Jennifer Jill Fellows: I think most people who listen to this podcast will be familiar with the concept of the wage gap, but I’m betting far fewer listeners have heard of the orgasm gap. The orgasm gap is a term coined to describe the disparity that exists between cis women’s and cis men’s orgasms in heterosexual sexual encounters. Because even though cis women are capable of multiple orgasms, the research shows that on average in heterosexual sexual encounters, cis women actually have fewer orgasms than cis men. But there is a technological tool, a device, if you will, that could close this gap. The vibrator.
JJF: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Cyborg Goddess, a Feminist Tech Studies Podcast. I’m your host, Jennifer Jill Fellows. And on this episode, I’ve invited Dr. Dennis Waskul and Michelle Anklan on the show to talk about their joint research paper examining the vibrator, its history, its marketing, and it’s complicated relationship with feminist activism. Michelle Anklan is a therapist who incorporate feminist theory, queer theory, and sex positivity into her work to support her client’s mental health. She also works as an adjunct assistant professor for the College of social work at the University of Utah, teaching courses focused on social justice and the social work profession. Dennis Waco is a professor of sociology at Minnesota State University Mankato and an MSU distinguished faculty scholar. His research focuses on symbolic interaction, sociology of the body, sociology of the senses, sociology of the supernatural, and computer mediated communications.
JJF: Hello to both of you, and welcome to the show.
Michelle Anklan: Thanks for having us.
Denniss Waskul: Yep. Thanks for having, Jennifer.
JJF: So, before we begin, I want to ground us by acknowledging the physical space that this podcast is recorded on. Digital space may seem ephemeral, but it is fundamentally physical space. The servers and cables that sustain the internet, sustaining my connection to Dennis and Michelle today occupy physical space and are built with materials extracted from physical space. With that in mind, I recognize that Cyborg Goddess is recorded on the unseated territory of the Coast Salish people of the QiqĂ©ytNation. And, Michelle, can you tell us where you’re located today?
MA: Yeah, I’m located on the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Shoshone, Paiute, Goshute, and Ute tribes, and the state of Utah is home to eight distinct tribal nations.
JJF: And Dennis, where are you today?
DW: I am located in Mankato, Minnesota, and we acknowledge that we live and thrive in the traditional homeland of the Dakota Nation and other Indigenous peoples.
JJF: Okay. So I want to start by asking you both a bit about your academic journey. So Dennis, can you tell us how you became interested in sociology?
DW: That could be a dissertation. I’ll keep it short. My father was a professor of sociology at a two-year College that I happened to attend. I had actually no academic interests at all. I just happened to have nowhere else to go but college and I ended up in some of my father’s sociology courses, which itself was an interesting sociological lesson and seeing my father in a very, very different light in a very, very different role. And I just loved it. I’ll admit I started college when I was 15 and at that age, being exactly like my father was the last thing I wanted in my life. But I kept taking his courses, and then I went on to the University of Minnesota and I kept taking sociology courses. I majored in just about everything but sociology until I realized at one point that I essentially completed the major and I loved what I was learning, and there was really no turning back after that. So yeah, I got my master’s degree right here in Mankato where I teach now at PhD in Oklahoma. I taught at six different colleges and universities around the country until this opportunity came up to come back to Mankato once again and I’m very happy where I’m at.
JJF: That’s awesome. My dad was also a college professor though not in philosophy. Maybe I was rebelling. He’s a college professor in economics. Maybe I rebelled against that, but didn’t rebel too hard and ended up still being in academia. But yeah, I really resonated with your story about how it’s seeing your parent in a different light when you see them at work, especially when you’re a student there. I also went to the institution where my dad taught, though I didn’t take courses from him. It was just odd to see him in the hallways.
DW: Yeah, I know. My daughter just graduated from MSU last Friday and my son is taking my sociology course next fall, I guess everything comes full circle.
JJF: There you go. Okay. Michelle, can you tell me how you became interested in therapy and mental health?
MA: Yeah, I wish I could say it was for selfless reasons, but it was honestly very self-centered. I’ve always been really into social justice and activism. I wrote my first letter to the editor when I was in sixth grade about how I need we needed a new middle school.
JJF: Amazing.
MA: I studied political science in undergrad and then I was working as a gymnastic coach and snowboard instructor, had a really pretty devastating knee injury that took me out of that. And so I got interested in positive psychology just to find ways to cope for myself. And I started, I did one semester of a graduate program in psychology, and then a friend who was a social worker had an intervention, and I realized I had been doing social work my whole life without really knowing what it was. I got into the social work program at Mankato and got my Master of social work and then I’m now working in the therapy world and mental health world along with instructing at the University of Utah.
JJF: That’s awesome. I know you said it was selfish, but it doesn’t sound entirely selfish to be writing letters to the editor in sixth grade to try and get a middle school.
MA: I think my psychology focus is more self-focused. Then it turns out that it fits really well into the social work world where we look at systems of injustice and socialization and how that impacts your individual experience. So it all really came together in the end.
JJF: That’s awesome. That’s a great story. Yay for your friend.
MA: Yes, I’m eternally grateful to that intervention.
JJF: Okay. So both of you did a joint paper together that I recently had the pleasure of reading, and I will link to the DOI for that in the show notes, if anybody else wants to check it out. The paper is a study on vibrators, so I wanted to ask how you both came to be interested in studying the uses and perceptions of vibrators.
