By Amara Grautski

For some, the vibrator has been a symbol of feminism and the women’s movement toward independence. But recently, more people are paying attention to the history and cultural significance of one of the most popular sex toys.

Although vibrators have been discussed in plays on campus like “The Vagina Monologues,” women may be surprised to find out that the first electromechanical vibrators were created back in the late 19th century – by men.

The history of the vibrator

Rachel Maines said she was working as an adjunct instructor at the University of Pittsburgh in the ’70s when she noticed something unusual about the needlework magazines from the early 1900s, which she had been using as research for an article.

“I kept seeing ads for vibrators and I thought, ‘Woah, what’s going on here?'” said Maines, now a visiting scholar of the Science and Technology Studies Department at Cornell University.

Maines said she was intrigued and, in 1977, decided to start researching the history of vibrators. After 22 years of research, in December 1998, John Hopkins University Press published her book “The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction.” But this came at a price: Maines said she was fired in 1986 from Clarkson University because of her research.

“They said that they were afraid that the alumni would stop giving money to the school if they found out someone on the faculty [was] working on vibrators,” Maines said.

But the stigma of vibrators didn’t always exist. She said the first vibrators were created as time-saving medical devices to help doctors cure a condition they referred to as “hysteria.”

“Vibrators were invented to perform a therapeutic task that doctors had been doing with their fingers since the time of Hippocrates,” Maines said. “The word ‘hysteria’ in Greek means ‘womb,’ so it was thought to be a womb disease.”

Maines said doctors believed symptoms for hysteria ranged from sexual fantasies to sleeplessness to nervousness, and that the cause of the disease was neglect of the uterus. Female patients had to be treated by producing something known as the “hysterical paroxysm,” which she said is a term doctors used to define the female orgasm, she said.

But instead of continually having to pay a doctor to manually perform this service, Maines said, women literally took matters into their own hands, and the consumer model vibrators were born.

“Doctors didn’t like it that women started buying them for themselves,” she said. “The doctors didn’t approve of what they called ‘self-treatment’ at home.”

By the 1900s, Maines said more than 100 models of vibrators existed and were exhibited at the World’s Fair in Paris. They were even available for purchase in the Sears catalogue. However, by the 1920s these popular advertisements had stopped and, for the most part, vibrators would be ignored for the next 40 years.

Repopularizing the vibrator

In the ’60s and ’70s, when sex was being more culturally popularized, vibrators started making a comeback. It was around this time, Maines said, that author and sexologist Betty Dodson started experimenting with vibrators and creating workshops.

In 1974, Bodysex Designs published Dodson’s book “Liberation Masturbation: A Meditation on Self Love,” the same year women’s rights activist Dell Williams founded Eve’s Garden, the first mail-order catalogue and sexuality boutique in New York City, according to the company’s website.

Three years later, Good Vibrations opened its first retail store in San Francisco. The store was created by sex therapist and educator Joani Blank, who was on a mission “to relay accurate sex information and good quality sex toys,” according to the Good Vibrations website.

With the popularity of vibrators growing, business capitalized. Passion Parties, founded in 1994, has been hosted by Northeastern Students For Choice twice.

The company provides the “ultimate girls night in,” with in-home parties where women can buy and educate themselves on sex toys, said Pat Davis, who has been the president of the company since Valentine’s Day 2001.

“There has been a lot of growth in the movement of women wanting to have more [sexual] education and seeking places where they can go get this,” Davis said. “Women now are taking more responsibility for their pleasure.”

Davis and Passion Parties were recently featured on the E! Channel’s reality show “Denise Richards: It’s Complicated,” and Davis said she sees this as progress in the discussion of sexuality.

“There’s just more permission to talk about it now,” Davis said.

Junior political science and journalism major Veronica Schiebold said she thinks her generation feels more comfortable talking about vibrators and sexuality in general.

