January 26, 2019 • 20 mins
Recently, CES came under fire for rescinding an award given to a handsfree device that allows for a blended orgasm. This points to a broader anxiety our society has around female pleasure. According to a recent study, around half of American adults use a vibrator on a regular basis -- yet the devices remain controversial. In this classic episode, Cristen and Molly explore the history of vibrators, from Victorian society to the modern day.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Hey, this is Annie and you're listening to STUFFMA never
told you. Some of you might have heard about a
little bit of a kerfuffle at this year's Consumer Electronics
(00:27):
Show in Las Vegas, CES. So what happened was the
Laura de Carlo team submitted this product called S to
the c e S Innovation Awards and Oh Say is
a hands free device that allows for the blended orgasm,
complete with micro robotic technology, and they won the CS
(00:48):
Innovation Awards Honore in the Robotics and Drones category and
to win, the product was vetted by the Consumer Technology
Association the c t A and the ct A is
c S his owner, and it was also vetted by
a panel of independent judges. A month after the announcement,
the team at de Carlo was notified by CS and
(01:09):
the c t A that their award had been presentded.
On top of that, they would not be permitted to
showcase or exhibit their product at CS. They have given
several inconsistent reasons for this award being rescinded. Quote entries
deemed by c ti A and their sole discretion to
be a moral obscene in decent profane are not in
(01:30):
keeping with ctias image will be disqualified. C TIA reserves
the right in its sole discretion to disqualify any entry
at any time which, in CTA's opinion, endangers the safety
or well being of any person or fails to comply
with these official rules. So women's sexual pleasure is either
according to this immoral, indecent, obscene, profane, or not in
(01:53):
keeping with ct AS image. Okay, decal I wanted to
know how they made it past all the judges and
staff if this is the case, and the team received
a letter from c t a s president and CEO
Gary Shapiro and the executive vice president Karen Tia, declaring
OSA didn't even qualify for the category. Never mind, it's
the subject of eight pending patents for robotics, biomimicry, and
(02:16):
engineering feats. Also, tech aimed at male pleasure is perfectly
acceptable and often lauded at c e S. From the
De Carlo company's founder, Laura how to quote, you cannot
pretend to be unbiased if you allow a sex robot
in the shape of an unrealistic female body, but not
a vagina focused robotic massager for blended orgasm. This whole
(02:41):
conversation touches on so much more than just ce s,
but problems in the tech industry at large and really
society as a whole. If you want to hear more
conversation around this, I'm going to be guesting on the
show Tech Stuff to dive into it. So go check
that out. And in the meantime, here an oldie but
a goodie looking at the history of the vibrator. Enjoy.
(03:07):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told You from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. This
is Molly and I'm Kristin. Kristen. Let's dive right in
to some statistics our favorite thing, all right, and it
will I think we'll ease us into the topic of
the day. Okay, So I want to talk about something
(03:29):
that was published in two thousand nine which revealed that
about half of American adults use a vibrator on a
regular basis, on a regular basis, and that is men,
that's women, that's gay, that's straight, always people using vibrators.
And what was interesting about this study in particular, not
(03:51):
just the number of people that use vibrators, but what
was really interesting was that the women who used them
had better sexual health because they're more likely to have
a gynecological exam during the past year, They're more likely
to do self examinations to make sure that the body
was still everything was looking the way it was supposed
to be, and men were more likely to do testicular
(04:12):
self exams too. So basically, the study was showing that
these people who use vibrators tend to take better care
of all their their special parts, and the women and
men also who were using the vibrators also tended to
rate a little bit higher on sexual satisfaction. So, with
no further ado, maybe we should back up hundred plus
(04:35):
years to figure out where where all the buzz came
from with vibrators, because these days we might associate vibrators
with sex toys and CD sex shops and things like that.
But their history is purely rooted in medicine. Medicine, very
(04:56):
um and very you know, no eyebrows raised. When the
greater started uh to appear in doctor's offices. It was
it was non controversial at all. Whereas you know, you
you read about a study like this two thousand nine one,
people like, oh my gosh, are likely people using vibrators.
