Best Sex Writing 2013: The State of Today's Sexual Culture (4 page)

The trendy London-based apothecary, Space.NK, bought the concept, and displayed Jimmyjane right next to Marc Jacobs’s new fragrances. Soon after, Selfridges, the high-end British de- partment store, carried the company’s products. For Imboden, debuting in European retailers was a deliberate end-run around American social taboos, and also made a sidestep of the sex toy industry entirely. It was a statement that products like vibrators

did not have to be relegated to their own store or a discreet web- site. Premiering in lofty precincts before trickling down to the mainstream borrowed from a fashion playbook: Little Gold could be thought of as Jimmyjane’s couture offering, its runway show- piece. A more accessible aluminum version, Little Chroma, now sells for $125 at Drugstore.com.

Early on, Imboden would also hang around celebrity gath- erings, putting vibrators in the hands of influencers. After the Grammy Awards one year, he found himself walking across an in- tersection in front of a white lowrider. Inside, two heads bobbed to music; “Snoop de Ville” ran across the side of the car. As Im- boden jogged over to the front window, he reached inside his shoulder bag for a vibrator, and “it dawns on me that this is a per- fect recipe for getting shot,” he recalls. Snoop Dogg was behind the wheel, talking on a cell phone; a chandelier swayed gently above him. Imboden handed him a Little Something. “This dude just gave me a twenty-four-k gold vibrator,” Snoop relayed into the phone. Then he turned to Imboden. “Thank you, my nigga. I’m gonna put this to work
right now
.”

In January 2005, the Little Gold made it into the Golden Globe Awards gift suite, the freebie swag lounge that, in those days, A-list celebrities actually visited. “To have a non-fashion item like that at one of these showcases was really unusual and groundbreaking,” Rose Apodaca, the West Coast bureau chief of
Women’s Wear Daily
at the time, told me. “It was the hot item everyone was trying to get their hands on.” Teri Hatcher and Jennifer Garner, by picking one up, became among the brand’s first celebrity endorsers. Apodaca wrote about it in
WWD’
s awards season special. “Suddenly there’s this tool for sex being featured in the bible of the fashion industry.” After Kate Moss was spotted purchasing a Little Gold from a Greenwich Village

lingerie boutique—a “buzz-worthy bauble,” Page Six wrote— Jimmyjane appeared in
Vogue
.

After the introduction of electric lights in 1876, home appliances were plugged in, one by one, beginning with the sewing machine and followed by the fan, the teakettle, the toaster and then, the vi- brator. (The vacuum cleaner would come ten years later.) Ads for them appeared in
Hearst’s, Popular Mechanics, Modern Women
and
Women’s Home Companion,
among many others. A
National Home Journal
ad in 1908 for a five-dollar hand-powered vibrator, de- clared: “Gentle, soothing, invigorating and refreshing. Invented by a woman who knows a woman’s needs. All nature pulsates and vibrates with life.” Another in
American Magazine
claimed that the vibrator “will chase away the years like magic… All the keen relish, the pleasures of youth, will throb within you… Your self- respect, even, will be increased a hundredfold.” A Sears, Roebuck catalog in 1918 advertised a portable vibrator on a page (with fans and household mixers) of “Aids That Every Woman Appreciates.” Was this language camouflage for an orgasm? Were these vi- brators also intended, with a wink, for masturbation? This has become the popular history of the device as written by Rachel Maines, a Cornell researcher, who argued in her 1999 book
The Technology of Orgasm
that electric vibrators replaced the hands of doctors who, from the time of Hippocrates to the 1920s, had been

massaging women to orgasm as a treatment for hysteria.

Hysteria: The seventeenth-century French physician Lazare Rivière described it as “a sort of madness, arising from a vehe- ment and unbridled desire of carnal embracement which desire disthrones the Rational Faculties so far, that the Patient utters wanton and lascivious Speeches.” Today, this sounds a lot like normal functioning of female sexuality. But men long viewed it

as a disorder. During antiquity physicians believed that hysteria was caused by the womb meandering around the body, wrecking havoc, yet by the nineteenth century the term had become “the wastepaper basket of medicine where one throws otherwise un- employed symptoms,” as the French physiatrist Charles Lasègue put it. (The American Psychiatric Association finally dropped hysteria altogether from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1952, the same year it added homosexuality.) Virgins, nuns, widows and women with impotent husbands were thought especially prone. Victorian physicians, especially in England and the United States, were wary of female arousal. They viewed it as a dangerous slope towards uncontrollable desires and ill health, and advised women against tea, coffee, masturbation,

feather beds, wearing tight corsets, and reading French novels.