DW: Since the early 90s, I’ve published quite a bit on the intersections of technology and sexualities, especially sex on the Internet. But I’ve been teaching sexualities courses for 27 years. And as Michelle can testified, she took my class, at least 80% of my students are women. This is a national phenomenon it’s primarily women that take courses like these. I’ve heard for over 20 years from women on their experiences with vibrators, and it’s always connected with my interests in sex and sexualities. It’s always a study that I thought a woman should do. So I’ve kinda put that off. But Michelle came to me when she was a graduate student at MSU, and you can explain this. You want to do some research, right?
MA: Yeah. I guess backing up a little bit. In my teenage rebellion, I spent a few years really invested in evangelical Christianity. Then in my undergrad program, my roommate was a sexual health peer educator and gender and women’s studies major. I thought that was a bunch of bullshit and I was also very sexually repressed, I would say. She used to put condoms in my backpack, so I’d find them in class and just be flustered and like, what? I’m so uncomfortable with this. She got me my first vibrator as a graduation present, and I was also really uncomfortable with that, but progressed a lot in my 20s and in my MSW program, I knew I wanted to focus on LGBTQ population, and so I did a gender and women’s studies graduate certificate in addition to my MSW program, which led me to Dennis’s class. It was an undergraduate class on the sociology of human sexuality, I believe. And I was planning to do an extra paper to make it a graduate level course and it turned into a larger project than we had imagined, but it was just really fun and interesting. One of my biggest challenges about research is picking a topic and narrowing things down because I’m so interested in everything. So Dennis had been sitting on this idea and it turned out to be a perfect time to make it happen.
JJF: That’s awesome.
DW: I’m really glad Michelle said that backstory because that’s a story I’ve been hearing for 25 years with respect to women’s experiences with vibrators. So that had been on my bucket list of research topics for a long time and I mentioned it to Michelle and she was all in from that moment forward.
JJF: Awesome. I think there is a lot of discomfort with talking about sexuality. I think that experience that in the United States, it is mostly women taking these classes, as far as I know, that is also the case in my country here in Canada, that it tends to be something that women and members of the LGBTQ+ community are more often in these classes, as opposed to perhaps cis het men, for example, take these classes at a much lower rate, and we can investigate that perhaps later in the discussion. But yeah, and that a lot of women that I know have kind of a complicated history with their own sexuality and having these kind of embarrassments and tension and stuff about it. So, Michelle, I think your story is very relatable.
JJF: Before we jump into your actual study looking at women in the 21st century and their experiences with vibrators, I want to ask you to back up because one thing you do in the paper that I found really interesting was you go over a quick history of the vibrator. Because I think a lot of people may have encountered a history that is not entirely correct. I certainly had in my brain a quote unquote history of the vibrator that was not entirely correct. So I first learned and I used the term loosely of the history of the vibrator as a medical device, and I learned this from the fictional movie Hysteria. The fact that it’s fictional really should have tipped me off, that this is not necessarily accurate. Can you tell me a little bit more about the actual history of this device?
Michelle: That’s a super common misconception that has really been standardized in academia and in society. I was super excited when I was first researching this topic to find a book by Rachel Maines. It was called the Technology of Orgasm, and I brought it to class. I showed it off. It was published by Johns Hopkins in 2001. And in that book, she writes about it being used as a medical device to treat women’s hysteria and makes the claim that doctors didn’t consider that to be a sexual experience because it was such a phallic centric environment. So I actually didn’t even know until, I think we were in the middle of writing that paper that Rachel Main’s argument is based on a lot of misquoting and mis-conveying some historical sources. So Hallie Lieberman wrote Buzz, A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, which was published in 2017 and our paper was published in 2018. And then also in 2018, Hallie Lieberman wrote A Failure of Academic Quality Control, The Technology of Orgasm, examining that book and how that book was based on very flawed research and application of research. That’s available. The article is available at the Center for Positive Sexualities peer reviewed journal. I would encourage everybody to look into that because it is such a widespread belief that is being held really strongly and perpetuated. It’s a fun story.
JJF: It is
MA: It is, but it’s not the truth.
JJF: Okay. I will try and link those resources in the show notes for people.
DW: And to back up what Michelle just said, I mean, I taught that for years based on again, Rachel Maines Technology of Orgasm, which I read when it came out in 2001, and I would imagine, Jennifer, you probably just took for granted that same wisdom. But,
JJF: I think I’ve read other papers that are based on that assumption and building other arguments subsequently.
DW; Yup. But, you know, not to defend Rachel Maines, but most people attribute the innovation of the vibrator to Joseph Mortimer, who invented the vibrator in the early 1800s in Victorian England that was extremely fascinated with electricity. In a context where they felt through electricity they could cure everything from headaches to cancer. Was it likely that the vibrator was used to treat women’s hysteria? Probably, but it was used to allegedly treat, many many many things. It was it was touted originally as a medical device. But that was a very hard sell for physicians, especially American physicians. So, come about the early 1900s, vibrator industry rebranded itself, not as a medical device, but as a household appliance, a kind of electrotherapeutic device that would be used to treat sore muscles, and you’d find it in the Sears and Roebuck catalogs, right next to toasters and blenders, Right. But its sexual uses were well known. The vibrator appeared in pornography as early as the 1920s, but it was not outwardly marketed as a sex tool until the 1960s and especially in 1970s, where it began to emerge as a liberating political tool, especially as touted by very sex positive progressive feminists of the time, such as Betty Dodson, Delle Williams, Joani Blank in which the vibrator was seen as a liberating tool for orgasmic equity for women and a break from men. Thus it remained until 1990s or so. Would Michelle agree? Where now we see the vibrator being recast once again as somewhat of a post-feminist toy, divorced from any kind of liberating potential and a tool for kind of self-care.