But I think the link is that the better sexual
health and the better health overall kind of links the
(05:18):
modern statistics to this history. We're going to go back to, right,
because one thing I found really fascinating about the history
of vibrators is that it was actually considered far less
controversial than the gynecological speculum, right because the speculum was
inserted during an exam, whereas vibrators were purely external use.
(05:40):
But let's talk about why you might be using a
vibrator in the Victorian era in the first place, one
word hysteria. Hysteria gripped a nation, a nation, many nations.
The women just kept coming down with hysteria from from
early early times. Like you've got people like Hippocrates Galen
writing about these uh fits that women would have where
(06:02):
they just couldn't breathe, where they just weren't acting right.
Everything was, Oh, it's just crazy, like the stereotypical female craziness.
These these early doctors could not figure out and they
always blamed it on the womb and the uterus. Yeah,
in nineteen hundred BC, ancient Egyptians blamed hysteria, which we
will later find out is really just sexual frustration on
(06:24):
the uterus wandering from the womb into the throat and
making it hard for a woman to breathe. And a
little a little linguistic fun fact, hysteria comes from the
word uterus, and we talked a little bit about that
in the Celibacy podcast about how doctors of olden days
would would prescribe sex as this way to curb the
(06:46):
wandering womb. Well sex for married people, molly true. And
that's that's when we're going to get into why some
some ladies needed more help than others. Because in the
sixteenth century, if you weren't married, if you were say single,
or owed or a nun, the cure for your hysteria
would have been vigorous horseback exercise or movement of the
(07:08):
pelvis in a swing rocking chair or carriage. Or they
told once train started coming, when they had the industrial evolution,
they would tell theman just to hop a train and
to let the rocking of the train take care of it.
But let's say that there were no horses around, you
weren't married, or you were married, and your husband just
couldn't seem to solve this womb problem on his own.
(07:28):
He would go to the doctor. And what the doctor
would do is he would massage the volbular area until
he brought you to what was deemed a hysterical proxys
m a k A. An orgasm, and this would cure
the classic symptoms supposedly of hysteria, which would include anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness,
(07:51):
erotic fantasy, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic edema,
and vaginal lubrication a k A. Sexual arousal. Yeah. I mean, really,
it's just curing your your libido. And so the thinking
is is that maybe you know, people just weren't that
knowledgeable about what might lead a woman to orgasm. It
really wasn't a topic for polite conversation, and so going
(08:14):
to the doctor to have this regular massage was not
seen as as anything deviant or or wrong. It was
purely curing medical symptoms. The doctors didn't seem to get
any pleasure out of it. It was just, you know,
another another day at the office. And because you know,
it was advocated by so many medical professionals, was like,
all right, this is something I'll have to do regularly.
(08:37):
Every two weeks or so, We'll head into the doctor's office.
Get my massage be cured form hysteria for a few weeks,
and doctors would use volvular massage for non orgasmic purposes
as well, including to treat constipation, arthritis, muscle fatigue, laryngitis,
and tumors. So bringing women to hysterical paroxysms and in
(09:00):
two sometimes had a wide range of applications. But one
thing about these massages sometimes they were just kind of
tiresome for the doctors. Sometimes their hands just got really
worn out. And I'm not trying to be crass there,
their medical records of doctors really take to like try
(09:22):
and cure this hysteria. And also if you were a
doctor in business, it was not very easy to see
a bunch of patients if you never knew how long
a hysterical patient was going to take uh to reach
her proxysm, and so it was, you know, it wasn't
a very good business model to have these indeterminate appointments
(09:42):
going on. And also for for a while, water treatments
became popular, and while they did work maybe a little
bit more little easier than than the manual treatment, they
weren't exactly clean and not exactly portable, So in the
eighteen eighties, doctor Joseph Mortimer Grandville comes along in patents
(10:06):
the first electro mechanical vibrator, and my goodness, were doctors
everywhere relieved. Oh my goodness. It just took off. And
there are all sorts of models that doctors could buy.
