Consider the humble vibrator. Invented as a medical device in the 19th century, it has gone on to become a Mad Men plot line, a Sex and the City tie-in, a celebrity talking point and a feminist cause.



Not only are vibrators not invisible, they’re hardly even avoidable. New vibrators are unveiled to the awed public at TechCrunch conferences. They are reviewed on Gizmodo. They comprise valid talking points for celebrities, including Barbara Walters. (Walters named hers “selfie”, Alicia Silverstone endorses “eco-friendly” vibrators, Beyoncé’s is allegedly gold-plated and Maggie Gyllenhaal claims an “incredible collection”.) High-end companies market them as luxury products. One 2012 survey found that 52.5% of women used them, whether alone or with a partner, and that women who used vibrators were actually more likely to take care of their sexual health by going to the gynecologist for regular exams.

It’s odd to admit this, but vibrators may have gone way beyond not being shameful. They may just be cool.

It’s been a strange road to this point. For one thing: vibrators, despite their generally positive connotations today, were not invented out of some entirely benevolent desire to give women orgasms.

“The electric vibrator was actually invented by a British physician in the 1880s to treat nervous conditions of various kinds in both men and women,” says Lynn Comella, associate professor of gender and sexuality studies at the University of Nevada, who’s currently completing a book on the subject.

Specifically, vibrators were used in treating “hysteria”: doctors gave manual genital massages to unruly women, with the goal of bringing on “hysterical paroxysm”. The vibrator was a quicker way to bring on that particular and apparently medically inexplicable fit. Today, we’d hardly find any of this inspirational; “hysteria” diagnoses could include forced institutionalization and clitoridectomies, along with the manual treatments. And even the “massages” themselves were often not undertaken by choice.

But, despite the oppressiveness of the “hysteria” panic – and the odd sexual split consciousness of Victorians – women seemed to pick up on what the devices were really doing. And advertisers started quietly signaling their better, more recreational use in ads.

“Vibrators were marketed initially as medical devices and beauty and health devices,” Comella says. “Although their sexual uses were known, advertisers in the early 20th century were coy, using coded language to both hint at and mask their sexual uses.”

The Vibra Touch massager, in the 1970s. Photograph: Archive

For example, in the 1908 advertisement for the Bebout vibrator, which lands somewhere between New Age relaxation tape and religious dogma, we are informed that the Bebout is “gentle, soothing, invigorating and refreshing. Invented by a woman who knows a woman’s needs. All nature pulsates and vibrates with life.” (This soon takes a turn into the vampiric, when we are informed that “the most perfect woman is she whose blood pulsates and oscillates in unison with the natural law of being.”)

Oscillating blood aside, well into the 20th century, vibrators have been sold disguised as something other than sex toys – as weight-loss devices (as noted in the Mad Men episode where Peggy Olsen finds some relief from the burdens of being a working gal) or as “personal massagers”, like VibraTouch, whose 1970s box showed a woman happily applying it to her shoulder.

So when did it become acceptable to refer to vibrators as sex toys? Or to refer to them at all?

The answer comes through the convergence of three important historical forces: feminism, LGBT rights and television.

In the late 1960s and 1970s, feminists began to dispute men’s received wisdom about things like the “vaginal orgasm” (then supposedly preferable to the clitoral variety). The rising gay rights movement, with its push for increased visibility and pride, also meant that more people were talking about sex, and defining what they wanted out of sex, while repudiating shame. Sex educators like Betty Dodson began to advocate for masturbation – often, as in Dodson’s case, with vibrators; she led (ahem) hands-on workshops – as a healthy and necessary way for women to get to know their own bodies and preferences.

It was at around this time that feminist sex toy stores – Eve’s Garden in New York, Good Vibrations in San Francisco and the bi-coastal phenomenon of Babeland – began to spring up, with welcoming, well-lit environments and highly trained and informative staff, as ways for women to get beyond shopping in uncomfortable or male-dominated venues like your standard porn store. The effort was often spearheaded by queer women, and it eventually began to change not only how sex toys were sold, but how they were made.

“You had retailers that were trying to cater to a less skeevy market, but the products were pretty much the same,” says sex educator and journalist Lux Alptraum. “You had lesbians and feminists starting to make their own sex toys. When we think about two women having sex, there’s more likely to be toys.”