JJF: So we have the part about the vibrator being a medical device is true in some sense, that originally, it was seen as a medical device, but not specifically for hysteria and perhaps not used a ton for the treatment of hysteria, but for the treatment of a variety of medical ailments, kind of going along with electricity just in general, being viewed as possibly really medically advantageous and efficacious.
DW: Correct.
JJF: And then it stops being used so much for medical professionals because medical professionals, if I remember your research weren’t entirely on board with this branding.
DW: Not at all.
JJF: Okay, not at all. Then it becomes branded as I’m almost picturing a household wellness kind device. You’ve got your blender, you can make your smoothies and things like that, and you’ve got your other household appliances and there’s this other household device for sore muscles, like a massager, maybe or something like that. Then we see second wave feminism in the 60s and 70s and now we see it being explicitly rather than perhaps more covertly, uderstood as a tool for sexual pleasure and also tied to feminist movements, movements of liberation. But then by the time we hit the 90s, this is the last part of your story, it becomes identified with post feminism, which we’ve talked about before on this show, and we will talk about in unpack more today.
DW: Another way of simply stating this is until the 1990s, the vibrator was always seen as a tool for accomplishing something. Post 90s vibrator has become literally referred to it as sex toy. To something to play with for recreation and self-help.
JJF: Okay. So let’s get into your research, which is post 1990s. So we are now living in the Sex-toy marketing era of the vibrator. And so you conducted an online survey to find out about people’s perceptions of and uses of vibrators. And while the vast majority of your respondents, you say identified as cis women. You also did get some responses from trans women, cis men, trans men, and some non-binary folks. What else can you tell me about getting the participants, the identities of people who chose to respond, the experience of doing this online survey in general.
MA: Yeah. Well, I will admittedly say that our data is pretty skewed towards white women, college students. Like a lot of college research. That’s the convenience sample that’s available. I worked with a couple of different women’s centers. I emailed, I think most of the women centers in Minnesota and some LGBTQ centers as well and put up flyers, and we were actually surprised, I think we had over 250 responses, which was way more than we expected. That was a huge benefit of doing the online survey. We had it open for two months, so there’s a lot of word of mouth too. I think a lot of people actually enjoyed taking the survey based on the responses that we got and a lot of people saying, I’ve never talked about this before to anybody. This is my first time talking about a vibrator. I mean, talking, typing into the computer, but
JJF: Sharing thoughts.
MA: Exactly. So yeah, it allowed for a really broader participation, but it also was very skewed in terms of being predominantly white cis women.
JJF: Yeah. And you did allude to this. This is a general problem that a lot of social scientific research faces that a lot of this research is done in institutions like universities, colleges, post-secondary institutions, which means quite often, as you said, the more convenient sample is the students and other community members in those institutions, which means that insofar as the student body doesn’t really often represent the general public for a variety of social and structural reasons, you can end up with research that as you said, in this case is skewed towards white cis women, for example.
MA: Exactly.
JJF: That is something to highlight as a limitation of your research, but it’s also as you said, a wider limitation of how not all social scientific research is, but a lot of this social science research runs into this problem.
MA: And we had first wanted to do actual face to face interviews. I think Dennis has a good bit of experience with that and we were turned down by the IRB. I think it took us four times to get this approved. The final iteration was this anonymous online survey.
JJF: So IRB the research board?
DW: IRB required us to do it.
JJF: This was for your research ethics process, right? Just for people who aren’t familiar with how this.
DW: That’s correct. I think that’s a limitation too. I mean, again, I published quite a bit on sex and technology on the Internet. I’ve done hundreds of interviews on the Internet. But when you’re limited to an anonymous survey in which people have to type their answers, answers can be very truncated. You don’t have the opportunity to follow up probe questions. So, So, there’s no doubt that the quality of our data was compromised by this requirement. But then on the other side of the coin, I think we did probably get a lot more participants in the study that would be willing to fill out an anonymous online survey rather than to speak to a live person.
JJF: And this goes back to something we talked about earlier, which is the kind of hesitation or internal tension maybe that many people feel talking about sexuality, talking about their own sexuality, talking about tools and devices that are linked to sexuality. Yeah. People may be more willing to participate if it’s online and anonymous, but I also take your point, Dennis, that that makes it harder for, like, if somebody said something that was vague or ambiguous or said something that you thought there was more there, you can’t really ask a follow up. Like, oh, what did you mean by that? Or could you expand on this? All of that opportunity to dig deeper into people’s perceptions, for example, is lost when you’re doing these surveys.
DW: Correct. And one of our chief goals here was to capture women’s experiences with vibrators and to have that rich enough so it would resonate with the readers once it’s published. So having rich qualitative data is really necessary to achieve that objective. I think we ultimately got there, but probably wouldn’t have unless we had gotten over 200 responses that we could then build a story around multiple sort answers.
JJF: Yeah, I think some of your responses are and I hope people do go read it, I think some of your responses really will resonate with a lot of listeners. I mean, it’s remarkable that you got 250 people. I know other sociologists doing these online anonymous surveys on different topics and they’ll get 25 responses or something like that. That’s really quite remarkable. It’s like a lot of people have a lot to say, and they just needed an outlet.
MA: Yeah, we were thrilled at the responses that we got.
JJF: All right. Let’s dig into some of the stuff that you found out. I want to start with something that I found surprising. Because given who you’re surveying, we have this story that millennials and gen Z, which were largely the demographic that you were surveying, these younger people who would be college and university students in 2017, 2018, we often think of these demographics as being highly Internet savvy, particularly in Canada and the United States, and then there are fears about what people are being exposed to online if they’re highly Internet savvy. We know, or we have these stories that the Internet consists of cats and pornography mostly. But I was surprised because you found that even though it is true, since the 1920s, you’ve said that vibrators are present in pornography, your research showed that most people are not actually learning about vibrators from porn. Can you tell me a little bit about how and maybe where people are first learning about these devices or at least the people in your survey sample.