You can buy like hand cranked models. You could buy
models that you operated with the foot pedal. There were
some that were like forks and they vibrated that way,
and some hung from the ceiling. I don't know how
(10:28):
that works. And there were I mean, it just just
every single model of a vibrator that you could imagine.
Even some of the ceiling models attached the tables why
a coils called vibrate tiles, turbines, gas engines, and it
was just it was a revelation for doctors that they
(10:48):
could just, you know, turn this thing on and and
it was worked much faster than using your fingers. It
was a little bit cleaner, and again, as we said,
it wasn't like a speculum that you had to insert.
They were just doing this on the extra old genitalia.
So it was on the up and up according to society.
And get this, the vibrator was only the fifth household
(11:10):
device to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle,
and toaster. So before we have the electric vacuum cleaner
and iron, we had the we had the vibrator. And
by nineteen seventeen there were more vibrators in the home
than electric toasters. I know, that's insane, crazy, and so
(11:40):
there were. You would find them in all these catalogs.
In fact, a lot of the knowledge we have about
the vibrator today is thanks to researcher named Rachel Mains
who was actually doing a history of needlecraft in America.
So she took a spicy churn, very unexpected term because
she was paging through this old needlecraft catalog and started
finding these advertiser advertisements for home vibrators. And this wasn't
(12:04):
from nineteen o six. Imagine looking through all these old
needlecraft catalogs and finding these ads that you would normally
expect to find in saucy magazine. So that's when she
ditches the needle craft. Hannah starts investigating why vibrators are
being sold at that time and comes across this hysteria
thing and the fact that the women weren't being we're
(12:25):
really being treated quite right, but their partners, and she
ends up writing a book called The Technology of the Orgasm,
which is really, I guess, kind of the go to
book for the history of the vibrator. And just for fun,
here's here's an advertising tagline from one of those very
respectable magazine nights for vibrators. It says, all the pleasure
(12:48):
of youth will throb inside of you. That sound too bad,
And vibrators were in fact so popular that they were
a driving force behind the creation of the small electric motor.
So really, I mean, this is a huge technological innovation
that we have to thank, you know, the vibrator for
without Without vibrators, and this craze about women's hysteria, you know,
(13:13):
would we would we have a vacuum cleaner, vacuum cleaner
and you know, I mean maybe the women would have
never been able to get up to vacuum if they
kept having all these hysterical symptoms that they never figured
out how to cure. If we still had to go
get volbular massages every two weeks, My god, time to post.
How would we have a breakthrough the glass ceiling? And men,
don't think that you were absent from this revolution as well,
(13:35):
because just a few decades after the women's vibrator movement
really gets going, John Mure aka that legendary naturalists invent
patterns of vibrator for men as well. Some men are
also using vibrators at this time. Their ailments can be
cured by a vibrating massager. Probably probably not using them
as much as women, but you never know, you never know.
(13:57):
So we've got vibraries being sold directly to men and women,
and be a catalog. We've got doctors administering massages in
their doctor's offices. Now, unfortunately, along comes Freud. I don't know,
maybe not unfortunately, I guess, I don't know. You can
draw your own conclusions because old Freud comes along and
he's like, this is not going to work. We need
to stop treating women's hysteria with these massages with orgasms.
(14:21):
They need to talk it out. That is the only
thing that's going to work. You're not really solving their problems,
but just you know, putting a band aid on them.
Stop doing this, talk to them, so you know, you
can you know, Freud, you can make a ton of
jokes about Freud and women and sex, but he was
the one who brings an ind to this. He ends
all the fun. But right around that same time, vibrators
(14:44):
start showing up in stag films. That is true in
the nineties, uh As, as Slate puts it, stagg reels
blew the vibrator's cover because a lot of people, I
guess based on Main's research, just sort of pretended that
what was happening was not an organ something. It was
just you know, a brief hysterical paroxysm. And I think
(15:05):
it has a lot to do with the fact that
we've mentioned many times now that nothing was going inside
of a woman. It was all outside, you know, sexually
different than a back massage, because remember this time, you know,
Victorian couples did not have Cosmo magazine to help learn
how to please a partner, so intercourse might have been
(15:28):
very bland. Let's just say, and um, you know, at
this point, when you've got these stag films coming out,
they're showing, you know, they're making that explicit connection between
what the vibrator does and what happens in the bedroom.