Maines argues that relieving women of this pent-up desire was a standard medical practice. She takes us back to the Greek phy- sician Soranus, who in the first century AD discussed his treat- ment: “We…moisten these parts freely with sweet oil, keeping it up for some time,” he wrote. Helen King, a historian and leading authority of Classical medicine at England’s Open University, told me that a correct translation of this passage has him mas- saging the abdomen, the typical treatment for yet another female disorder—chronic flowing of female “seed”—for which rose oil was prescribed, along with cold baths and avoiding sexy pictures. Rather, King says, it is with the influential Roman physician Galen where we see the first explicit mention of genital mas- sage to orgasm as a medical treatment. Galen discusses a woman rubbing “the customary remedies” on her genitals—sachets of Artemisia, marjoram and iris oil—and feeling the “pain and at the same time the pleasure” associated with intercourse.

But did doctors do the deed? Probably not in antiquity, King

said—there was a taboo against such things even back then, and the task was likely assigned to midwives. References in the an- nals of medicine to genital massage are oblique, leaving a trove of circumstantial evidence, with some exceptions, like the British physician Nathaniel Highmore complaining in the seventeenth century that massaging the vulva was “not unlike that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.” Maines believes that doctors con- sidered this a tedious task, and not a sexual act, since sexual rela- tions, especially in those pre-Clinton centuries, meant proper in- tercourse. However, if intercourse failed to relieve the symptoms of desire—only recently have we known that up to 70 percent of women cannot reach orgasm from intercourse alone—doctors prescribed hydrotherapy (the douche sprays in Saratoga Springs, NY, were a popular destination for women whose husbands were at the racetrack) or an office visit.

In 1869, an American physician, George Taylor, patented a steam-powered contraption called the “Manipulator,” in which a patient lay stomach-down on a padded table and received a pelvis massage from a vibrating sphere. The Chattanooga, a 125-pound apparatus that sold in 1904 for $200, was used on both sexes for various treatments including, the company’s catalog described, “female troubles.” All manner of inventions were marketed to doctors: musical vibrators, vibratory forks, vibrating wire coils called vibratiles, floor-standing models on rollers and portable devices shaped like hair dryers. They were powered by air pres- sure, water turbines, gas engines and batteries. We don’t really know how common the practice of massaging women with these devices actually was—Maines’s book touched off a debate among sex historians, with some arguing that it was probably rare and considered quack medicine—but in any case, after the first elec-

tromechanical vibrator was patented in 1880, vibrators marketed for home use flourished. General Electric and Hamilton Beach both made handheld devices that looked like hair dryers, boxed with various attachments. (I recently found a 1902 Hamilton Beach vibrator listed on eBay for $25.99.) Women could now regain the “pleasures of youth” through their own devices.

For reasons that are not entirely clear, vibrator ads gradually disappeared from upmarket magazines after the 1920s, and went underground. Fifty years later they would resurface—Hitachi’s Magic Wand Massager first appeared in the 1970s and remains one of the top-selling vibrators, even though the company will tell you it doesn’t make vibrators—and feminists in New York City began teaching women self-pleasure. By the 1990s, Bob Dole was talking about erectile dysfunction as the pitchman for Viagra, and the Starr Report described fellatio and a semen- stained dress, pushing the boundaries of acceptable mainstream media conversation.

And then, Miranda presented Charlotte with the Rabbit Pearl, a pink, phallus-shaped vibrator with rotating beads and animated bunny ears, on prime-time cable television.

Everyone in the sex toy business with whom I spoke credits “Sex and the City” with profoundly changing the way Americans now talk about sex toys. The Rabbit Pearl became an overnight sen- sation—“Talk about product placement,” the vibrator’s manufac- turer, Dan Martin of Vibratex, told me. With clean, well-lit stores like Good Vibrations and Babeland; the Tupperware-inspired, sex-toy house gatherings for women known as Pleasure Parties (“Where Every Day is Valentine’s Day”); and the Internet— which opened all kinds of new avenues for sexual adventure— women now had safe and discreet places to buy it. The Rabbit

Pearl is still the top-selling sex toy, although the original from Vibratex has been knocked off so many times that “the rabbit” has become generic.

In an episode during the fifth season of “Sex and the City,” Samantha walks into a Sharper Image to return her vibrator.

“We don’t sell vibrators,” the clerk tells her.

