Today vibrators, dildos, and other sexual aids are understood as toys for women’s sexual satisfaction. But this wasn’t always the case. Originally, the vibrator was understood and used as a medical tool by male doctors on women for “physical therapy.” The demand for this treatment was caused by (1) the cultural prohibition of women’s masturbation as unchaste, and (2) the failure of male-centered sexual relationships to produce orgasm regularly in most women. Until the 1920s, genital massage to orgasm by a physician was a standard medical treatment for “hysteria,” the illness commonly attributed to nontraditional women (e.g., unmarried women). The electric vibrator of the 1880s was itself a response to physicians’ demands for a faster method of “physical therapy” for female patients.

The electric vibrator began to sell directly to women through catalogs and magazine advertisements beginning in the early 1900s. Decades later, it was transformed into a toy and sold as such to individual women. While some sex-toy shops now sell these products, and virtually all drug stores sell electric “massagers,” women commonly buy sex toys from company representatives at women-only sex-toy parties that take place in individual women’s homes.

The sale of sex toys follows an American tradition of in-home marketing to women. Selling women products in their homes at parties has been a popular marketing technique for decades; Tupperware parties are the quintessential example. (Pampered Chef parties are also common today.) Some women even refer to their sex-toy parties in code as “Tupperware parties.” Women have often found fun and empowerment in the push to buy ever more plastic items. But are those items necessary? Do they cause women to focus on their own individual lifestyles rather than their place in a sexist social order? Certainly most American women in the 1950s didn’t ultimately find fulfillment in kitchens neatly organized into color-coded Tupperware containers.

Sex toys are the plastic that promise fulfillment to today’s American women. Vibrators and other sex toys constitute the technological route to a self-reflexive body project of female orgasm. Yet, where exactly do these pleasure providers fit into feminism? While cultural norms are no longer such that women would see a physician rather than masturbate themselves, many women still complain about sex lives ruled by male-centered desires. Does the body project of technologically achieved female orgasm channel women’s attention to their individual situations and prevent a broader critique of the cultural norms for male and female sexuality? Do BOBs (“battery operated boyfriends”) cause not only good vibrations for individual women, but also reverberation in the larger society?

Technologies and the body projects they support can either disrupt or reinforce normative discourses of the gendered body. Is this new plastic purchased at parties liberating or just another form of containment? How much Tupperware does a woman really need to buy, before she’s been bought?

Suggested Readings:
Alison Clarke, Tupperware: The Promise of Plastic in 1950s America. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian, 1999.

Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins, 1999.

Martha McCaughey and Christina French, “Women’s Sex-Toy Parties: Technology, Orgasm, and Commodification,” Sexuality and Culture 5:3. 2001.