MA: Yeah. We also found that really interesting. A lot of it was social within friend groups or older students on the same sports team sharing about that information. Also, media in terms of shows like Sex in the City or Girls, they’re talked about, and that was a common response. Some people responded that they learned from family members, either an older sister or a mom.
JJF: So interesting. In a lot of these cases, it’s personal social relationships like friends, teammates, family members, and then mainstream media, not Internet pornography, but mainstream media is where people are learning about this.
DW: Yeah. There’s about a third of our respondents indicated they first learned about vibrators through media. Again, it was fascinating. They’re equally as likely to first learn about vibrators from traditional media sources as was online about a third first learned about vibrators from peers primarily in middle school or high school. But we have to put this in perspective a little bit. And I believe the average age of participants in our study was a little over 22 years of age. Although we had participants as old as 65 and as young as 18. But I think the average age was right around 22, does that seem right to you, Michelle?
MA: Yeah.
DW: Yeah. And they reported first learning about vibrators in middle school or high school. So you’d have to take that back another 12 years or more. So that brings us back to 2005 is when they would first have learned about vibrators. So at that age in 2005, is it fair to assume that they’re extremely Internet savvy? Perhaps not.
JJF: Yeah. So this may be changing with current generations, but I was still surprised.
MA: Correct. Yeah.
MA: Some people did mention Tumbler and I don’t know how to say Imgur?
JJF: I forgot about that one.
MA: Yeah.
DW: So that takes it back a ways.
JJF: Yeah.
DW: Perhaps the most fascinating for me was about 15% of them first learned about vibrators from family members. And again, this is one of those areas where I wish we could have done probe follow up questions, especially the ones that first learned about vibrators from their mother and in particular, having discovered their mother’s vibrators through snooping around in their bedroom. And none of them found that to be a disconcerting experience. They didn’t know what it was, you know, and it was only later on in life that they discover, oh, I know what that is now that I found my mother had before. And in a certain way that from our data, at least, it seemed to provide some assurances that vibrators are perhaps a normative thing. Even mom has one.
JJF: Right.
DW: I wish I could have followed up with a little bit more on that because those respondents always seem to have amongst the most positive attitudes towards vibrators, having had that experience of knowing that even their mother has one and it’s perhaps not as shameful and taboo as those who discovered the vibrator from other sources.
JJF: Right. Yeah, that is interesting. It would be nice to know a little bit more about that. But I can see your point that if later in life, you’re like, oh, that thing I found snooping around my mom’s bedroom or whatever, that was a vibrator, if mom had one when I was younger, this must be pretty widespread or mainstream or normalized, that kind of thing. Yeah. That’s really curious and then they went on to have more positive responses in general.
DW: Yeah. Especially there’s one participant in our study who discovered her mother’s vibrator and then brought it out to mom and said, what is this? Then mom was very straightforward about what it was.
JJF: Amazing.
DW: Yeah, I want to give that mom a mom of the year award.
JJF: Yeah, high fives to that mom.
DW: Right. Absolutely.
JJF: Okay. We’ve got an idea of where people, I guess, in the early to mid 2000s were learning about vibrators. Of the study participants who do own vibrators because not everyone in your survey did own one. How did most of the people who do own one acquire their first vibrator?
MA: This was one of my favorite questions to look at the responses for. There were two themes that really arose, one being that it was a dare or a joke. So, really off-loading that choice and responsibility to someone else, either a friend, a partner, a sister, someone like that, who they can take that responsibility in that personal agency. Like, oh it’s not something I want. It’s just my friend dared me to go into Spencer’s and get this.
JJF: Or my friend got it for me as a joke or something like that.
MA: Exactly. Yeah. The other side to that was people making really intentional choices to hide their purchase, either waiting until they had their own credit card so their parents wouldn’t see it or waiting until they lived in a situation where they weren’t at home or didn’t have a roommate, and they went to extreme measures to hide it, maybe going to a different city to go to a sex shop. So that, that was an interesting, interesting stories to hear.
JJF: Yeah. You’ve got some participants who don’t want to take ownership of the decision or the impetus to get the vibrator in the first place Right? So, oh, will this happened because I was dared or somebody wrapped it up and gave it to me as a present as a joke or something like that. Oh, it wasn’t serious. That’s not how I came to be in possession of this. Then other people who seriously did want to, but also didn’t want other people to know, right?
MA: Yeah.
DW: And even those who intentionally made that purchase found ways to distance themselves from the agency of making that decision. For example, about a quarter of our participants acquired the first vibrator at a sex toy party? Here in the United States, that would have been a Pure Romance? What it is again?
MA: Yeah.
DW: A home based. . .
MA: A MLM, multi-level marketing.
JJF: Yeah. Yeah, like a tupperware party.
DW: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. But those who made those purchases, about a quarter of them did almost universally attribute the purchase to the fact that they had been drinking.
JJF: Okay.
DW: They and their friends were at the sex toy party and we’ve been drinking and it was just funny, so we all decided to buy.
MA: There is another narrative to of groups of pretty much women going to stores together and in having a girls night out and we’re all going to go to the sex shop and buy these things together. And those respondents tended to have a more positive attitude towards vibrators in general and then also positive experiences with the purchase of a vibrator, having that and group support and camaraderie.
