February 20, 2011 • 17 mins
According to a recent study, around half of American adults use a vibrator on a regular basis -- yet the devices remain controversial. In this 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 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop mom never told you?
From house top works dot com. Hello and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristin Kristen. Let's
(00:20):
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 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
(00:41):
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 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
(01:04):
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 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
(01:26):
tended to rate a little bit higher on sexual satisfaction. So,
with no further ado, maybe we should back up hundred
plus years 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,
(01:51):
but their history is purely rooted in medicine. Medicine, very
um and very you know, no eyebrows ray East. When
the vibrator started uh to appear in doctor's offices, it
was it was non controversial all whereas you know, you
you read about a study like this two thousand nine one,
people like, oh my gosh, all like people using vibrators.
(02:12):
But I think the link is that the better sexual
health and the better health overall kind of links the
modern statistics to this history. We're going to go back
to you, 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
(02:35):
the speculum was inserted during an exam, whereas vibrators were
purely external use. But let's talk about why you might
be using a vibrator in the Victorian era. In the
first place, one word hysteria. Steria gripped a nation, many nations.
The women just kept coming down with hysteria from from
(02:55):
early early times. Like you've got people like Hippocrates Galen
writing about these uh fits that women would have where
they just couldn't breathe, where they just were 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,
(03:16):
in nineteen hundred BC, ancient Egyptians blamed hysteria, which we
will later find out is really just sexual frustration on
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
(03:37):
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
wandering womb. Well sex for married people are true, and
that's that's where 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
(03:59):
single or widowed or a nun, the cure for your
hysteria would have been vigorous horseback exercise or movement of
the pelvis in a swing, rocking chair or carriage. Or
they told once train started coming, when they had the
Industrial Revolution, they would tell theman just to hop a
train and to let the rocking and the train take
(04:20):
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 swim problem
on his own. He would go to the doctor. And
what the doctor would do is he would massage the
volvular area until he brought you to what was deemed
a hysterical proxys m a k A. An orgasm, and
(04:42):
this would cure the classic symptoms supposedly of hysteria, which
would include anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasy, sensations of
heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic edema, and vaginal lubrication
K sexual arousal. Yeah, I mean really, it's just curing
(05:03):
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. Really wasn't a topic for
polite conversation, and so going 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
(05:25):
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, I was like, all right, this is something
I'll have to do regularly. Every two weeks or so.
We'll head into the doctor's office get my massage, be
cured from hysteria for a few weeks. And doctors would
(05:45):
use volvular massage for non orgasmic purposes as well, including
to treat constipation, arthritis, muscle fatigue, laryngitis, and tumors. So
bringing women to hysterical paroxysm and men too sometimes had
a wide range of applications. But one thing about these
(06:07):
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 crassed. There there medical records of
doctors really to like try 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
(06:30):
you never knew how long a hysterical patient was going
to take uh to reach her prooxism. And so it was,
you know, it wasn't a very good business model to
have these indeterminate appointments going on. And also for for
a while, water treatments became popular, and while they did
(06:51):
work maybe a little bit more, a 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 the first electro mechanical vibrator,
and my goodness, were doctors everywhere relieved. Oh my goodness.
(07:14):
It just took off, and there were 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 then some hung from
the ceiling. I don't know how that works. And there
were I mean, it just just every single model of
a vibrator that you could imagine, even some ceiling models
(07:37):
attached the tables. Why a coil is called vibrate tiles, turbines,
gas engines, and it was just it was a revelation
for doctors that they could just, you know, turn this
thing on and and it was worked much faster than
using your fingers. It was a little cleaner, and again,
as he said, it wasn't like a speculum that you
(07:58):
had to insert. They were just doing us on the
external genitalia. So it was on the up and up
according to society. And get this, the vibrator was only
the fifth household device to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan,
tea kettle, and toaster. So before we have the electric
(08:18):
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
um and so 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
(08:39):
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 from nineteen o six. Imagine looking through
(08:59):
all these old needlecraft catalogs and and finding these as
that you would normally expect to find in Saucia magazine.
So that's when she ditches the needlecraft and uh 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 really being treated quite right, but
(09:19):
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, uh, here's here's an
advertising tagline from one of those very respectable magazine nights
for vibrators, It says, all the pleasure of youth will
(09:42):
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,
(10:02):
in this crazy about women's hysteria, you know, 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 signed to podcast, how would we
have a break through the glass ceiling? And men, don't
(10:25):
think that you were absent from this revolution as well,
because nine nine, just a few decades after the women's
vibrator movement really gets going. John Muir a ka 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
(10:45):
not using them as much as women, but you never know,
you never know. So we've got vibraries being sold directly
to men and women 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
(11:05):
along and he's like, this is not gonna work. We
need to stop treating women's hysteria with these massages with orgasms.
