The Joy of Sex Toys: How Vibrators Stopped Being 'Shameful' Secrets

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The idea of a being a groundbreaker in the art of masturbation sounds like the stuff of bad jokes, and that is a great, great credit to the people who made an obvious joy of what was once an embarrassing secret. It means we see self-pleasure as a given, and, like lots of other things we take for granted (within the last century women weren't allowed to vote, remember) someone had to have the nads to pipe up and give us a new model.

Betty Dodson discovered the joys of vibration in 1965 when then-partner Grant Taylor got the idea that the scalp massager used by his barber would be fun for quite another purpose, Dodson writes in Orgasms for Two: The Joy of Partnersex.

This new idea lead the innovative artist and author to introduce electric vibrators at the first NOW conference on sexuality in 1973.

"My lecture overflowed into the hallway," Dodson writes, and it led to her groundbreaking 1974 work, Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Selflove, later titled Sex for One, the Joy of Selfloving.

More than three decades later, Dodson is still a good-humored, forthright voice, writing and making videos, like the ones on her Web site with Carlin Ross, subheaded Dodson and Ross: Liberating Women, One Orgasm at a Time.

Many contributors to the sexual revolution are responsible for getting us where we are, and Black cites a great many pioneers as helping get us out of back rooms and bad head spaces.

One was Dell Williams, founder of Eve's Garden in New York, the first nice sex boutique ever. "Where she had found product," Black says, "she couldn't not find a space she was willing to walk into. It was really cleaning up the aesthetics and giving real information to women," including books, catalogs and sexuality workshops (Williams' papers were recently donated to Cornell University).

Another revolutionary was Joani Blank, sex therapist, counselor, teacher, publisher, entrepreneur and inventor. In 1975, she founded Down There Press, producing sex-related books, and two years later opened the now-legendary Good Vibrations in 200 square feet of space.

Now 31 years old, GV is still an industry gold standard, the first place that leaps to mind for many women wanting information, even if they've never set foot in a Good Vibrations store, but have long bought the books and gotten the catalog (if this sounds like the voice of experience, it is).

Blank even invented a vibrator herself, the Joani Butterfly, a wearable item with a raised clitoral stimulator; it's popularity is evidence of what happens when you actually get women designing the toys they're going to use. When she started Tantus, Black wanted input on her own products as well.

"It was the era of dolphins and goddesses," and toys tended to be made of a lesser-quality silicone. "Nothing was there that I wanted to play with." Another gap in the market was "they were all geared towards women. No one was looking at a couples industry."

That would change, too, but in between the daring vision of the '70s and the design-conscious '90s lies the '80s -- and the AIDS crisis.