JJF: Mm hmm. I also think the idea of, like, a group of women going together, it’s making me remember going to my friend’s bachelorette party, and we all went to a sex toy shop as part of the bachelorette party day, right? And, like, purchased some items and vibrators and stuff like that, and then, you know, went out and continued with the party. So, I think that’s a fairly common experience, I think that women will do that in groups and go to one of these sex toy stores, for example.
MA: Yeah.
JJF: That just made me remember that.
DW: And I think that’s outstanding. Making that purchase in a more communal way allows for that opportunity for social bonding and support. Now knowing that my friend has a vibrator and I have a vibrator, now we can broach that conversation later on. Dialogue is important.
MA: And placing, again, this timeline back in the early 2000s, maybe in the 90s and mall culture, a lot of people specifically mentioned Spencers, which is a novelty store in the US, and they sell joke cards and gag gifts and they also have a vibrator section, but it’s an all-ages store just at the local mall. You could very easily run into that store, not knowing what a vibrator is and some people discovered vibrators in that way or made their first purchase at that store and were able to you know, not having it be a sex shop specifically, that was easier for them to walk around the mall carrying a bag from Spencer’s.
JJF; Right. It also allows for this privacy that many people still wanted. I know that and this is something I think your research showed too that some women feel a little intimidated going into a sex shop. The fact that Spencer’s is not explicitly a sex shop, but just happens to have vibrators in the store. I know here in Canada, I don’t think it was in the 90s, but now we also have local drug store chains like London Drugs has a small selection of vibrators in the drug stores. You could go in to buy some groceries, buy Advil, and also get a vibrator if you wanted to.
DW: Yeah, we have that in the United States, too. Although they don’t call them vibrators, a personal massage devices.
JJF: Oh, I don’t know what they call them here. I’ll have to look at the labeling.
DW: Yeah, they marketed as personal massage devices. It just so happened to be right next to the condo.
JJF: And the lube.
DEW; And the lube. Yeah.
MA: I would say, I think that’s been more recent that those have just been displayed at the local Target. After 50 Shades of Gray came out, there was a little line of blindfolds, branded blindfolds, and stuff like that. So at least for Target, which is a big superstore in the US, that I hadn’t seen that before, but I would be curious to know when they introduced that as a product for sale.
JJF: Maybe a future research project for you.
DW: The other common source was Amazon.
JJF: Right.
DW: Actually, after completing this research, I can’t say for sure, but I’m fairly convinced that Amazon must be the world’s leading distributor of vibrator. And they’re, you know, and actually, I never even thought about it was in collecting this data, I actually went to Amazon and like, oh, my God, they do have a ton of them. And there’s a zillion reviews.
JJF: Yeah.
DW: And of course, you purchased them off at Amazon, and it’s like any other Amazon purchase and it shows up in a box just like a bag just like any other Amazon purchase. So it allows for that, you know, anonymity of the purchase.
JJF: So, I want to get into a little bit of a theoretical framework here. Some of this we’ve already alluded to with the talk about how the marketing for vibrators shifted in the 1990s to a more post-feminist marketing. So, when you were analyzing the research that you had, you reached for two concepts and one of them we’ve already mentioned post-feminism, and the other one was sex-positive feminism. And we want to make sure we don’t get these two confused because they are very different. So, can we explain for anyone who might not be familiar what these two concepts are. Let’s start with post-feminism.
DW: I think post-feminism is probably a poorly phrased term because it isn’t feminist at all. But I get the assumption, it’s the notion of a kind of view of feminism that is post-feminist ideals. It’s a sentiment that is often attributed to ideas that emerged kind of post 1990s in which there’s this general false belief that the goals of the feminist movement have already been attained and that further feminist objectives are, are obsolete at this point. The view that equity has been obtained, politically, socially, economically, sexually and hence in the context of vibrators, then sexual pleasure is achieved then, not through changing social cultural conditions, but instead through the purchase of an object of consumerist entitlement and that those experiences are valued for their own sake, not as a tool for achieving sexual equality or liberation, but as a form of self-help and personal recreation.
JJF: Right.
DW: Did that resonate well with you, Michelle?
MA: Yeah. I think it’s akin to I don’t see color, quote unquote, we don’t have racism anymore. We had a Black president of the United States. You know, we had a woman win the popular vote in the United States, and thereby
JJF: Sexism solved!
MA; Yes.
JJF: This is how I’ve seen pos- feminism talked about before. The idea that feminism succeeded, which is not true. Everything’s great now and women are equal and we don’t have to smash the patriarchy. It’s all done. Now instead of thinking about collective empowerment or collective resistance, we can just talk about individual actions and individual, often consumer, often technological quick fixes to individual freedom and empowerment rather than collective mobilizations of resistance and change. It really does start arising in the 90s and in the early 2000s, with this very strong backlash against what is sometimes called third wave feminisms. So, yeah, we get all these ideas that like, Well, if you are feeling unempowered or hindered as a woman, that’s your problem. It’s not society’s problem anymore, right? And so, Dennis, I take it that in the context of the marketing of the vibrator, now we have this technology suggested as a fix to what has become quote unquote your problem rather than kind of larger social issues about sexuality in general, about female sexuality more specifically and about the orgasm gap and all that kind of stuff. Instead of talking about these larger social issues, we’re just going to be like, go buy something.
DW: Right. But, in all fairness, I mean, the vibrator can be a very empowering tool. There’s no doubt of that.
JJF: Yeah.
DW: What we have to remember is that feeling empowered is not the same as being empowered. Being empowered is going to require much more broad social and cultural changes that cannot be accomplished through the purchase of a commodity.