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
(11:27):
jokes about Freud and women and sex. But he was
the one who brings an end to this. See ends
all the fun. But right around that same time, vibrators
start showing up in stag films. That is true in
the nine twenties. 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
(11:50):
that what was happening was not an orgasm, it was
just you know, a brief history hysterical paroxysm. And I
think it has a lot to do with that. We've
mentioned many times now that nothing was going inside of
a woman. It was all outside, you know, no sexually
different than a back massage, because remember this time, you know,
(12:12):
Victorian couples did not have Cosmo magazine to help learn
how to please a partner, so intercourse might have been
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.
(12:33):
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
by those stag films, the most famous of which is
called The Nun's Story, not the one with Audrey starring
Audrey Hudberd. But once the once vibrators get the sixy
edge to it, they have to go under the rug
(12:58):
and it becomes something that allers call camouflage technology. Vibrators
don't go away, they just become home massagers. 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
(13:19):
case in Alabama where you can't say it's a sex toy.
You have to show that it's used for medical purposes.
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 surge in General see Everett mailed
out this list of safe sex options to every household. Um,
(13:43):
and vibrators were on the list. Yeah. And they did
this in response to the AIDS epidemic at the time,
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
(14:04):
you're getting the Hatachi magic wad, the jig is up.
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 filter, do you have a span filters?
(14:24):
Don't title the email vibrator the g rated jokes. Our
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
(14:45):
a librarian and I love my career very much. I
graduated 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, and I'm back to graduate school from my
MLS and I've been extremely happy and it's per qassion
ever since. When you tell people you're a librarian, they
always assume that you work in a public library. I
(15:05):
think it's important for people 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 learning on a
(15:26):
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. Lidia 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. I have
(15:47):
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've
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 are
(16:10):
heavily weighted with the elderly female grandma front be, 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
if V has a library. Oh, I bet that a
little bit. I thought you're gonna ask whether MTV just
(16:31):
has old people working there. Hurt loader zing And on
that note, uh, you guys, doon 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 finally, but I should have said second
to last, because really, finally, you can read our blog
(16:52):
stuff I've Never told you at how stuff works dot
com for moralness and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast,
clock 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. Brought to you by the
(17:19):
reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stop mom never told you?
From house top works dot com. Hello and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristin Kristen. Let's
(00:20):
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 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
(00:41):
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 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
(01:04):
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 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
(01:26):
tended to rate a little bit higher on sexual satisfaction. So,
with no further ado, maybe we should back up hundred
plus years 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,
(01:51):
but their history is purely rooted in medicine. Medicine, very
um and very you know, no eyebrows ray East. When
the vibrator started uh to appear in doctor's offices, it
was it was non controversial all whereas you know, you
you read about a study like this two thousand nine one,
people like, oh my gosh, all like people using vibrators.
(02:12):
But I think the link is that the better sexual
health and the better health overall kind of links the
modern statistics to this history. We're going to go back
to you, 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
(02:35):
the speculum was inserted during an exam, whereas vibrators were
purely external use. But let's talk about why you might
be using a vibrator in the Victorian era. In the
first place, one word hysteria. Steria gripped a nation, many nations.
The women just kept coming down with hysteria from from
(02:55):
early early times. Like you've got people like Hippocrates Galen
writing about these uh fits that women would have where
they just couldn't breathe, where they just were 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,
(03:16):
in nineteen hundred BC, ancient Egyptians blamed hysteria, which we
will later find out is really just sexual frustration on
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
(03:37):
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
wandering womb. Well sex for married people are true, and
that's that's where 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
(03:59):
single or widowed or a nun, the cure for your
hysteria would have been vigorous horseback exercise or movement of
the pelvis in a swing, rocking chair or carriage. Or
they told once train started coming, when they had the
Industrial Revolution, they would tell theman just to hop a
train and to let the rocking and the train take
(04:20):
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 swim problem
on his own. He would go to the doctor. And
what the doctor would do is he would massage the
volvular area until he brought you to what was deemed
a hysterical proxys m a k A. An orgasm, and
(04:42):
this would cure the classic symptoms supposedly of hysteria, which
would include anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasy, sensations of
heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic edema, and vaginal lubrication
K sexual arousal. Yeah, I mean really, it's just curing
(05:03):
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. Really wasn't a topic for
polite conversation, and so going 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
(05:25):
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, I was like, all right, this is something
I'll have to do regularly. Every two weeks or so.
