Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America

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The author thanks Eric Schatzberg for his moral support and Stephen Vaughn for letting her work on this topic for her dissertation.

For nearly four decades, the Hitachi company marketed its plug-in Magic Wand vibrator as a massager, even though feminist stores had been selling the Magic Wand as a sex toy since 1974. Hitachi did not publicly admit that its device had sexual uses until 2013, a fact already acknowledged by hundreds of Amazon.com reviewers, a dozen manufacturers of sexual attachments, and thousands of pornographic movie websites.¹There was nothing new about the Magic Wand, though. Vibrators like the Magic Wand had been sold since the early 1900s, marketed in a similarly veiled way. Companies hid the sexual uses of the vibrator behind its multiple nonsexual uses. Some of these uses, like neck massage, were legitimate, whereas others, such as claims of cancer cures, were patently false.

Although the vibrator was a common consumer product in the early 1900s, historians have very little direct evidence for its use, either sexual or nonsexual. No records survive from vibrator companies, and men and women of the time rarely mentioned masturbation, even in their most private writings. Given the absence of direct evidence, marketing materials provide some of the best sources for accessing the meaning of vibrators.²

In the first three decades of the twentieth century, the vibrator was pervasive in consumer advertising. Vibrator ads appeared in mainstream magazines and all the major newspapers.³Vibrators were displayed in electrical shop windows and featured in Sears catalogs.⁴Vibrator manufacturers targeted all manner of consumers: male and female, young and old, sick and healthy. Suggestive advertisements portrayed vibrators as cure-alls for dozens of diseases, including deafness, malaria, fatigue, and impotence.⁵

Marketing sources show how what we now consider a masturbation device became ubiquitous during a period of draconian anti-obscenity laws and pervasive condemnation of masturbation.⁶Companies attempted to shape the meanings of vibrator technology through strategic marketing that overtly portrayed the vibrator as nonsexual while covertly conveying its sexual uses.

To support this argument, I examine vibrator ads, user manuals, artifacts, electric company pamphlets, and writings by physicians and moralists. These materials show how vibrator and electric companies transmitted these messages by...