So that's that's sort of when I think the first
explicit that we could find link between sex and the
vibrator comes into play. Yeah, and once it becomes tainted
(15:50):
by those stag films, the most famous of which was
called The Nun's Story, not the one with Audrey starring
Audrey Hepburn. But once it, once vibrators get the sixy
edge to it, they have to go under the rug
and it becomes something that scholars call camouflage technology. Vibrators
(16:10):
don't go away, they just become home massage, a backscratcher. Yeah.
So um, that's how they were sold in catalogsies with
very you know, uh, euphemistic titles. You can't really say
what it's for. And in some states, like there's this
case in Alabama where you can't say it's a sex toy.
You have to show that it's used for medical purposes.
(16:33):
And going back sort of to that old Victorian era.
So um. But one interesting fact that I came across,
because I don't remember this was in the eighties when
Reagan was president, his surgeon General see Ewet mailed out
this list of safe sex options to every household. Um,
and vibrators were on the list. Yeah, And they did
this in response to the AIDS epidemic at the time.
(16:56):
So they were trying to educate people on on safe
sex and lo and behold. Vibrators kind of come back
into a little more public acceptance, come a little more
out in the open. You can stop using things like
backscratcher to get them into catalog. We all know why
you're getting the Hatachi magic wad, right. The jig is up.
(17:16):
So that was the history of vibrators, the buzz on
this this fascinating device that may have, you know, led
to the vacuum cleaner. So if you have anything that
you would like to add, bearing in mind that we
do have a spam filters. Do have a spam filters,
don't tell the email vibrators the g rated jokes. Our
(17:36):
email is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com.
And I have an email that was sent to that
very address. It was from Kristen, but not you, Kristen.
This is Christen with a cake and she writes, I'm
(17:57):
a librarian and I love my career very much. I
graduate from college with a teaching degree and wasn't particularly
happy in that profession. I realized that I didn't go
into teaching because I love teaching, but because I loved learning.
Big difference. I'm in back to graduate school from my
MLS and have been extremely happy in this profession ever since.
When you tell people you're a librarian, they always assume
that you work in a public library. I think it's
(18:18):
important for people to understand that there are many opportunities
outside of public libraries. Librarians are employed by hospitals, law firms, universities, museums,
art galleries, manuscript galleries, private corporations, government agencies, and publishing companies.
I've seen job postings over the years for companies like WebMD, ESPN,
and Pixar, just to name a few. If someone enjoys
(18:38):
learning on a daily basis and seeks variety and their occupation,
librarianship is an excellent career choice. Maybe I should become
a librarian. I really want to become a library and
I think, all right, Well, I've got another library related
email here from Lydia. Lydia writes, I am a professional
librarian and have been from his fifteen years, and I
guess I'm considered one of those cool or hip librarians.
(18:59):
I have some fellow cool librarian friends, and we're happy
to use our personal biases and interests to enhance our
libraries collections. And interesting and maybe subversive ways. But in general,
I think most librarians are really square. Just try going
to a library conference or large meeting. Hipsters will certainly
find a niche, but as a whole, groupings of librarians
(19:22):
are heavily weighted with the elderly female, grandma frontbe, can't dance,
doesn't get out too much type. Don't get me wrong,
some of them might be fascinating people too, but believe me,
it's not like working for MTV. But I wonder Molly
It's empty has a library. Oh I bet that a
little bit. I thought you're gonna ask whether MTV just
(19:43):
has old people working there Kurt loader Zing And on
that note, Uh, you guys can't write us at mom
Stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can also
follow us on Twitter at mom stuff podcast. And finally,
we would love for you to like us on Facebook.