We'll head into the doctor's office get my massage, be
cured from hysteria for a few weeks. And doctors would
(05:45):
use volvular massage for non orgasmic purposes as well, including
to treat constipation, arthritis, muscle fatigue, laryngitis, and tumors. So
bringing women to hysterical paroxysm and men too sometimes had
a wide range of applications. But one thing about these
(06:07):
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 crassed. There there medical records of
doctors really to like try 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
(06:30):
you never knew how long a hysterical patient was going
to take uh to reach her prooxism. And so it was,
you know, it wasn't a very good business model to
have these indeterminate appointments going on. And also for for
a while, water treatments became popular, and while they did
(06:51):
work maybe a little bit more, a 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 the first electro mechanical vibrator,
and my goodness, were doctors everywhere relieved. Oh my goodness.
(07:14):
It just took off, and there were 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 then some hung from
the ceiling. I don't know how that works. And there
were I mean, it just just every single model of
a vibrator that you could imagine, even some ceiling models
(07:37):
attached the tables. Why a coil is called vibrate tiles, turbines,
gas engines, and it was just it was a revelation
for doctors that they could just, you know, turn this
thing on and and it was worked much faster than
using your fingers. It was a little cleaner, and again,
as he said, it wasn't like a speculum that you
(07:58):
had to insert. They were just doing us on the
external genitalia. So it was on the up and up
according to society. And get this, the vibrator was only
the fifth household device to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan,
tea kettle, and toaster. So before we have the electric
(08:18):
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
um and so 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
(08:39):
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 from nineteen o six. Imagine looking through
(08:59):
all these old needlecraft catalogs and and finding these as
that you would normally expect to find in Saucia magazine.
So that's when she ditches the needlecraft and uh 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 really being treated quite right, but
(09:19):
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, uh, here's here's an
advertising tagline from one of those very respectable magazine nights
for vibrators, It says, all the pleasure of youth will
(09:42):
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,
(10:02):
in this crazy about women's hysteria, you know, 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 signed to podcast, how would we
have a break through the glass ceiling? And men, don't
(10:25):
think that you were absent from this revolution as well,
because nine nine, just a few decades after the women's
vibrator movement really gets going. John Muir a ka 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
(10:45):
not using them as much as women, but you never know,
you never know. So we've got vibraries being sold directly
to men and women 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
(11:05):
along and he's like, this is not gonna work. We
need to stop treating women's hysteria with these massages with orgasms.
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
(11:27):
jokes about Freud and women and sex. But he was
the one who brings an end to this. See ends
all the fun. But right around that same time, vibrators
start showing up in stag films. That is true in
the nine twenties. 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
(11:50):
that what was happening was not an orgasm, it was
just you know, a brief history hysterical paroxysm. And I
think it has a lot to do with that. We've
mentioned many times now that nothing was going inside of
a woman. It was all outside, you know, no sexually
different than a back massage, because remember this time, you know,
(12:12):
Victorian couples did not have Cosmo magazine to help learn
how to please a partner, so intercourse might have been
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.
(12:33):
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
by those stag films, the most famous of which is
called The Nun's Story, not the one with Audrey starring
Audrey Hudberd. But once the once vibrators get the sixy
edge to it, they have to go under the rug
(12:58):
and it becomes something that allers call camouflage technology. Vibrators
don't go away, they just become home massagers. 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
(13:19):
case in Alabama where you can't say it's a sex toy.
You have to show that it's used for medical purposes.
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 surge in General see Everett mailed
out this list of safe sex options to every household. Um,
(13:43):
and vibrators were on the list. Yeah. And they did
this in response to the AIDS epidemic at the time,
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
(14:04):
you're getting the Hatachi magic wad, the jig is up.
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 filter, do you have a span filters?
(14:24):
Don't title the email vibrator the g rated jokes. Our
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
(14:45):
a librarian and I love my career very much. I
graduated 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, and I'm back to graduate school from my
MLS and I've been extremely happy and it's per qassion
ever since. When you tell people you're a librarian, they
always assume that you work in a public library. I
(15:05):
think it's important for people 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 learning on a
(15:26):
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. Lidia 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. I have
(15:47):
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've
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 are
(16:10):
heavily weighted with the elderly female grandma front be, 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
if V has a library. Oh, I bet that a
little bit. I thought you're gonna ask whether MTV just
(16:31):
has old people working there. Hurt loader zing And on
that note, uh, you guys, doon 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 finally, but I should have said second
to last, because really, finally, you can read our blog
(16:52):
stuff I've Never told you at how stuff works dot
com for moralness and thousands of other topics. Is it
how stuff works dot com. To learn more about the podcast,
clock 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. Brought to you by the
(17:19):
reinvented two thousand twelve Camray. It's ready, are you
Stuff Mom Never Told You News
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