http://www.philly.com/mld/inquirer/living/health/14194115.htmWhen Angeline Masciantonio decided to host her first sex-toy party, the 21-year-old had no trouble packing a girlfriend's Drexel Hill apartment.
Women in their 20s, wearing distressed jeans and flip-flops, filed in, squeezing onto the living-room floor. They listened patiently as saleswoman Tobi Benz went through her exhaustive pitch for various creams, lotions and novelties before getting to the point of the evening - the vibrators.
Benz, who works with a New Orleans-based company called Slumber Parties, held up about a dozen battery-operated models - most of them oversized phalluses wrapped in soft jelly rubber that come in lively spring pastels. Near the base, some sprout strategically placed bunnies for clitoral stimulation.
The guests left with $700 worth of merchandise, including nine toys, Benz said. These aren't cheap - $120 for the coveted "rabbit pearl" vibrator made famous by Sex and the City; and $130 for Decadent Indulgence, which sports 300 unique settings.
A few months ago, these Tupperware-style parties caught the attention of University of Michigan epidemiologist Betsy Foxman. She conducted a random phone survey in Seattle and reports that about half of women between 18 and 39 have tried a sex toy. "I think it's important to let health-care workers know this is a very normal behavior," she says. She says clinicians are not well-educated about sexual health, and she found no literature on sex toys.
But that may be because she looked in the wrong century.
According to Cornell University researcher Rachel Maines, the first vibrator was invented in 1883 as a medical device. Doctors used it to give their patients "pelvic massages" to produce "hysterical paroxysm" as a cure for a disease they called hysteria. The device was designed to mechanize a job that doctors had been doing - believe it or not - by hand.
Maines chronicled her findings in the 1999 book The Technology of Orgasm. The real bombshell, she said, was that doctors had been giving women orgasms as a so-called medical treatment since the time of Hippocrates.
By the late 19th century, hysteria was hitting epidemic proportions, with women complaining of paralyzed limbs, sudden inability to speak, and other bizarre symptoms magically relieved by their doctor's touch.
But some doctors complained the technique was difficult to learn. According to one biographer, Sigmund Freud tried to learn it, Maines says, but never got the hang of it.
Vibrators made the job much easier, though some early ones ran on steam, she says, requiring the doctors to shovel in coal. They often had cumbersome but impressive power sources, and the business end looked like a ball or some other non-phallic shape.
Doctors charged about $2 to $3 per treatment, she says.
Vibrators took a whole new turn when homes were electrified. In the early 20th century, advertisements for vibrators started showing up in magazines such as Home Needlecraft and Women's Home Companion, promising a "thrilling" and "invigorating" experience that would "restore the vitality of youth."
It all came crashing down in the 1920s, after somebody realized that vibrators could be sexy and started incorporating them into pornography. Suddenly the medical establishment stopped using vibrators on women and pretended it never happened.
Maines said she couldn't find any trace of women's voices expressing their feelings on vibrator-wielding physicians. But then, perhaps they knew when to keep a secret.
Texas, Georgia and Alabama all have anti-vibrator laws, Maines says, that either make it illegal to sell them or to own more than five. Luckily, she said, state lawmakers only worry about the ones that look distinctly phallic, not, say, the Hitachi Magic Wand, which reportedly resembles an advanced kitchen gadget. Somehow, women demanding their hysterical paroxysms will always find a way.
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