Abstract
Can selling vibrators change gender and sexual politics? What possibilities and limitations arise from pursuing social change through consumer capitalism? How does sexual commerce relate to the cultural production of sexuality? In Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure, Lynn Comella traces the emergence of feminist sex-toy shops to explore these questions. Drawing from multiple data sources – in-depth interviews, archives, and fieldwork on the sales floor – Comella argues that feminist sex-toy shops created new cultural spaces where people could talk openly about their bodies, desires, genitals, and orgasms. These cultural spaces in turn propelled cultural changes: feminist, queer and sex-positive values have become commonplace in the erotic marketplace and even in consumers’ bedrooms (e.g. see Chapter 7 for discussions of ‘pegging’ and ‘queering heterosexuality’).
Vibrator Nation tells the origin story of a sex-toy industry that catered to women and queer people and operated from feminist politics. Chapter 1 opens with the 1973 National Organization for Women conference on female sexuality, where Betty Dodson taught overflowing rooms of women that labia are beautifully diverse and vibrators are empowering. By the early 1970s, feminists had begun to argue that extracting women’s pleasure from patriarchal entanglements was central to women’s liberation. The women who catalyzed feminist sex-toy retail, such as Betty Dodson, Dell Williams, Joani Blank and Susie Bright, believed that women should admire their naked bodies, discover the pleasures of their clitorises, and explore their sexuality without men. Sex-positive frameworks, which posited ‘sexuality [as] a potentially positive force in people’s lives’, became central for feminist practice (p. 50). Thus, ‘creating a sex-positive diaspora’ (p. 83) became the mission of feminist sex-toy retail.
Comella’s historical analysis brings familiar debates about sex, gender and feminism into the context of retail spaces. Is vaginal penetration indicative of the patriarchal centrality of the phallus and inevitably heterosexual? Is porn inherently objectifying and anti-feminist? Can women desire being submissive or objectified without reproducing patriarchy? Who is really included in feminism, and who is essentialized, ignored, or tokenized? At the feminist sex-toy shop, the questions that animated feminist theory and politics became practical questions, requiring translation into material decisions. Was stocking and selling dildos, porn, and kink/BDSM gear antithetical or essential to a sex-positive feminist mission? Should men be catered to or even hired? In what ways did identity-based marketing and educational strategies reinforce essentialist notions of womanhood? Vibrator Nation illustrates how historical feminist debates unfolded to inform the practices and policies of sex-positive retail.
But why would debates about values and ethics persist in an environment structured around selling products? Comella shows that the sex-positive mission was so central to the operations of feminist sex-toy shops that education, not money or sales, was the bottom line. Sales staff were trained and expected to operate primarily as sex educators: information about sexuality and sexual well-being was provided freely without the imperative to purchase. This mission-driven retail model arguably democratized information about bodies, health, and pleasure because the ability to buy products was not contingent on access to this information.
However, contradictions surfaced and tensions arose. The early success of many feminist sex-toy stores depended on the independent wealth and financial security of the white, middle/upper class, well-educated women who owned them. Operating a socially conscious business within the market realities of capitalism meant, and continues to mean, that owners must contend with the potential contradictions between their politics and the material realities of success. Success does depend on selling products and making money. Hierarchies exist between owners and retail employees who are often paid hourly with no access to healthcare or paid sick-leave. In an increasingly saturated and internet-based sex-toy market, competition exists even among other sex-positive companies.
Importantly, Comella points out additional limitations to retail activism such as its potential to deepen race and class divides. Both employees and customers often uncritically positioned sex-positive stores as ‘clean’ and ‘classy’ in direct contrast to other adult stores they considered to be ‘sleazy’, ‘dirty’ and ‘crass’ (p. 92). This boundary work was often silent and coded, but nonetheless established highly racialized and classed ideas of ‘respectable sexuality’ (p. 99). ‘[T]he business’s emphasis on sexual safety and comfort assumed a highly gendered, class-specific, and racially coded dimension that served as a powerful organizing principle for what it meant to be a different kind of sex shop’ (p. 99).
Vibrator Nation shows how sex-positive sex-toy shops have been part of the social and cultural landscape that renegotiated norms about sexuality, and sold this message to eager consumers who not only bought vibrators, dildos, and feminist porn but also bought into the sex-positive mission. So maybe selling vibrators can change gender and sexual politics. But greater attention needs to rest on the racial and class implications of using consumer culture in the name of feminist and queer social change.