The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (21 page)

Mail order was a standard method of marketing vibrators between 1900 and 1920. The J. J. Duck Company of Toledo, Ohio, for example, offered a vibrator in its 1912 catalog
Anything Electrical
for $17.50, about $10 less than it charged for a five-car electric train.
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Sears, Roebuck and Company published an
Electrical Goods
catalog in 1918 that emphasized the modernity and efficiency of electrical appliances for the home. Among these were coffee urns, toasters, irons, heaters, hair dryers, and other such devices, as well as home electromedical apparatus. Sears offered three kinds of home medical batteries at prices ranging from $4.95 to $11.95, three violet ray devices, and six models of vibrator, plus the vibratory attachment for a home motor described in
chapter 1
(
fig. 24
). Vibrators ranged in price from a low of $5.95 to a deluxe “professional” model with numerous applicators and vibratodes at $28.75.
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In the twenties and early thirties, some brands of vibrator, such as the Star, were available at retail; print advertising advised male readers to purchase the devices as gifts for women. In 1922 two models of Star vibrators, “Such Delightful Companions!” were available, a deluxe model at $12.50 and a portable that retailed for $5, with “six feet of cord. Comes in good-looking black box. Perfect for week-end trips.”
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Violet ray devices and apparatus combining violet rays with electromechanical vibration were available in 1932 in the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada. According to their endorsers, “either Pulsation Massage or Suction Massage may be enjoyed,” noting that the glass and rubber applicators may be used “with every comfort and safety on the delicate parts of the face and body.”
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By far the most widely advertised home vibrator of the early twentieth century, however, was that of the Lindstrom Smith Company of Chicago, whose White Cross Electric Vibrators (
fig. 25
) were sold from about 1902 through the 1930s as “Swedish Movement right in your own home.” Advantages to purchasers included the savings over massage treatments in a doctor’s office and the privacy of self-treatment at home.
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The brand, White Cross, was drawn from the name of an Episcopalian sexual purity organization that flourished in Britain in the late 1880s. The society was introduced to America by Frances Willard of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union; its name on the Lindstrom Smith vibrator must have been intended to suggest virtue and chastity.
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Advertisements in
Needlecraft, Home Needlework Magazine, American Magazine
, Modern
Priscilla
, the
National Home Journal
, and
Hearst’s
between 1908 and 1916 told women:

F
IG
. 24. “Aids That Every Woman Appreciates,” Sears, Roebuck and Company, 1918.

F
IG
. 25. “Vibration is Life,” advertisement for Lindstrom Smith’s White Cross Vibrator, from
Modern Priscilla
, 1910.

You can relieve pain, stiffness and weakness, and you can make the body plump and build it up with thrilling, refreshing vibration and electricity. Just a few minutes’ use of the wonderful vibrator and the red blood tingles through your veins and arteries and you feel vigorous, strong and well. With our Electric Vibrator and special attachments you can convert
any chair
into a perfect vibrating chair without extra cost, getting the genuine Swedish Movement and wonderfully refreshing effects, the same treatment for which you would have to pay at least $2.00 each in a physician’s office.
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Sharing a page with the White Cross in the
National Home Journal
is an advertisement for Wade’s Golden Nervine for “Weak Men.” In the December 1910 Modern
Priscilla
, a woman is shown vibrating her coccyx and a man his stomach; the copy claims that their product eliminates the causes of disease by sending “the rich, red blood leaping and coursing through your veins and arteries,” which in turn “makes you fairly tingle with the joy of living.” A somewhat alarming testimonial claims that the White Cross “Cured Constipation of Three Years’ Standing.”
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The
American Magazine
of January 1913 had an advertisement for the White Cross showing a young woman in suggestive dishabille, applying the ball vibratode to the upper surface of her right breast. Enthusiastic boldface and italics punctuate the text:

Rests, strengthens, renews, repairs. Every vital organ is
crammed full of vitality
. The clogging waste is
swept away
by the coursing blood which the marvelous force sets leaping through every vein and artery
with the virile strength of perfect health
. You sleep as restfully
as you used to
. You awaken,
refreshed
mentally—physically—
strong in mind and body
and
glad to be alive
.
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A later advertisement in the same magazine included the orgasmic phraseology quoted in
chapter 1
:

