Sex Toys, 1700–1920

The Science Museum in London has an ivory dildo, about 20 centimeters long, with a mechanism inside for simulating ejaculation and a cloth bag to put it in. Catalog date: 1701–1800, possibly French. When the museum acquired it, the paperwork said it had been found stuffed in the seat of a Louis XV armchair in a convent on the banks of the Seine.¹

Someone spent real money on carved ivory and a pump, then hid it in furniture. Leather dildos stuffed with rags were the cheaper version in the same centuries. This is the one you commission if you can. Still no motors, but the workshop is starting to look like a factory. That’s after the ancient record.

A white rubber Dildoe for $6

Charles Goodyear’s vulcanization patent in 1844 is the materials break. Rubber that holds a shape, flexes, and can be molded in quantity is a different object from carved ivory. Condoms and cervical caps show up in the late 1860s. Rubber dildos follow. By the early 1870s you could buy a “white rubber Dildoe” — that’s the spelling in the period ads — for $6, which was not a casual amount of money.²

Anthony Comstock, the postal inspector who spent the 1870s trying to empty the American mail of sex, was baffled by the customer list. In 1874 his allies seized tens of thousands of “articles made of rubber for immoral purposes.” The number that gets repeated is 60,300. Rubber was cheap enough to make in volume and durable enough to ship, which is exactly why it showed up in the catalogs he hated. The Comstock laws made it harder to advertise a dildo as a dildo. They did not put the molders out of business.

I think this is the first moment the tech and the law are obviously arguing with each other.

Then you plug it in

Hamilton Beach, in Racine, Wisconsin, patented the New Life vibrator on June 24, 1902. The Smithsonian has one in a leatherette case with rubber attachments and a cloth-insulated cord. In 1915 it listed at $25.³ It’s a motor you can hold.

These were sold as massagers. Sears put a vibrator in the 1918 catalog under “Aids That Every Woman Appreciates,” next to a home motor that also ran a mixer and a fan, for $5.95. Hallie Lieberman’s work on the ads is the reason we know this wasn’t a niche mail-order gag: hundreds of them in papers like the New York Times between 1900 and 1930.⁴

Were people using them as sex toys? Some of them, almost certainly. Some of the copy is not exactly hiding the ball (“the pleasures of youth will throb within you”). The box still said backache.

The doctor story

You have probably heard that Victorian physicians treated “hysteria” by bringing patients to orgasm with a vibrator, and that the machine was invented to save the doctor’s wrist. That version comes from Rachel Maines’s 1999 book The Technology of Orgasm. It became a play, then a movie.

In 2018, Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg went through Maines’s citations and could not find evidence that doctors routinely used electromechanical vibrators to induce orgasm as treatment.⁵ Maines has since called her argument a hypothesis. The book does not read like one. BBC Future walked through the same gap: vibrators were sold to physicians as massage equipment, and hysteria was on the long list of ailments the pamphlets claimed to help, usually with a device aimed at the back or the neck.⁶

So the machines are real. They were in the Sears catalog. The labor-saving orgasm clinic is the part that didn’t survive a source check. Mechanical massage tables existed in clinics before the handheld AC models, including steam-powered ones. What they were doing in a doctor’s office is the part that got overwritten by the Maines version, so I’m leaving the steam out of this column.

Deluvery is a same-night adult wellness delivery service in DC. We carry toys, lubes, condoms, and personal care, and everything arrives in plain packaging with a forgettable name on the card statement. Comstock was hunting the mail. The modern version of that problem is a charge that explains itself to whoever shares the card.

The Sears page is 1918. After that the ads leave the newspapers, and a Japanese massager shows up in 1968 still pretending to be for your shoulders.

Love, delivered in minutes.

Notes

1. Science Museum Group, “Ivory dildo, complete with contrivance for simulating ejaculation, with cloth bag,” object A641108, Sir Henry Wellcome’s Museum Collection. French, 1701–1800; found in a Louis XV armchair in a convent near Paris. ↩

2. Amy Werbel, Lust on Trial: Censorship and the Rise of American Obscenity in the Age of Anthony Comstock (Columbia University Press, 2018). The $6 “white rubber Dildoe” and the 1874 round-up of 60,300 rubber “articles for immoral purposes” are in Werbel; a readable digest is Scott McLemee’s review in Inside Higher Ed. ↩

3. Smithsonian National Museum of American History, “Hamilton Beach type C ‘New Life’ electric vibrator,” patented June 24, 1902; ca. 1903. 1915 price $25.00. ↩

4. Hallie Lieberman, “Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America,” Enterprise & Society 17, no. 2 (2016). Newspaper ad counts, Sears pricing, Hamilton Beach’s 1918 appliance advertising budget. ↩

5. Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg, “A failure of academic quality control: The Technology of Orgasm,” Journal of Positive Sexuality 4, no. 2 (2018). ↩

6. Martha Henriques, “The vibrator: from medical tool to revolutionary sex toy,” BBC Future, 2018. ↩