JJF: Yeah. I think that’s something that I found really interesting going back to our earlier discussion about the history of the vibrator, is that this tool has been quite malleable and it’s been used and marketed in different ways at different points in history, possibly by even different groups. And so it’s marketing as post-feminist is not saying that, like, you’re a bad feminist if you buy a vibrator, we absolutely don’t want to say that and we’ll come around to talking about sex-positive feminism soon. But it is saying that there is this kind of message right now that’s being attached to this technological device, right? This idea that it’s for individual commodification rather than as a tool that can fit into a larger social movement about sexual liberation or about talking openly about sexuality or things like that. I think that’s what I was taking your earlier part of the paper to be doing and framing.
DW: Yes.
JJF: Cool. So, we should be on the lookout for these post-feminist framings of these tools as feminists, but I also want to talk about the relationship that the vibrator has with sex-positive feminism and what your research found in terms of possibly se- positive attitudes that people might have had. So, let’s talk about sex-positivity. What is it?
MA: Sex-positivity, generally, I would say is recognizing sex as a human right and looking at how sexual orientation, sexual values, sexual activity are influenced by our culture and our socialization and upbringing. And I don’t know if academics would agree with me, but I see sex-positive feminism as just feminism. I think that is inherently a part of the the journey towards liberation for all people.
JJF: And so what kind of things did you find in terms of sex positivity when it comes to the vibrator?
DW: Again, correct me if you would characterize this differently, Michelle, but, I mean, there were plenty of themes of sex positivity in the data that we had collected. There were plenty of responses in which women reported that the purchase of the vibrator was transformational in obvious kinds of ways in that they discovered through the purchase of the vibrator and ultimately figuring out how to appropriately use it with their own bodies. They discovered a very different kind of orgasmic experience. In many cases, they discovered the capacity of orgasm for the first time. They discovered that they can achieve orgasm much more quickly, much more efficiently. But it was more than just that orgasmic experience. It was through the vibrator and through their experiences of orgasm that they discovered their body and their sexual desires more broadly and learned to embrace that more fundamentally and to expect that from their individual and partnered sexual encounters. So, I believe that we can say that there is an important element of sex positivity that is emergent from these women’s experiences with that vibrator over time. It’s just not connected. It’s just unlike that sex-positive feminism that we saw articulated by people like Betty Dodson and Delle Williams and Joani Blank, that that fundamental experience still remains. It’s just not connected to some broader social agenda. I
JJF: Like we’re missing the collectivity part of this. Which I think you also alluded to when you said so many people were excited to answer your survey because they felt like they hadn’t been given the opportunity to talk about this stuff before, that we’re not building collective conversations about this. We’re still having the individual discovery and empowerment. But it’s not becoming a sex-positive feminism so much in terms of creating communities and mobilizing people.
DW: Yeah. And it’s kind of ironic. This would be happening at a time when never before, have we had more opportunities to interact and communicate globally in ways that are anonymous or confidential, and yet apparently women aren’t having these conversations with other women.
MA: The other area where I think we saw sex-positivity was that connection of going and purchasing this together or being at a house party, Pure Romance party or we had one respondent who somehow had discovered her roommate also had a vibrator and then it was like, Oh, you use a vibrator. Oh, so do I? Oh, my gosh. Let’s share our experiences and talk about it and normalize it. So that it’s not something that has that stigma attached to it.
JJF: Yeah, for the positive experiences. So happy to hear about that. But you also found in your research that there were some quite regressive attitudes towards the vibrator. So can we talk about to what extent people’s perceptions of these devices or even the media portrayals where people learned about these devices seemed to uphold regressive ideas about female sexuality.
MA: I think there wss a large either or attitude where it’s like, oh, I don’t need to use a vibrator if I can get the quote unquote real thing and comparing almost like a zero sum game that it’s one or the other when it could really be just an additional tool that can enhance an experience.
JJF: Yeah. I think you talked about this in the paper, talking about people viewing the vibrator as quote unquote dick substitutes, as opposed to just another tool you can use to explore your sexuality with a partner, without a partner, with multiple partners.
DW: Yeah. That phrase dick substitute was actually was something one of our participants said and that was very disturbing. There’s a lot to unpack there.
JJF: Yeah.
DW: But there still remains at least for some of our participants, this notion that vibrator is how would we phrase that? Less
MA: Less meaningful, maybe.
JJF: Yeah. Like Michelle’s point about a vibrator versus the real thing. Yeah. Like vibrators aren’t real things.
DW: You only need a vibrator if you don’t have a partner. And several participants indicating that, you know, a vibrator is a running joke for desperate women who can’t get a guy.
JJF: Right.
DW: I mean, those are very regressive attitudes. But the irony is that of the participants in our study that own and use a vibrator, they equally use them both alone and with their partners. Despite the fact that those attitudes of vibrators being a dick substitute still remain, that’s not how they’re used in practice, at least according to the data that we’ve collected.
MA: There were some responses that I think I don’t know if the word emasculation, I think that was used in responses a few times. But in talking about introducing vibrators to a partner, specifically a hetero partner, so a man, that there was some feelings of emasculation or fears of, oh if I tell my partner, I want to use this, he’s going to think that he’s not good enough to satisfy me or there’s something wrong with me or with him or the way that we have sex.
JJF: So instead of kind of viewing it as a tool that could enhance the experience, many people were fearful that their partner would view this as saying the partner wasn’t good enough.
DW: But, you know, on the positive side that that fear was there. But in the vast majority of the cases, what they discovered that their partner was, in fact, enthusiastic about
JJF: Yay.
DW; including this. I think I mean, we can’t say for sure, but I’ve been teaching sexualities for long enough that I do believe that that’s a change in masculinities, hetero-masculinities. I feel very confident from the experiences that I would hear and read about earlier in my career that it was common for men to find vibrators and other sex toys to be emasculating.
