Yuan Changying prize runner up '23-'24
This year’s Yuan Changying Runner Up Prize in Understanding Gender in the Contemporary World goes to Harriet Marchand (Year 1, MA Politics). The jury felt this essay offered an excellent historical and geographical tracing of the gendered and racialised history of the vibrator. It crafted an original archive of historical and contemporary texts and developed a compelling analysis of gendered orders, labour, intersectionality, and showed gender as critical to capitalism. It demonstrated how a technological object can be both liberating, and work as a commodity built on women’s (racialised and classed) labour in the global economy. The committee were impressed by the critical reflection on whom the vibrator was aimed for, for whom it is liberatory and what privileges that belies.
Photo credit: Jessie Pearl on Flickr.
The Vibrator
The electromechanical vibrator was invented in the early 1880s by the British doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville (Lieberman, 2016). He initially invented the device as a medical device for use on men, but takeup from the medical community was “lukewarm” and the vibrator began to be marketed to consumers as an electrotherapeutic device and as a household device. However, through the 20th century, the vibrator began to be used as a sex toy, first covertly, and then increasingly openly. Now, the vibrator is explicitly sold as a sex toy and is usually marketed towards women as a tool for masturbation. In this essay, I will analyse the vibrator as an object that is circulated in gendered, classed and racialised ways, focusing my analysis mainly on the United States. First, I will discuss the gendered circulation of the vibrator in the early 20th century. I will draw on Hallie Lieberman’s research and on the theories of Raewyn Connell (2020) to analyse how the usages of the vibrator proposed by advertisements worked to reinforce gender binaries and to represent masculinities and femininities. Then, I will discuss the liberatory potential of the vibrator first from a sexuality studies perspective, mentioning also the feminist movement of the 1960s and 70s. Finally, I will draw on Kimberle Crenshaw’s (1989) concept of ‘intersectionality’ to challenge the extent to which the vibrator can truly be deemed liberatory.
Although the vibrator was not initially sold as an explicitly sexual product, as it is now, its circulation and usage was still profoundly gendered. In her article “Selling Sex Toys” (2016), Hallie Lieberman discusses the ways in which advertisements for vibrators enforced certain manifestations of masculinity and femininity. Lieberman explains that adverts for the vibrator as a medical device were often targeted at men. Many of these adverts claimed the vibrator could “cure impotence and strengthen muscles” (Lieberman, 2016), and Lieberman links this to the “crisis in masculinity” that was occurring as men in America increasingly began working in office jobs and on factory floors rather than performing physical labour. This suggests that the hegemonic model of masculinity in the US had been “disrupted” by a changing economy and labour landscape, and that a new ideal of masculinity was being created in order to integrate this change into gender order (Connell, 2020). Lieberman (2016) describes “sexual potency and muscle strength” as two of the measures by which masculinity was increasingly gauged in this time. Thus, the adverts of the early 20th century projected gendered meanings onto the vibrator by implying that the use of the vibrator would allow men to better embody the hegemonic masculinity of the time.
By contrast, when these adverts were aimed at women, they presented the vibrator as an electrotherapeutic medical device or a household appliance (Lieberman, 2016). When being marketed as a household appliance, it was most commonly marketed towards housewives, often as an attachment for a “universal” electric motor which could power various electric devices. Duntley even produced a hoover that was designed to work also as a vibrator. When the vibrator was being marketed as an electrotherapeutic device for women, it was sometimes cast as a beautifying tool, with one 1909 advert suggesting that it could increase breast size (Lieberman, 2016). When we compare the narratives presented in these adverts with the adverts aimed at men, it becomes apparent that advertisers made use of binary, dichotomous views of gender. Connell (2020) writes that “‘masculinity’ only exists in contrast with ‘femininity’” and this dichotomy is clearly presented in the uses of the vibrator suggested by advertisement. Men are presented as strong and virile, whilst women must be sexually appealing and must be capable housewives. These gendered imaginations are not only implied by the adverts for the vibrators, but by the design of the items themselves – to me, this is highlighted in astonishing clarity in the hybrid vacuum cleaner and vibrator.
Although, in the early-to-mid 20th century, vibrators were primarily marketed as medical devices and household appliances, Hallie Lieberman (2016) suggests that their use as “instruments for masturbation” was well known. Many adverts for vibrators included suggestive imagery or text, with one White Cross ad reading “All the keen relish, the pleasures of youth, fairly throb within you” (Lieberman 2016). Equally, “phallic, dildo-like attachments” were sold. However, companies were forced by obscenity laws to advertise any potential sexual uses of the vibrator covertly (Henriques, 2018). I suggest that anti-obscenity laws like the Comstock Act in the US essentially worked to enforce societal norms around sex, which included a vehement condemnation of masturbation. This condemnation was, for some time, a medical one – it was believed that masturbation could lead to insanity and even to the contraction of tuberculosis, although, by the 1930s, this idea had largely been rejected by specialists (Laqueur 2003). However, there were also moral worries about masturbation that persisted for much longer. Masturbation was considered primal and antithetical to civilisation, especially in women. Masturbation implies that reproduction can no longer be taken for granted as the goal of sexual behaviour (Laqueur, 2003), an idea that has wide-reaching and destabilising implications for the patriarchal gender order of the early 20th century. The creation of sexual relationships for the purpose of reproduction and the creation of legitimate heirs is the prime purpose of the institution of marriage (Keufler, 2020). Thus, when used as a masturbatory device, the vibrator is inherently subversive to the patriarchal gender order, so it is no wonder that its use was and is taboo. In fact, the sale of sex toys is still prohibited in Alabama (Henriques, 2018).