And I said find, but I should have said second
to last, because really, finally, you can read our blog
(20:05):
stuff I've Never told you at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
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click on the podcast icon in the upper right corner
of our homepage, The How Stuff Works iPhone app has arrived.
Download it today on iTunes
Hey, this is Annie and you're listening to STUFFMA never
told you. Some of you might have heard about a
little bit of a kerfuffle at this year's Consumer Electronics
(00:27):
Show in Las Vegas, CES. So what happened was the
Laura de Carlo team submitted this product called S to
the c e S Innovation Awards and Oh Say is
a hands free device that allows for the blended orgasm,
complete with micro robotic technology, and they won the CS
(00:48):
Innovation Awards Honore in the Robotics and Drones category and
to win, the product was vetted by the Consumer Technology
Association the c t A and the ct A is
c S his owner, and it was also vetted by
a panel of independent judges. A month after the announcement,
the team at de Carlo was notified by CS and
(01:09):
the c t A that their award had been presentded.
On top of that, they would not be permitted to
showcase or exhibit their product at CS. They have given
several inconsistent reasons for this award being rescinded. Quote entries
deemed by c ti A and their sole discretion to
be a moral obscene in decent profane are not in
(01:30):
keeping with ctias image will be disqualified. C TIA reserves
the right in its sole discretion to disqualify any entry
at any time which, in CTA's opinion, endangers the safety
or well being of any person or fails to comply
with these official rules. So women's sexual pleasure is either
according to this immoral, indecent, obscene, profane, or not in
(01:53):
keeping with ct AS image. Okay, decal I wanted to
know how they made it past all the judges and
staff if this is the case, and the team received
a letter from c t a s president and CEO
Gary Shapiro and the executive vice president Karen Tia, declaring
OSA didn't even qualify for the category. Never mind, it's
the subject of eight pending patents for robotics, biomimicry, and
(02:16):
engineering feats. Also, tech aimed at male pleasure is perfectly
acceptable and often lauded at c e S. From the
De Carlo company's founder, Laura how to quote, you cannot
pretend to be unbiased if you allow a sex robot
in the shape of an unrealistic female body, but not
a vagina focused robotic massager for blended orgasm. This whole
(02:41):
conversation touches on so much more than just ce s,
but problems in the tech industry at large and really
society as a whole. If you want to hear more
conversation around this, I'm going to be guesting on the
show Tech Stuff to dive into it. So go check
that out. And in the meantime, here an oldie but
a goodie looking at the history of the vibrator. Enjoy.
(03:07):
Welcome to Stuff Mom Never told You from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. This
is Molly and I'm Kristin. Kristen. Let's dive right in
to some statistics our favorite thing, all right, and it
will I think we'll ease us into the topic of
the day. Okay, So I want to talk about something
(03:29):
that was published in two thousand nine which revealed that
about half of American adults use a vibrator on a
regular basis, on a regular basis, and that is men,
that's women, that's gay, that's straight, always people using vibrators.
And what was interesting about this study in particular, not
(03:51):
just the number of people that use vibrators, but what
was really interesting was that the women who used them
had better sexual health because they're more likely to have
a gynecological exam during the past year, They're more likely
to do self examinations to make sure that the body
was still everything was looking the way it was supposed
to be, and men were more likely to do testicular
(04:12):
self exams too. So basically, the study was showing that
these people who use vibrators tend to take better care
of all their their special parts, and the women and
men also who were using the vibrators also tended to
rate a little bit higher on sexual satisfaction. So, with
no further ado, maybe we should back up hundred plus
(04:35):
years to figure out where where all the buzz came
from with vibrators, because these days we might associate vibrators
with sex toys and CD sex shops and things like that.
But their history is purely rooted in medicine. Medicine, very
(04:56):
um and very you know, no eyebrows raised. When the
greater started uh to appear in doctor's offices. It was
it was non controversial at all. Whereas you know, you
you read about a study like this two thousand nine one,
people like, oh my gosh, are likely people using vibrators.
