Good Vibrations
When I pick up the “Premier Vibrator” in the Yale Medical Historical Library, I am surprised by how heavy it is. It seems less like a massage tool and more like a power drill. Its nameplate reads: “Premier Vibrator/110 Volts DC…Patent Applied For.” Thought to be made in 1896, it was probably one of the United States’ earliest vibrator patents. Accompanying it in its purple-velvet lined box is an oil dropper, as well as various rubber attachments — or vibratodes — that are equal parts menacing and confusing. It is a far cry from the hot pink “rabbits” we know today.
New Haven itself was once home to large-scale vibrator production. The Eli Whitney Museum owns and exhibits the collection of Yale Medical School alumnus A.C. Gilbert and his company. The A. C. Gilbert Company was the largest toy company in America and the largest employer in New Haven from the 1920s to the 1950s. Gilbert went out of business in 1967 and is little known today, remembered mostly for his toy construction — or “Erector” — sets, while not much historical attention has focused on his patent №1,668,364: “The Vibrator.”
Gilbert’s vibrator was not a device intended solely for tired feet. An unsigned document from the 1920s in the Gilbert Catalog Archive, housed at the Eli Whitney Museum, describes the Gilbert Vibrator. The documents proclaims that “one object of the invention is to provide a means by which married people can enhance sexual excitement with each other so as to enjoy completion of normal sexual intercourse with the least expenditure of time and energy.” It continues: “without proper stimulation… sex can become a chore and every excuse is used to avoid this obligation … the vibrator is the quick and simple solution.” According to Bruce Watson, author of The Man Who Changed Boys and Toys, Gilbert tested the gadget amongst New Haven friends and reported that “all couples have admitted that their sexual relationships have immeasurably improved. Husbands feel proud of their new ability to satisfy their wives…The Wife is now extremely happy and content with marital life. The Husband is proud of his new prowess.”
Bill Brown, Director of the Eli Whitney Museum, says that while the specifics of the production of Gilbert’s vibrators are unknown, the large number remaining in the archive suggests they were produced in large quantities. Vibrators were part of Gilbert’s Polar Club line — the brand used to market his electromechanical household appliances — and according to Brown, they generated just as much revenue as his toys. Under the Polar Club and “Vitalator” Brands, the A.C. Gilbert Company marketed vibrators ostensibly for “beautifying” purposes. However, one magazine advertisement from 1922 boasts that their vibrator is “recommended for nervous disorders,” bringing “instant relief to…general ‘nerviness.’”
“General nerviness” appears to be the 1920s’ version of hysteria. Since Ancient Greece, women had been diagnosed with hysteria, a condition in which the uterus supposedly disconnected and began to wander the body. The cure to hysteria was the coaxing of the organ back into its original position in the pelvis. In his 1653 medical compendium, Pieter van Foreest advised that when symptoms of hysteria presented themselves, it was “necessary to ask a midwife to assist, so that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside.” By the Victorian era, when most midwives had been pushed out of the medical profession, women would have repeat hysteria therapies at doctors’ offices and spas. In the words of historian Rachel P. Maines, “doctors inherited the task of producing orgasm in women because it was a job nobody else wanted.”
Maines also asserts that hysteria was so common in women because female masturbation was seen as unchaste and potentially detrimental to health. Furthermore, the androcentric definition of sex — which sees sex as three essential steps of preparation for penetration (foreplay), penetration, and male orgasm — fails to produce an orgasm in most women. Indeed, the reason that the physician’s massage of the clitoris could be seen as a clinical, non-sexual treatment was because clitoral stimulation was not at all considered a part of sexual intercourse. Through hysteria treatment, the female orgasm was enabled precisely because it was denied.
Physicians thus viewed clitoral stimulation not as an act of sexual pleasure, but as a routine chore — and a difficult one. In 1660, a notable British surgeon lamented the difficulty of performing clitoral massage, comparing it to “the game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.” In general, physicians hated performing hysteria therapy, but enjoyed its profitability. With the advent of electromechanical technology, the dilemma of physicians was solved. Thus originated the vibrator.
The predecessor to the first American vibrator was a steam-powered massage and vibratory apparatus, patented in 1869 by physician George Taylor, which was in part designed for treating female disorders. Taylor made sure to warn physicians and spas — his main market — to supervise treatment with the “Manipulator” to prevent “overindulgence.” Taylor’s patent was a giant apparatus, consisting of a table and wheels. By the turn of the 20th century, however, handheld vibrators were readily available. For the next two decades, the vibrator was increasingly marketed as a household appliance to aid in health, relaxation, and beautification, appearing in periodicals such as Home Needlework Journal, and Woman’s Home Companion. Advertisements often contained ambiguous phrases such as the promise that “all the pleasures of youth…will throb within you.” At the end of the 1920s, this ambiguity — or what Paines calls the vibrator’s “social camouflage” — disintegrated as the medical community learned more about women’s sexuality, and as vibrators began to feature in pre-pornographic stag films. The advertisements disappeared from magazine pages and the mention of vibrators disappeared from common discourse.