Alptraum points to companies like Tantus, which was founded in 1997 and was instrumental in popularizing the medically safe silicone over popular soft PVC plastics that had been linked to endocrine disruption and cancer.

“Women-friendly sex shops also played an important role in putting demands on an industry not typically known for producing quality products,” says Comella. “Good Vibrations, for example, offered customers warranties and were not afraid to send defective products back to manufacturers.”

With less stigma, there was more pressure for vibrators to be well-made, healthy and effective. And, though vibrators are traditionally focused on clitoral or vaginal stimulation, vibrators focused on prostate stimulation have been on the rise as well, which is helpful in getting the whole gender identity spectrum in on the action.

And then there was TV. Which may have been the one thing to push the whole discussion over the edge, and into the public eye, once and for all.

Carrie Bradshaw pondering her vibrator in Sex and the City. Photograph: Screengrab

“It was only really in 1999 that [sex toys] began to gain some respectability in the mainstream,” says Filip Sedic, founder and CEO of high-end sex toy company LELO. “That was largely thanks to an episode of Sex and the City, which featured a ‘rabbit-style’ vibrator. That episode, in which Charlotte was so enamored by her sex toy that her friends had to stage an intervention, caused a sudden increase in interest in personal pleasure products.”

“Increase” is putting it mildly. At that time, Sex and the City occupied the dead center of the cultural conversation; it effectively popularized everything from shoe brands to specific cocktails. But demand for the Rabbit Pearl, which provided clitoral and vaginal stimulation simultaneously, was riotous. In 1999, UK store Ann Summers says it sold over one million rabbit vibes alone.

And thus, it was upon us: the first celebrity vibrator. The Rabbit was so trendy that not only was it more than acceptable to know what it was, you could actually admit to owning one.

Which more or less brings us up to the present day. By now, vibrators are not only a recognized industry, they attract major technological talent.

“By 2008, women were considered to be the ‘hottest’ growth market in the adult industry,” Comella says. “What you began to see were sex toy companies founded by mechanical engineers and design school grads who were really interested in bringing ideas about form and function and, importantly, lifestyle branding, to the forefront of the ‘novelty’ sector.”

Sedic, for example, has a background in smartphones, and his company’s vibrators have a particularly sleek, minimalistic, future-by-Stanley-Kubrick look that unavoidably reminds one of a sexy iPhone. Alptraum also points to the rise of independent designers.

“There are three factors that have aggressively sped up innovation,” she says. “One of them is decreasing stigma. MIT engineers can say this is a viable career. [Factor] two is 3D printing. You can now more easily prototype, more cheaply prototype. And three is crowdfunding. People with an idea and a 3D printer can now get something made.”

With bigger budgets and easier manufacturing comes more research and development – Sedic says that LELO’s in-house designers “work with CAD, 3D modeling, clay, wood, you name it” – and with research and development comes the chance for the products to work in new ways.

LELO’s Ora, which won the Cannes Lions award for product design in 2014, is a clitoral vibrator designed to simulate the feeling of oral sex. (The upgraded Ora 2 model was released last June.) Meanwhile, the Womanizer, which has gotten rave reviews everywhere from O Magazine to Autostraddle, works on the principle of suction.

“The quality of sex toys across the industry is improving generally, and that’s very heartening,” Sedic says. “But there are still common mistakes that we try to avoid. For example, we try not to ‘gender’ LELO products except where it’s more or less unavoidable, and we try to make predicts for specific purpose but without dictating how they should be used because everybody’s sensations are different. It’s a fine line.”

That said: just because you can buy a $12,000 24-karat gold vibrator does not necessarily mean you have to. At least not on your first try. Alptraum recommends buying a cheap “bullet vibe” model (a Doc Johnson “Silver Bullet” is typically available for less than $10 from online outlets) before anything else, simply to figure out what you like. After that, it’s really a matter of personal choice: “There’s a vibrator that’s totally worth it to some people, but not worth it to me, because our bodies are different,” she says.

But, if you recall, that’s what the entire history of the vibrator’s long, slow march to the mainstream has been about: figuring out what you, personally, want. If we can say nothing else about the state of the vibrator in 2015, it’s that you now have a whole lot of options.