You Still Can't Buy a Vibrator in Alabama

By Paul Krassner, Cleis Press . Posted June 13, 2009.

And what about the women who produce porn? Writer/director Candida Royalle confesses, “I have absolutely no time for my sex life any more -- I’m just working too much -- and I’m engaged.” Certainly those who participated in an AVN panel about porn have a vested interest in it. Shirley Isaacson, co-creater of Impulse TV, used to be with the Spice Network, where subscribers viewing habits were monitored.

“After the kids went to school, the buys came in very heavily,” she recalls. “Around noon they started coming in again. They stopped around four when the kids started coming home from school. So we know that women watch by themselves.”

Carol Queen, president of Good Vibrations, says, “Fifteen years ago you really had to give women a lot of encouragement. Today there is a sub-category of more diverse, sex-positive college-age women who wouldn’t think twice about liking porn. Women would like to know just why these people are fucking. They often love that they’re fucking, but they think that plot devices are fairly stupid, and they would like to see a little discernment in the way that the plot, if there is a plot at all, is set up.”

Susie Bright adds, “Men wouldn’t enjoy movies featuring men with limp dicks. Well, women don’t like dry pussies either. They like to see women obviously getting off. I can’t repeat that enough. What’s funny to me are the producers who make hot stuff that women would like, who don’t have a clue how to reach women about it. The production values [of female-ejaculation videos like Cum Rain Cum Shine and Flower’s Squirt Shower] are terrible, the men are red-faced clowns, but the women’s orgasmic raindown is irresistible. Every woman I know who sees them has to go excuse herself and beat off.”

Susie has reported on her interview with porn director Tristan Taormino, whose Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women won AVN’s “Best Anal Sex Release” award:

“Tristan has a knack for arguing with powerful men in the movie business. Spike Lee asked her to be his sex/dyke consultant for his movie, She Hate Me, a comedy about -- among other things -- predatory lesbians on the Baby-Making March. Spike would tell her things like, ‘I really don’t know any lesbians that well,’ and then she’d look around at everyone who was working in his office and blink -- ’Hello! Are you blind?’

“He was flabbergasted at what she suggested, that vaginal orgasms are not the primary way women orgasm. She fought sooooo hard to get some realistic female sexiness in this movie, and after I saw the film, I was impressed with the battles she won and biting my lip at the ones she lost. Thank god she got a real vibrator in. She lost the strap-on dildo debate, though.

“But from a ‘this-is-worth-noticing’ perspective, the sheer numbers of black, Latin, Asian and bi-racial dykes in this film singlehandedly smashes the cliché that lesbian is for white college girls. There are so many heretofore ‘unseen women’ traipsing in and out of the sperm donor’s apartment (this is the comedy part) that their very presence is inspiring.”

On the AVN panel, Tristan said about porn flicks, “It’s frustrating, because there’s a segment of the industry that is still hanging on to the fact that only a tiny percentage of their customers are women and couples. I want to see people who clearly love sex, I want to see them having a good time. I want to see a lot of amazing real female orgasms. I want to see toys. I want to see vibrators.”

According to historian Rachel Maines in The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, the vibrator was originally developed to perfect and automate a function that doctors had long performed for their female patients -- the relief of physical, emotional and sexual tension through external pelvic massage, culminating in orgasm.

“Most of them did it,” said Dr. Maines, “because they felt it was their duty. It wasn’t sexual at all.”

Which brings us to Sherri Williams, a casualty of the war on pleasure. She was acquitted of the heinous crime of selling non-prescription vibrators. She had violated an Alabama statute, which bans the sale of vibrators and other sex toys. The law prohibited “any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.”

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