But I think the link is that the better sexual
health and the better health overall kind of links the
(05:18):
modern statistics to this history. We're going to go back to, right,
because one thing I found really fascinating about the history
of vibrators is that it was actually considered far less
controversial than the gynecological speculum, right because the speculum was
inserted during an exam, whereas vibrators were purely external use.
(05:40):
But let's talk about why you might be using a
vibrator in the Victorian era in the first place, one
word hysteria. Hysteria gripped a nation, a nation, many nations.
The women just kept coming down with hysteria from from
early early times. Like you've got people like Hippocrates Galen
writing about these uh fits that women would have where
(06:02):
they just couldn't breathe, where they just weren't acting right.
Everything was, Oh, it's just crazy, like the stereotypical female craziness.
These these early doctors could not figure out and they
always blamed it on the womb and the uterus. Yeah,
in nineteen hundred BC, ancient Egyptians blamed hysteria, which we
will later find out is really just sexual frustration on
(06:24):
the uterus wandering from the womb into the throat and
making it hard for a woman to breathe. And a
little a little linguistic fun fact, hysteria comes from the
word uterus, and we talked a little bit about that
in the Celibacy podcast about how doctors of olden days
would would prescribe sex as this way to curb the
(06:46):
wandering womb. Well sex for married people, molly true. And
that's that's when we're going to get into why some
some ladies needed more help than others. Because in the
sixteenth century, if you weren't married, if you were say single,
or owed or a nun, the cure for your hysteria
would have been vigorous horseback exercise or movement of the
(07:08):
pelvis in a swing rocking chair or carriage. Or they
told once train started coming, when they had the industrial evolution,
they would tell theman just to hop a train and
to let the rocking of the train take care of it.
But let's say that there were no horses around, you
weren't married, or you were married, and your husband just
couldn't seem to solve this womb problem on his own.
(07:28):
He would go to the doctor. And what the doctor
would do is he would massage the volbular area until
he brought you to what was deemed a hysterical proxys
m a k A. An orgasm, and this would cure
the classic symptoms supposedly of hysteria, which would include anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness,
(07:51):
erotic fantasy, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic edema,
and vaginal lubrication a k A. Sexual arousal. Yeah. I mean, really,
it's just curing your your libido. And so the thinking
is is that maybe you know, people just weren't that
knowledgeable about what might lead a woman to orgasm. It
really wasn't a topic for polite conversation, and so going
(08:14):
to the doctor to have this regular massage was not
seen as as anything deviant or or wrong. It was
purely curing medical symptoms. The doctors didn't seem to get
any pleasure out of it. It was just, you know,
another another day at the office. And because you know,
it was advocated by so many medical professionals, was like,
all right, this is something I'll have to do regularly.
(08:37):
Every two weeks or so, We'll head into the doctor's office.
Get my massage be cured form hysteria for a few weeks,
and doctors would use volvular massage for non orgasmic purposes
as well, including to treat constipation, arthritis, muscle fatigue, laryngitis,
and tumors. So bringing women to hysterical paroxysms and in
(09:00):
two sometimes had a wide range of applications. But one
thing about these massages sometimes they were just kind of
tiresome for the doctors. Sometimes their hands just got really
worn out. And I'm not trying to be crass there,
their medical records of doctors really take to like try
(09:22):
and cure this hysteria. And also if you were a
doctor in business, it was not very easy to see
a bunch of patients if you never knew how long
a hysterical patient was going to take uh to reach
her proxysm, and so it was, you know, it wasn't
a very good business model to have these indeterminate appointments
(09:42):
going on. And also for for a while, water treatments
became popular, and while they did work maybe a little
bit more little easier than than the manual treatment, they
weren't exactly clean and not exactly portable, So in the
eighteen eighties, doctor Joseph Mortimer Grandville comes along in patents
(10:06):
the first electro mechanical vibrator, and my goodness, were doctors
everywhere relieved. Oh my goodness. It just took off. And
there are all sorts of models that doctors could buy.
