Vibrators

The ‘Buzz’ on Vibrators

Suppressed sexuality and coy, coquettish femininity are nothing new to the world of women. Women are told to be polite, appreciative, and at all costs, protect their ‘womanhood,’ also known as their sexuality. Yet, women for ages have been fighting this oppression and pushing the limits of their physical roles as sexual beings; ancient Greek women used sex toys to illicit pleasure, and Asian women have been doing the same for a thousand years. There have been vast improvements in women’s sex toys, but exposure of them has been continually stifled by the overwhelming tone of patriarchy. By analyzing the vibrator in Wendy Griswold’s cultural diamond I will show how the agents of the vibrator patented women’s needs as a “disease,” how the receivers gratefully welcomed the new invention, and how the social world views women’s sexual independence.

The vibrator became widely used with the exposure of an “epidemic” among women. This “epidemic” entailed constant frustration, lack of concentration, and, among the seedy details, “excessive vaginal lubrication.” This was what physicians of the late 1800s coined as Hysteria. Hysteria, the root of the word stemming from the Greek notion of a “wandering womb,” was simply the plight of being a sexually frustrated woman. Yet, physicians did not see that as the case; they seemed to not want to identify sex drive with femininity (therefore, it had to be overtly medical). Rachel Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, through her “androcentric model of sexuality,” believes that physicians were quick to deny the sexual nature of the treatment (which, at the time, involved manual massage of the genita...

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...fter the publication of her book Good Vibrations: The Complete Guide to Vibrators. Blank has a fully operational website, complete with an online store, historical information (plus pictures of latter-day vibrators from her museum in San Francisco), and information on sex workshops, which discuss safe sex issues.

So, according to Griswold’s cultural diamond model, our cultural object is the vibrator, our agents are physicians as inventors/creators/designers, our receivers are women afflicted with Hysteria, and our social world stifles women’s sexuality through the facets of patriarchy and motherly influence. Yet, times are changing, and with entrepreneurs like Dodson and Blank, and authors like Maines, perhaps women will realize their roles as sexual beings and the world will identify femininity not with submission and weakness, but with power and assertiveness.