JJF: In the past?
DW: Yeah. In the past that I don’t see quite nearly as much of. But then again, this is a bias sample. I’m dealing with semi college educated men in this case, but I do think that that’s a positive change. I think it warrants quite a bit more research to validate and to explore further.
JJF: I’m going to hope that changes right. Listeners can’t see, but I’m crossing my fingers. I hope that’s widespread because that’s amazing.
JJF: So, your research pointed out that many people, as we’ve said, have very contradictory perceptions of the vibrator. On the one hand, you found participants who found this as normal and empowering. But on the other hand, as we just discussed, there’s still a lingering sense of shame, embarrassment when it comes to vibrators in particular and to female sexual pleasure in general. And I thank you sum this up really well near the end of your paper. I’m going to quote from you for just a minute. You say, “ Indeed, it may be true that as one participant in the study claimed, vibrators are the best invention second to the dishwasher. Just as dishwashers are incredibly efficient in accomplishing the task of cleaning dishes, vibrators are incredibly efficient in accomplishing orgasm. But the commodification of sexual pleasure is not a pathway to liberation or empowerment any more than the purchase of a dishwasher solves or even challenges the structures of gender inequality that unequally assign gender responsibility for doing the dishes in the first place” end of quotation. Can we talk about this more and about these contradictory perceptions of the vibrator and limitations here.
MA: I’ve had in our research and in my work as a therapist and a sexual educator, I’ve had people say, women specifically come to me with concerns that I can only experience an orgasm with the use of a vibrator and there’s something wrong with me that I can’t experience that with penetrative sex and using the verbiage of a natural quote unquote orgasm compared to a contrived or artificial or mechanical experience or tool rather not experience. And, so thinking about challenging that notion of does the how matter so much in this case? If you want your clothes to be clean, do you want to use a laundry machine or do you want to wash them by hand and
JJF: Natural cleaning process.
MA; Exactly, the point is to end up with clean clothes. Not that the point of sex is to experience orgasm, but to be able to use the tools that are available for you.
JJF: Yeah, to have the empowering experience that is right for your body and that you want to have.
DW; Yeah, and I encountered this frequently in my teaching sexualities. I frequently have to remind students that the vibrator can be a very effective tool for achieving orgasm, but the vibrator can’t caress you, the vibrator can’t kiss you, the vibrator can’t whisper sweet nothings or dirty words in your mouth. It can’t run fingernails through your hair or down your back. The totality of the experience of sex is so much more than merely the orgasm itself, that this is just one of many potential tools and resources for the complete totality of an experience. And, but the other part of that analogy that we’re trying to get at from the quote that you mentioned is that certainly the vibrator is very effective in achieving orgasm, just like a dishwasher is effective in cleaning your dishes. But the purchase of a dishwasher doesn’t solve who is responsible for tending to those dishes in the first place, right? And the purchase of a vibrator may be effective for achieving orgasm in women, but that doesn’t challenge gender inequities in the bedroom. It just provides for the opportunity for potentially more equitable orgasmic experience, but not a broader equitable sexual experience.
JJF: Yeah. Yeah. I think those two points actually do relate to each other. The vibrator can’t caress you, which means purchasing, like, if what you want what you need is to be caressed to have someone’s hands running through your hair, that kind thing, purchasing a vibrator may bring you to orgasm equity, but it isn’t going to solve the larger problems that you might have in your various relationships. And it isn’t going to solve this larger social issue which we’ve hinted at, but haven’t explicitly said that at least in Canada and I suspect in the United States, there is often still a presumption that male pleasure comes before female pleasure and heterosexual relationships, that women give pleasure to men in other words. And so this is another contributing factor to not only the orgasm gap, which maybe the vibrator can help close, but also just to experiencing sexual pleasure and sexuality in general.
MA: Yeah, I think you hit on those expectations too in the norm of what counts as sex is penetration, penis and vagina experience and anything else.
JJF: And we could talk about virginity culture that too.
MA: Yes, purity culture is strong in Utah.
DW: That’s an understatement.
MA: In looking at those experiences, one of the contradictory fears was women being concerned that a vibrator would work too well for them, that, now I’m not going to be able to have orgasms in other ways, either fingers or with a partner, and that in using a vibrator, it can be a really reliable experience that, you know, it’s the same. It’s consistent. You can control the power and the level and the placement. And, so, in a lot of ways that leads to an easier orgasm and then women are afraid of becoming dependent on that. But also considering that mental component of it, that in using a vibrator, reaching an orgasm is almost a foregone conclusion. And with a partner, there’s interactions and you don’t know what’s going to happen. And so some of that quote unquote dependency can be just that trust and the confidence. I know this is a way that works for me, and so that allows women to relax and know exactly what’s going to happen.
DW: And there’s another side of this that we couldn’t get at with our data, and I wish we could and it warrants further research, but this is a bit of speculation here, but I’ve certainly observed over the years, there’s a tendency for heterosexual men to think of women’s bodies as innate objects whose sexual subjectivity hinges on their actions techniques and skills in the bedroom.
JJF: Hinges on the men’s actions techniques and skills. Right?
DW: Right, right. One concern, and I can’t confirm this right now, is that when introducing a vibrator in partnered heterosexual intercourse, that further contributes to that tendency for men to think of a woman’s body as a inanimate object whose sexual subjectivity can be further triggered by my use of this tool.
JJF: Mmm. That is interesting. Instead of thinking of women as having sexual agency as needing or wanting different experiences at different times, perhaps, as also being active participants in the bedroom in turning themselves and their partners on, for example, there is this idea of viewing women as sexually passive objects to be manipulated to orgasm and that this tool might be an effective mode of manipulation of the female body.