You can buy like hand cranked models. You could buy
models that you operated with the foot pedal. There were
some that were like forks and they vibrated that way,
and some hung from the ceiling. I don't know how
(10:28):
that works. And there were I mean, it just just
every single model of a vibrator that you could imagine.
Even some of the ceiling models attached the tables why
a coils called vibrate tiles, turbines, gas engines, and it
was just it was a revelation for doctors that they
(10:48):
could just, you know, turn this thing on and and
it was worked much faster than using your fingers. It
was a little bit cleaner, and again, as we said,
it wasn't like a speculum that you had to insert.
They were just doing this on the extra old genitalia.
So it was on the up and up according to society.
And get this, the vibrator was only the fifth household
(11:10):
device to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle,
and toaster. So before we have the electric vacuum cleaner
and iron, we had the we had the vibrator. And
by nineteen seventeen there were more vibrators in the home
than electric toasters. I know, that's insane, crazy, and so
(11:40):
there were. You would find them in all these catalogs.
In fact, a lot of the knowledge we have about
the vibrator today is thanks to researcher named Rachel Mains
who was actually doing a history of needlecraft in America.
So she took a spicy churn, very unexpected term because
she was paging through this old needlecraft catalog and started
finding these advertiser advertisements for home vibrators. And this wasn't
(12:04):
from nineteen o six. Imagine looking through all these old
needlecraft catalogs and finding these ads that you would normally
expect to find in saucy magazine. So that's when she
ditches the needle craft. Hannah starts investigating why vibrators are
being sold at that time and comes across this hysteria
thing and the fact that the women weren't being we're
(12:25):
really being treated quite right, but their partners, and she
ends up writing a book called The Technology of the Orgasm,
which is really, I guess, kind of the go to
book for the history of the vibrator. And just for fun,
here's here's an advertising tagline from one of those very
respectable magazine nights for vibrators. It says, all the pleasure
(12:48):
of youth will throb inside of you. That sound too bad,
And vibrators were in fact so popular that they were
a driving force behind the creation of the small electric motor.
So really, I mean, this is a huge technological innovation
that we have to thank, you know, the vibrator for
without Without vibrators, and this craze about women's hysteria, you know,
(13:13):
would we would we have a vacuum cleaner, vacuum cleaner
and you know, I mean maybe the women would have
never been able to get up to vacuum if they
kept having all these hysterical symptoms that they never figured
out how to cure. If we still had to go
get volbular massages every two weeks, My god, time to post.
How would we have a breakthrough the glass ceiling? And men,
don't think that you were absent from this revolution as well,
(13:35):
because just a few decades after the women's vibrator movement
really gets going, John Mure aka that legendary naturalists invent
patterns of vibrator for men as well. Some men are
also using vibrators at this time. Their ailments can be
cured by a vibrating massager. Probably probably not using them
as much as women, but you never know, you never know.
(13:57):
So we've got vibraries being sold directly to men and women,
and be a catalog. We've got doctors administering massages in
their doctor's offices. Now, unfortunately, along comes Freud. I don't know,
maybe not unfortunately, I guess, I don't know. You can
draw your own conclusions because old Freud comes along and
he's like, this is not going to work. We need
to stop treating women's hysteria with these massages with orgasms.
(14:21):
They need to talk it out. That is the only
thing that's going to work. You're not really solving their problems,
but just you know, putting a band aid on them.
Stop doing this, talk to them, so you know, you
can you know, Freud, you can make a ton of
jokes about Freud and women and sex, but he was
the one who brings an ind to this. He ends
all the fun. But right around that same time, vibrators
(14:44):
start showing up in stag films. That is true in
the nineties, uh As, as Slate puts it, stagg reels
blew the vibrator's cover because a lot of people, I
guess based on Main's research, just sort of pretended that
what was happening was not an organ something. It was
just you know, a brief hysterical paroxysm. And I think
(15:05):
it has a lot to do with the fact that
we've mentioned many times now that nothing was going inside
of a woman. It was all outside, you know, sexually
different than a back massage, because remember this time, you know,
Victorian couples did not have Cosmo magazine to help learn
how to please a partner, so intercourse might have been
(15:28):
very bland. Let's just say, and um, you know, at
this point, when you've got these stag films coming out,
they're showing, you know, they're making that explicit connection between
what the vibrator does and what happens in the bedroom.