Equally, the vibrator is subversive as a tool that helps women to experience sexual pleasure without the need for the form of sex that is considered natural in western society, i.e. heterosexual coitus in the “missionary position” (Gagnon and Simon, 2017). Instead, the vibrator can be used in solo sex or in intercourse to stimulate the clitoris either externally or through the vagina. Breaking from the normative “sexual script” that ultimately culminates in heterosexual, missionary sex (Gagnon and Simon, 2017) allows the implication that a woman does not need to be penetrated by a penis to be sexually gratified. Thus, by decentering the penis and instead centering the clitoris and female sexual pleasure (Lynn, 2017), female masturbation undermines the phallocentric gender order, which sees the phallus as the “master-signifier” (Connell, 2020).
This subversive potential of the vibrator was picked up by feminists in the 1960s and 70s, who saw female masturbation as empowering; as a rejection of sexual dependence on men; as an act of self-creation, and as a means of community-building (Laqueur, 2003)(Dodson, 1974). Comella Lynn (2017) discusses the female-run sex-toy shops that appeared in the 1970s in the US, arguing that these created a viable counterpublic sphere in which a “progressive sexual politics” could be enacted. These shops created spaces in which female pleasure was centred and female community could be built. These initiatives were also economically empowering in that they involved the owners to enter into the “sexual marketplace” as entrepreneurs. In the terms of separate spheres theory, this represents women stepping out of the domestic sphere and into the productive, economic sphere. However, Lynn admits that these shops drew heavily on cultural feminism and were thus often gynocentric and exclusive, rather than intersectional (Crenshaw, 1989). Even the suggestion that economic empowerment through entrepreneurship naturalises and thus centres the middle-class woman who has access to the resources to become an ‘entrepreneur’.
Continuing to draw on Crenshaw’s idea of intersectionality, I argue that, in the modern day, we should be equally suspicious of the vibrator as a mascot of female liberation, due to its relationship to a capitalist economy. Vibrators are ultimately non-essential commodities that, in our contemporary economy, are produced primarily through international supply chains for the purpose of mass consumption (Tyburczy, 2016). The fact that 70% of sex toys are made in China (Tyburczy, 2016), suggests that the vibrator is produced largely by feminised and racialised labourers in the Global South for those women who can afford to buy them. To the middle-class white woman, who is only “marked” by gender (Connell, 2020), the vibrator may seem to be a liberating technology. But this depends on her whiteness and economic security remaining “invisible” (Moreton-Robinson, 2021), as when we consider her whiteness and class as an attribute and a privilege, her complicity in the oppression of racialised, working class labourers involved in the creation of the vibrator becomes apparent. Crenshaw (1989) argues that feminist efforts need to begin “with addressing the needs and problems of those who are most disadvantaged” which, in this case, is the underpaid workers, especially women, in China. Thus, a truly intersectional feminist approach would focus on dismantling capitalism, neo-imperialist economic structures as well as the patriarchy (see Combahee River Collective, 2019).
In conclusion, the vibrator has been marketed as a gendered technology ever since its commodification. Advertisements for vibrators in the early-to-mid 20th century upheld the gender order of the 19th century by entrenching the new hegemonic standards for masculinity and presenting an opposing model of femininity. However, the vibrator has also been circulated in ways that have undermined the gender order. The use of the vibrator as a sex toy for female masturbation undermines a phallocentric, heteronormative and patriarchal gender order. That said, the extent to which the vibrator undermines the gender order can easily be overestimated by middle-class white women who do not have to be aware of the role that the vibrator plays as a commodity in the global capitalist economy.
Bibliography
Combahee River Collective (2019) ‘A Black Feminist Statement’
Connell, R.W. (2020) Masculinities, 2nd US edn., New York: Routledge.
Crenshaw, K. (1989) ‘Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,’, University of Chicago Legal Forum, 1989(1), pp. 139-167.
Dodson, B. (1974) Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love, New York: Bodysex Designs.
Gagnon, J.H. and Simon, W. (2017) Sexual Conduct: The Social Sources of Human Sexuality. United Kingdom: Routledge.
Henriques, M. (2018). The vibrator: from medical tool to revolutionary sex toy. [online] www.bbc.com. Available at: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181107-the-history-of-the-vibrator [Accessed 4 Dec. 2023].
Kuefler, M. (2020) 'Sexualities in Historical Comparative Perspective', in N.A. Naples (ed.) Companion to Sexuality Studies. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, pp. 40-60.
Laqueur, T.W. (2003) Solitary Sex, A Cultural History of Masturbation, New York: Zone Books.
Lieberman, H. (2016) ‘Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America’, Enterprise and Society, 17 (2), pp. 393-433.
Lynn, C. Vibrator Nation : How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017.
Moreton-Robinson, A. (2021) Talkin’ Up to the White Woman: Indigenous Women and Feminism. 2nd edn. Minneapolis : University of Minnesota Press.
Tyburczy, J. “Sex Toys after NAFTA: Transnational Class Politics, Erotic Consumerism, and the Economy of Female Pleasure in Mexico City.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 42(1), pp. 123–152.