vibrators from their office practices, the only exceptions being chiropractors, who concentrated their attentions on the skeletal muscles, not the genitalia.

Still, such as the commercial success of the devices that in 1956, Sears produced its own vibrator, announcing that the product could give you that “great-to-be-alive” feeling.

The company started selling worldwide in department stores and popular mail-order catalogs such as Good Housekeeping.

Masturbation – female self-stimulation, in particular – was still viewed as shameful, which meant that vibrators were not advertised as sex gadgets. Instead, manufacturers continued to use euphemistic language and imagery to suggest the usage options of their products.

Be that as it may, women never knew what to expect from sales representatives when they walked into a department store to buy a Sears vibrator.

This stigma only began to recede in the 1970s, when American feminist activists like Betty Dodson and Dell Williams made the vibrator a symbol of women’s sexual autonomy.

Of course, the device has since then steadily claimed its place as an icon in the women’s empowerment movement.

Now, twenty years after its commercial explosion with the advent of internet shopping, one might finally say the vibrator has finally come of age.

Surely, its cloaked, controversial, and once-furtive ascent to such glorified heights hasn’t been easy.

Indeed, if the history of the vibrator tells us anything, it is that society has been determined for millennia to deny what is now a widely accepted truth.

That is, often enough, a resourceful, independent-minded woman doesn’t need a man to achieve her goals. 

Feature Photo Credit: Exxxotica, New York, 2008. Other photos are courtesy of Vintage Everyday.