A History of How Vibrators Became a Girl’s Best Friend

Electric and Battery Vibrators are Both Better Than Bees.

Last week, I told the story of how non-vibrating sex toys came into being and grew in popularity over tens of thousands of years. This week, we step into the future of genital pleasure; a time during which health and sexuality began an awkward romance and vibrators trod a legally murky path on which they used euphemistic names to hide in plain sight.

The first known mention of a vibrating sex toy is a probably mythical tale about Egyptian queen Cleopatra. According to the unlikely story, the powerful monarch ordered her servants to collect some bees and place them inside of a carved-out gourd. When placed against her royal genitals, the theory is that the understandably angry buzzing of the bees worked as a primitive vibrator.

I can’t speak for any other women, but I have neither servants capable of gathering bees nor an interest in having them buzz against my bush. Seems risky as well as cruel. That could explain why it did not become a popular form of self-pleasure. Those with infinite patience and an unreasonably long lifespan finally had some options during the 1800s. That’s when British doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville invented an electric vibrator to relieve muscle tension, pain, spinal diseases, deafness, and impotence in men. When it was released onto the market in 1883, it was called Grandville’s Hammer. Sounds intense.

Weirdly enough, in 1868 when Anthony Comstock worked for the federal government to promote a crusade against anything sexual that wasn’t for the purpose of reproduction. Condoms, diaphragms, erotic literature, explicit photos, dildos; they and their producers all fell victim to Comstock’s vengeance in the name of a friend who had died by suicide and enjoyed pornography, although not in that order.

What’s weird is that neither Comstock nor any other contemporary morality superpower gave electric vibrators a second thought. Although they were the most popular of the sex toys once they became available, they moved unmolested through the USPS all because they marketed themselves as massagers with medical benefits. Even the ones that included phallic-shaped attachments. I wonder what happened when one of those attachments arrived damaged and a replacement had to be shipped on its lonesome, which would technically classify it as a dildo.

While we’re kinda on the topic of the health benefits of vibrators, excuse me, massagers, I think it is enormously important to call balderdash on a myth so pornographic that I’m shocked it has become veritable feminist scripture.

No, doctors did not cure “hysteria” in women using vibrators.

Let me repeat that. No, doctors did not cure “hysteria” in women using vibrators.

Thanks to Rachel Maines' 1999 book Technology of Orgasm, published by Johns Hopkins University Press, a lot of otherwise well-educated and intelligent people have insisted that the first use of electrical vibrators was for prurient reasons. Maines provided hundreds of citations and primary sources. Unfortunately, those citations and primary sources did not support her claim. She has since insisted that she was simply proposing an “interesting hypothesis,” but by that time, it was too late for the truth since the “hypothesis” is so much more “interesting.”

Now that we have that out of the way, we can move forward. In the early 1900s, vibrators started to become more common and were marketed to adults and babies as domestic and medical appliances. They could eliminate wrinkles, cure tuberculosis, and, on the rare occasions that a doctor did use one on a woman patient, they purposely avoided the clitoris because “it is liable to cause sexual excitement,” according to James Craven Wood, who was a gynecologist in 1917.

Don’t think for a moment that women hadn’t already figured this out on their own. Long before Betty Dodson started promoting the use of vibrators during her masturbation workshops in the early 1970s, women could be found with vibrators in porno mags and stag films. So, by the 1920s, claiming your “back massager” was just that became suspect. In fact, if Babeland’s Museum of Vintage Vibrators can be trusted, the golden age of vibrators existed between the end of the Victorian Age until the 1930s. Who knew our not-so-distant ancestors were such horndogs?

Frankly, given that vibrators including Grandville’s Hammer and later products like the Massage Master II, which had three heads, had huge motors and were awkwardly configured for intimate contact. They were marketed as “massagers” during the 1940s because of these very reasons. Plus, they were noisy as hell. It wasn’t until the early 1950s that a speed control button was introduced. Prior to the Niagara Handheld Unit 1, all a woman had to work with was an on/off switch.

It wasn’t just clits that were exploring the benefits of vibration. Patented in 1892, the Electro-Thermo Dilator was released as “an improved method of administering electricity to the system through the rectum, at the same time dilating the sphincter muscles.” In this way, Young’s Dilator became a marketing success, with ads in medical journals and popular health magazines alike. Usually made of rubber, which was new on the market, they came in four sizes to gain muscle tone and were promoted as a treatment for constipation, enlarged prostates, asthma, and a cure for masturbation in men.

Not one to miss an angle, there were also vaginal dilators, which tended to be made of rubber but could also be found made of metal or glass with a plunger mechanism in the bottom. Their alleged purpose was to cure vaginismus, a condition that makes vaginal intercourse difficult and painful.

Thanks to pioneers like Betty Dodson, the stigma against vibrators has become less over time, which is not to say that there aren’t people, especially men, who find them intimidating due to their modern effectiveness. Good news, gentlemen! They make vibrating cock rings and anal toys now, too!