DW: Right. Because what I hear frequently, and again, it would require further research to unpack, but most often, when I hear of women’s accounts of using a vibrator and partnered intercourse, that vibrator is not in her hands.
JJF: Oh. Yeah.
JJF: Okay. Obviously, this paper is a few years old now. I was wondering if you could talk a bit about how this research or the results of this research have informed your professional life in academia for Dennis or your professional life in mental health work for Michelle.
MA: I’ve loved having this research to be able to share with therapy clients and in group therapy as well, I for two years a queer women’s group and an LGBTQ center. And I shared this paper with them and we had a whole evening talking about vibrators.
JJF: Yay!
MA: Yeah. At Mankato State, I did a similar forum with the Women’s Center, and providing those opportunities to present this research and some of the data that we found as a foundation for people having vulnerable conversations and sharing and adding their own experiences to that. Because going back to that creation of community and empowerment. I think that’s what has shown to be so important that normalization of female sexuality and talking about it. Guys jerking off is a common high school lunchroom topic. And I have a core memory in high school of somebody asking if girls masturbated and I was like, no, no way. I was in that group, right?
JJF: Yeah. No, that’s really common. I love that. That’s like you pushing back against the post-feminist framing and getting sex-positive feminism and vibrators back together again.
MA: Yeah. In the human sexuality class that I taught a lot of students were previously LDS or Mormon they talked about some of that shame and the purity culture that they were brought up in. And so, being able to hear data about how common it is for women to use vibrators, I think was really liberating for them because they had grown up thinking that it was shameful and only allowed in this very specific relationship that’s been sanctified in their religion and the purpose is for creation. So really expanding that narrative of what sexuality can be, I think has been very empowering for me.
JJF: That’s awesome.
DW: As I mentioned earlier on, our objective here was to capture women’s experiences with vibrators in a holistic way. Where did you first learn about vibrators, where did you purchase them and your experiences with them over time. And to try to put those women’s stories first and foremost in the article rather than bogging it down with a whole bunch of academics and theory. The stories of women and the story of the vibrators first and foremost in the article, and that’s been very instrumental, at least in my sexualities courses. I utilize this piece. I don’t like using stuff that I’ve published. It’s awkward.
JJF: It is awkward.
DW: Reading the professor’s work. But I like to use this one because it resonates so much with the students in my class, and the fact that they say that to me, I mean, I’m their professor, what else are they going to say? But it does seem to genuinely resonate.
JJF: I think it would, yeah.
DW: It captures, I mean, the participants in our study, the vast majority of them own and use vibrators. Those that don’t own and use vibrators openly admit that they want to.
JJF: Right.
DW: And they will eventually. So when my students read this, they find themselves easily in one of those groups or another, and the experiences that they read from others connect very closely with the experiences that they’re having in their own life. It’s important for me as a cis gender guy teaching sexualities classes to primarily women that they’re able to read those accounts and hear the story from women’s voices and not me standing in front of a classroom.
MA: And I think that circles right back around to that second wave feminism of having collectives of women being like, Oh, this domestic violence that I’m experiencing isn’t an isolated incident. You’re also experiencing this.
JJF: Yeah, this kind of collective consciousness.
MA: Exactly.
JJF: So, hey, my curiosity about the vibrator isn’t weird.
MA: Right.
JJF: And it’s not listeners!
MA: We tracked, yes or no, had you ever used a vibrator in the beginning of our survey of the respondents who had said that they’d never used one, we asked them to guess how many women they think have and used vibrators, and they said 80%. Even though they weren’t themselves, they were seeing it as something very common. And the main, the only difference we found in demographics between people and the yes and the no tracks was age. The average age of those who had used a vibrator was almost 27 and the average age of those who had not was 22. And so, I think we like to hope that we redid this research, those
JJF: five years later, those 22 year olds will be 27 and they will have a vibrator.
DW: Well, yeah.
MA: I hope so.
DW: Because it is kind of ironic. The ones that don’t own a vibrator overwhelmingly say they want to. So the question is, well, why not? And the answer was always kind of the same. You know, I’m living at home with my parents, my bank account is still connected with theirs. I’m worried that they’d hear me use it in the bedroom, you know.
MA: Or not being able to afford it.
DW: Not being able to afford it. Presumably, one would guess it as again, more independence financially and in terms of the housing situations that they will ultimately probably purchase one like the rest of the participants in our study not regret that purchase one bit. I sometimes think that there’s a dividing line in women’s orgasmic experiences. There’s BV and AV. Before vibrator, after vibrator. I could be totally wrong with that, but the data we’ve collected seems to support that.
JJF: That’s awesome.
JJF: I want to thank you both so much for speaking with me today. I’ve had a wonderful time. Is there anything else that either of you would like to leave our listeners with regarding your research on women’s perceptions of and uses of vibrators?
MA: I would say I would love to live in a world where talking about vibrators is as common as talking about dishwashers. It’s just a household appliance that everybody has. And if you haven’t used a dishwasher before, you should try it. It’s a different experience.
JJF: I want to thank Dennis and Michelle again for sharing their research on the vibrator with me today. And thank you, listener for joining me for another episode of Cyborg Goddess. This podcast is created by me, Jennifer Jill Fellows, and it is part of the Harbinger Media Network. Music is provided by Epidemic Sound. You can follow this podcast on Twitter or BlueSky and if you enjoyed this episode, please consider buying me a coffee. You’ll find links to my social media and Ko-Fi page in the show. Until next time, everyone. Bye.