Vibration is life. It will chase away the years like magic. Every nerve, every fibre of your whole body will tingle with force of your own awakened powers. All the keen relish, the pleasures of youth, will throb within you.
Rich, red blood
will be sent coursing through your veins and you will realize thoroughly the joy of living. Your self-respect, even, will be increased a hundredfold.
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The December 1928 advertising section of
Popular Mechanics
included a half-page ad for Lindstrom and Company’s “Elco Electric Health Generator,” a vibrator with violet ray and ozone capacity apparently marketed to families rather than explicitly to women as in the earlier advertisements.
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Vibrator advertising then disappeared from home magazines until the modern vibrator resurfaced in the 1960s as a frankly sexual toy.
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In the 1950s, massager (but not vibrator) advertisements did appear in some downmarket magazines for women, such as
Workbasket
, an inexpensive needlework periodical printed on pulp paper from 1930 through the mid-1960s. Called “Spot Reducers,” “Glorifier Massagers” (“Take Off Ugly Fat”), or “Massage Pillows,” these devices had flat working surfaces and no attachments or vibratodes, although one, the Viber-8, could be fastened under the chin. Many of the advertisements, however, conspicuously feature applications to the abdomen.
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Roger Blake, admittedly not the most reliable of historians, calls vibrators the “oldest sex gadget of the twentieth century” and mentions the appearance of the vibrator in erotic films in the 1920s. He describes a movie called “Widow’s Delight” in which “a finely dressed matron” rejects a kiss at the door from her well-dressed male escort, “then dashes into her bedroom and within seconds is stripped to her open girdle and stockings. She produces one of the first vibrator models on the market, with the motor largely exposed, and applies it liberally to her privates.”
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It seems likely that this kind of exposure helped to drive the vibrator from the medical and respectable home markets, since it made social camouflage very difficult to maintain.

Other factors must have contributed as well, such as the growing
understanding by both men and women of female sexual function, making it difficult to disguise the use of vibrators by either physicians or consumers as a mere therapeutic measure. Decades later, when the vibrator reemerged in advertising from its midcentury eclipse, few efforts were made to camouflage its sexual benefits.

Vibrators may not have been advertised in respectable publications, at least in the United States between about 1930 and the 1970s, but they must have been available. Albert Ellis does not seem to think, in 1963, that his readers will require any explanation of the assertion that one of the many techniques of arousing women to orgasm is “massage of their external genitalia with electric vibrators.”
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Paul Tabori, as well, expects in 1969 that Americans will be familiar with the use of both vibrators and massagers as “marital aids.”
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The chief difficulties of the device in the latter half of the twentieth century seem to have been male dismay at its efficacy compared with their own efforts and female ambivalence about the possibility of “addiction” to the multiple orgasms the device so effortlessly produced.
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Helen Singer Kaplan wrote in 1974, “The vibrator provides the strongest, most intense stimulation known. Indeed, it has been said that the electric vibrator represents the only significant advance in sexual technique since the days of Pompeii.”
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Even sex therapists, who conceded that the vibrator was an effective treatment for some kinds of sexual “dysfunction,” were slow to endorse it for “normal” heterosexual relations.
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Edward Dengrove, who had great hopes in 1971 for the vibrator as a sex aid, observed that some women did not want to use vibrators because they believed that only vaginal orgasms were desirable, and that “men are likely to reject its use because it makes them out to be incapable of producing orgasm in the female on their own; emasculating them, so to speak.”
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Some feminists have expressed highly ambivalent opinions of the vibrator. In Susan Strasser’s 1982 history of housework,
Never Done
, the author and one of her sources revile the invention, along with other modern expressions of female sexuality, in almost puritanical terms:

Sexual massage parlors and public pornography appeal primarily to men; despite
Playgirl
and bars with male go-go dancers, most women prefer to keep sex private, and many have bought themselves machines for sex partners. The vibrator—a one-time purchase that requires even less conversation than a prostitute—has left the sex shops and now appears in department and variety stores, manufactured by the same respectable corporations that market electric razors and hair dryers, with names like Feelin’ Good and Body Language, and instruction booklets that refer to a “soft touch body massager for … tender areas.” Sex researchers and therapists agree that the vibrator’s intense stimulation produces orgasms fast and consistently; many recommend them to patients, sometimes with warnings about the possibility of dependence on the gadget. The housewares industry’s entry to the market takes the device beyond therapy; as one writer points out, it “poses new questions: has achieving orgasm become just another way of releasing the tensions of day-to-day living? Has the vibrator, once considered a therapeutic device, become a sort of microwave oven of the bedroom—a fast, efficient means of getting sexual pleasure? Is the most efficient orgasm the best orgasm? Is the bedroom really the place for a time-saving device? If so, what are we saving all this time for?”
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