“Yes you do, I bought this here six months ago,” Samantha replies, holding up the device.

“That’s not a vibrator,” he says, “that’s a neck massager.”

Within Sharper Image, that neck massager became known jokingly as “the ‘Sex and the City’ vibrator,” but in 2007, Im- boden approached the company with the Form 6. Literally the sixth in a series of vibrator sketches—Imboden believes in mini- malist names—the Form 6 has a curved, organic shape that is sug- gestive without being representational. It is wrapped completely in soft, platinum silicone, making it completely water-resistant, and charges on a wall-powered base station through a narrow stainless steel band, a novel cordless recharging system that Im- boden patented. For these features, the Form 6 earned an Inter- national Design Excellence Award, the first time a sex toy had earned such a distinction. It comes in hot pink, deep plum or slate—non-primary, poppy colors that he believes convey sophis- tication. It is packaged in a hard plastic case inside a bright white box—“literally and figuratively bringing these products out of the shadows,” Imboden said. And it has a three-year warranty (this may not seem remarkable, but is for a sex toy).

“It was certainly controversial internally,” recalled Adam Ertel, Sharper Image’s buyer at the time. Sharper Image decided to try the Form 6 in a few stores—“a waterproof personal mas- sager” is how they described it—and, to everyone’s surprise, the Form 6 soon became one of the retailer’s best-selling massage

items. They quickly rolled it out nationwide. “It was clear to all of us that we were treading on new ground,” said Ertel. “We real- ized that the people that bought the Form 6 for its intimate nature may be a large group of consumers that people aren’t strategically selling to.”

One afternoon in May, I joined Imboden at a meeting with Yves Behar to talk through ideas for the Form 4, their next vi- brator. They met at Behar’s downtown San Francisco design studio, fuseproject, around a conference table topped with some rudimentary prototypes that they would pick up and flex in dif- ferent directions while discussing “torque” and “harmonics” and “programming sequences.” On a counter along the back wall stood a desk lamp that Behar designed for Herman Miller. Behar is perhaps best known for creating the One Laptop Per Child computer and perhaps least known for designing both New York City’s branded bike helmet and its official condom dispenser. The two had been friends for a while—Behar was an early advisor to Jimmyjane—before deciding, a couple years ago, to collaborate. “Isn’t this that old-fashioned
Playboy
mansion cliché, two guys coming up with products used for women?” Behar asked. “I don’t know if it is because I have twenty-plus years experience of design or thirty years of sexual experiences. You put the two together and you can get to some really interesting places.”

During the initial brainstorms, which included the women on their respective teams, some awkward workplace conversations, and plenty of giggling, Imboden and Behar identified three dif- ferent functions that a vibrator should deliver. They decided to roll them out in a trio of devices—a collection they’ve named “Pleasure to the People”—all built upon a modular base structure that houses a common digital interface, wireless rechargeable bat- tery and motor. They designed the Form 2, their first product, to

be a “new interpretation” of the Rabbit Pearl. Its form is compact, resting ergonomically in the palm of the hand, with a novel shape that resembles a padded tuning fork or a portly, marshmallow Peep Easter bunny—suggestive enough of the iconic Rabbit to appear familiar to people, but amorphous enough that they don’t dwell too much on what it looks like. “It’s not just a lumpy random shape,” Imboden pointed out. “I think there’s a real sense of purpose in the forms which communicate that this is not an arbitrary act or a whimsical random thing we’ve created.”

Through their design, Imboden wants to convey the sense that these are carefully considered objects—that someone is looking out for our sexual well-being, even if we have been conditioned to have low expectations. “I jokingly say this is an area where you really don’t want to disappoint your customers,” Behar told me. “And I think this is an industry that has treated its customers really badly.” The Form 2 takes a symmetrical, organic form but they avoid emulating anatomy, because while “the penis is very well designed to accomplish what it needs to accomplish, a vibrator doesn’t actually need to do those same things,” Im- boden said. One function it was not designed to accomplish was to stimulate a woman’s G-spot, but even if it did, mimicking male genitalia treads on psychological territory that Imboden would rather avoid. “While on the one hand that has its own excite- ment, there becomes a third person,” he said, noting that some men feel threatened by an object they perceive to be a substitu- tion for themselves. “People aren’t necessarily seeking to have a threesome. Our goal has really been for the focus to be on you and your sensations and the interaction with your partner and not really to pull attention to the product itself. That’s an element of why we make the products as quiet as they are. It’s also why we make them visually quiet.” Representational objects, like