So that's that's sort of when I think the first
explicit that we could find link between sex and the
vibrator comes into play. Yeah, and once it becomes tainted
(15:50):
by those stag films, the most famous of which was
called The Nun's Story, not the one with Audrey starring
Audrey Hepburn. But once it, once vibrators get the sixy
edge to it, they have to go under the rug
and it becomes something that scholars call camouflage technology. Vibrators
(16:10):
don't go away, they just become home massage, a backscratcher. Yeah.
So um, that's how they were sold in catalogsies with
very you know, uh, euphemistic titles. You can't really say
what it's for. And in some states, like there's this
case in Alabama where you can't say it's a sex toy.
You have to show that it's used for medical purposes.
(16:33):
And going back sort of to that old Victorian era.
So um. But one interesting fact that I came across,
because I don't remember this was in the eighties when
Reagan was president, his surgeon General see Ewet mailed out
this list of safe sex options to every household. Um,
and vibrators were on the list. Yeah, And they did
this in response to the AIDS epidemic at the time.
(16:56):
So they were trying to educate people on on safe
sex and lo and behold. Vibrators kind of come back
into a little more public acceptance, come a little more
out in the open. You can stop using things like
backscratcher to get them into catalog. We all know why
you're getting the Hatachi magic wad, right. The jig is up.
(17:16):
So that was the history of vibrators, the buzz on
this this fascinating device that may have, you know, led
to the vacuum cleaner. So if you have anything that
you would like to add, bearing in mind that we
do have a spam filters. Do have a spam filters,
don't tell the email vibrators the g rated jokes. Our
(17:36):
email is mom Stuff at how stuff works dot com.
And I have an email that was sent to that
very address. It was from Kristen, but not you, Kristen.
This is Christen with a cake and she writes, I'm
(17:57):
a librarian and I love my career very much. I
graduate from college with a teaching degree and wasn't particularly
happy in that profession. I realized that I didn't go
into teaching because I love teaching, but because I loved learning.
Big difference. I'm in back to graduate school from my
MLS and have been extremely happy in this profession ever since.
When you tell people you're a librarian, they always assume
that you work in a public library. I think it's
(18:18):
important for people to understand that there are many opportunities
outside of public libraries. Librarians are employed by hospitals, law firms, universities, museums,
art galleries, manuscript galleries, private corporations, government agencies, and publishing companies.
I've seen job postings over the years for companies like WebMD, ESPN,
and Pixar, just to name a few. If someone enjoys
(18:38):
learning on a daily basis and seeks variety and their occupation,
librarianship is an excellent career choice. Maybe I should become
a librarian. I really want to become a library and
I think, all right, Well, I've got another library related
email here from Lydia. Lydia writes, I am a professional
librarian and have been from his fifteen years, and I
guess I'm considered one of those cool or hip librarians.
(18:59):
I have some fellow cool librarian friends, and we're happy
to use our personal biases and interests to enhance our
libraries collections. And interesting and maybe subversive ways. But in general,
I think most librarians are really square. Just try going
to a library conference or large meeting. Hipsters will certainly
find a niche, but as a whole, groupings of librarians
(19:22):
are heavily weighted with the elderly female, grandma frontbe, can't dance,
doesn't get out too much type. Don't get me wrong,
some of them might be fascinating people too, but believe me,
it's not like working for MTV. But I wonder Molly
It's empty has a library. Oh I bet that a
little bit. I thought you're gonna ask whether MTV just
(19:43):
has old people working there Kurt loader Zing And on
that note, Uh, you guys can't write us at mom
Stuff at how stuff works dot com. You can also
follow us on Twitter at mom stuff podcast. And finally,
we would love for you to like us on Facebook.
And I said find, but I should have said second
to last, because really, finally, you can read our blog
(20:05):
stuff I've Never told you at how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast,
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