“I think that people are a lot more open about talking about vibrators now than people used to be,” Schiebold said. “And I actually know someone who’s actually a Passion Party consultant.”

Schiebold, a San Francisco native, said she admits her openness about sexuality might be a result of the environment in which she grew up.

“San Francisco is just a fairly sexually liberated place,” she said. “We have such a hippie history. We’re all about free love, so I think that kind of stayed.”

Schiebold said she can tell some people on campus feel uncomfortable discussing topics like sex toys and she sometimes gets dirty looks when she does. But she said she thinks progress is being made.

Junior music technology major Jamie Alimorad said he thinks sex toys are more prominent today than in years past.

“They obviously have some relevance, because during Sex Week, there’s usually a seminar or two based on sex toys,” Alimorad said.

And although Davis said some men feel threatened by vibrators, Alimorad does not share that sentiment.

“Not to sound [crude], but we’ve had our right hand since the dawn of time, so why can’t a girl have a vibrator?” he said. “What’s the big deal?”

Alimorad said his friends from school feel light-hearted about the subject.

“If we go to Condom World … and if someone actually wanted to get something, you make a little joke, but in the end, we don’t care,” he said.

Technological advances

Through the years, vibrators represented the advancements in technology, said Maines. Some of the first vibrators were wind-up and were created as early as the 1700s. The steam-powered vibrator came next, created in 1869 by George Taylor, the electromechanical vibrator followed in 1883, created by Joseph Mortimer Granville.

Even today, cultural and technological influences of this new age have been popping up in the advancement of vibrators. Stephanie Kienzle, who works in the sales and market department of Vibratex, based in Vallejo, Calif., said she has noticed the creative changes in vibrators that have come with new technology.

“[Some] people who are very well-educated are now applying their technical abilities to this arena,” Kienzle said.

According to the company’s website, Vibratex brought the first dual-action vibrators, used to stimulate the vagina and the clitoris, to the United States from Japan in the 1980s.

Kienzle said this brought the Rabbit Pearl model, featured in HBO’s “Sex and the City,” in 1998, to the country. She said Japan had to make the vibrator look somewhat figurative, like an animal, to be able to call it a “toy” for exportation purposes.

Now vibrators are available in all shapes and sizes., and can be shaped as anything from dolphins to butterflies, according to some websites.

But, starting in 2006, vibrators not only looked different-they sounded different. A large impact on the vibrator market was the growing iPod generation. According to a March 2006 article in the United Kingdom’s PR Week, Americans started taking notice of iBuzz, a music-activated vibrator, during that year. Created by the company Love Labs, the iBuzz can be hooked up to an MP3 player and vibrates differently, depending on the beat and volume of the song being played.

There are also signs that vibrators have been influenced by the growing Green Movement. California Exotic Novelties introduced a solar-powered vibrator a few years ago, called “Solar Sensations,” for the environmentally conscious user.

Coming to a theatre near you

In July 2007, “Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm” made its theatrical debut at Lincoln Center in New York City. The documentary, produced and directed by Emiko Omori and Wendy Slick, revived and updated Maines’ story about the history of the vibrator.

“The movie kind of mushroomed and grew from Rachel’s book,” said Slick, who had been told to read “The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction” by a mutual friend of hers and Maines’.

After reading the book, Slick said she and Omori put in a bid to make a documentary and won, but it wasn’t easy. She said she was surprised at how difficult it was to get funding because of the stigma still surrounding the subject matter.

“It was a very hard movie to get made. We ultimately mortgaged our own homes,” Slick said.

This year the film has been shown in places like San Francisco, Philadelphia and Asbury Park, N.J. Slick said she hopes to have a showing in Cambridge sometime soon to help increase awareness on a topic she said she is surprised hasn’t been discussed more.

But, if Slick wants to continue to raise awareness, she may want to take Davis’ advice.

“I always said there’s two ways to get a word out: tell a newspaper or tell a woman,” Davis said.