Vibrators did not resurface in the popular media until the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s — and this time as a sexual device, rather than a medical one. It was an acknowledgment and embrace — finally — of the female orgasm. But state regulation quickly kicked in. By 1973, Texas introduced its Obscene Device Law, a statute prohibiting the promotion and sale of sexual devices. The law is, in fact, still on the books today, though declared by a judge as unconstitutional and unenforceable since 2008. Alabama, Colorado, Georgia, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Virginia also had laws banning the sale of sexual devices at different points. Alabama remains the only state where the purchase of vibrators is still illegal, its anti-vibrator law upheld in 2009 by the Alabama Supreme Court.
The de-medicalization of vibrators did not just bring on legal implications for their sale and possession, but also stripped them of the social respectability they once had. Their association with sexuality has resulted in an inextricable association with shame.
As a result, even today, most sex shops or online distributors of vibrators operate policies of discretion in order to ease the customer’s embarrassment. At a sex shop in Orange, Conn., the manager informed me that the shopping bags are black, with no labels, and that the shop attendants take extra care to take items out of packaging and DVDs out of cases, and don’t give out receipts. Some customers using credit cards ask how the transaction will appear on their bill and the shop attendants assure them that the name of the sex shop is omitted.
The manager told me that their biggest rush is on the weekends, with large crowds of women coming in after the bars close. The store intentionally stays open till midnight on weekdays and till 2 a.m. on weekends. “You’ll find that most of [the customers] are intoxicated,” she said, and suggested that people like to come in when they’re inebriated because they are more “open.”
Since the 1960s, popular acceptance of vibrators has grown. A stunning breakthrough in public perception came in 2012, when in the months following the launch of the Fifty Shades of Grey book trilogy, sex toys underwent a 400 percent growth in sales in the US market. In 1976, there were only half a dozen pleasure product companies in the world. Today, the sex toy industry is a $15 billion market. However, it’s worth noting that the male-dominated pornography industry currently stands at about $97 billion.
Furthermore, the boom in the sex toy market doesn’t mean that vibrators have shed the shame attached to them since their de-medicalization. Even sex toys companies embed a sense of indecency in the advertising of their products. In 2012, sex toy manufacturer Adam & Eve published a publicity infographic with a heading that read, “If she doesn’t admit it, there’s a pretty good chance she’s lying [about using a vibrator].” Meanwhile, the fourth link to come up when you google “buying a vibrator” is a HuffPost article titled “The Shame-free Guide To Buying a Sex Toy.”
At Yale, the embarrassment surrounding the vibrator is alive and well. One female Yale student who asked to remain anonymous refers to herself as a “vibrator dealer” and has bought around 30 vibrators for other Yale students on her Amazon account. She said, “People don’t want to order [a vibrator] on their own Amazon account because their parents might see it or [they] don’t really want to go a store because they’re hard to find, they’re usually kind of sketchy, and it just feels kinda weird.” She remarked that perhaps women feel so uncomfortable buying vibrators because “by placing an Amazon order, even walking into a sex shop, you’re articulating the sexuality that’s always been societally suppressed.” Even in a liberal space like Yale, many female students feel discomforted by vibrators — and this feeling can be even more extreme for students from Southern conservative backgrounds. “After I got mine, I mentioned it to some friends from home. I’m from the South and most of my friends were like, ‘oh my god a vibrator uhh,’” she added, acting out revulsion. Another female Yale student, who lives in an apartment, said that sometimes she feels uncomfortable using her vibrator in case her roommates hear her.
Both students affirm that talking about vibrators openly has made other women they know more comfortable with the idea of having one. They agree that the positive encouragement from each other to take their sexual pleasure into their own hands, instead of depending on Yale hook-up culture, functions as a “reclamation” and a type of “Fuck Yale Men” initiative.
But as open as both students are with each other, they admit that they keep their vibrators in their sock drawer or in their nightstand. As much as we like to think that at Yale we’ve reached a point where female sexual pleasure is fully celebrated, vibrators remain something concealed. A 1920 A.C. Gilbert advertisement for the Polar Club vibrator exclaimed that “a vibrator is an indispensable requisite of every woman’s dressing table.” Today, it’s just as much a requisite as ever, but you won’t find it sitting proudly atop anyone’s nightstand.
