The Feminist Vibrator Store, 1981
My job at Good Vibrations was lonely in 1981. Sometimes I’d have one customer per day. Even if they stayed for an hour or two, I had lots of time to sit there and think about what they said.
“My husband has died and I will never achieve climax again.”
“The therapist has told me I am sexually dysfunctional and sent me here.”
“My dad’s in prison and he has a bigger dick than anything you got in here.”
I could rock their world with just a little information. One little chat, and they wouldn’t think they needed to rely on someone else for their orgasm. Nor would they remain distraught that a M.D. had “sentenced ” them to a vibrator institution. The kid who taunted me about his dad in prison and then ran out the door— I could say something kind to settle him right down. Sex education was so powerful because even the smallest effort was enlightening.
I got bored when the store was slow. I read every book on our shelves. It seemed strange that the catalog of decent sex information was so small that one could read it all in a couple of weeks. There was only one book in the whole world for kids about sex that wasn’t focussed on pregnancy and disease. One!
There was a a single photo book about men and masturbation that didn’t treat it like a juvenile disorder or failure.
All the contemporary “women-authored” erotica was penned by Anais Nin, circa the 1920s. We had the Nancy Friday sociological surveys of women’s fantasies, but I would advise customers to just read the fantasies, not the pathological critiques of why these women fantasized in the first place. It would have only discouraged them!
We had what my boss Joani Blank called “the tryout room. “ The world-famous-try-out-room!” I called it, although it was really the world’s biggest secret.
It was only a bench seat adjacent to the bathroom, behind drapes. There were two basic electric vibrators plugged into the wall sitting on a flowered seat-cover. People always widened their eyes when I suggested giving it a whirl.
“You'll understand after you turn on the vibrator,” I’d say. “You’ll understand in one second, literally.”
You could be wearing fleece-lined snow pants and a parka, but if you touched the Hitachi Magic Wand to the outside of your jeans for one moment, you’d know whether you liked it or not. For many women, it was the first time they’d experienced what men would call an “instant boner.”
It was a magic trick. They couldn’t believe my recommendation to “try the try-out room,” but it was so tempting. Then they’d have their one-second experiment, and bang! They were out of the try-out room faster than I could turn around.
People always ask me if the tryout room was taken advantage of, so to speak. It never really got a chance during my tenure. Everyone jumped out of the room quickly because they couldn’t wait to get their own vibrator home for privacy and as much time as they wanted.
The only reason to take an extended interest in the try-out room would’ve been to impress me. That happened twice. Each time the customers were friends of the owner.
A cab driver David Marshall, who was also a freelance sex guru, came in with his girlfriend. “Isn’t she gorgeous?” he said, walking in with his lover. “Lana, show Susie your tattoo!”
Lana had a long gown that split open on the side. Turquoise eyes and Lady Godiva hair. She released her magic snap and the Greek gown fell open, revealing a serpent that crept up from her instep, around her hips and breasts, and up to her neck.
I was their captive audience. I had a gong under the cash register if they became too much. But they didn’t. I was still interested. I’d never seen anyone with a body-length tattoo before.
David heralded the wonders of the try-out room to his mistress. I hoped Lana wouldn’t be disappointed. I mean, it was only a water closet. They disappeared behind the mauve curtains and their moaning began a moment later. I suppressed my laughter since I figured they could hear me as well as I could hear them.
This is what everyone thought my job was like, eavesdropping on ardent lovers in the back room, everyone dripping in sweat. In fact, this was a once-in-my-career performance.
David and his Serpent Girl popped out of the tryout room like a cork from a genie bottle. They turned to me, flushed, their afterglow aflutter.
I could have crushed them with indifference, but that was too mean. They had pushed me a bit to be the voyeur, but was I unwilling? No. More just curious at their chutzpah. I had a flash of how unusual it is to be in a sexual space where the rules are what I made them. The rest of my female life, when men had exposed themselves to me, they always they got the drop on me before I even had a chance to respond.
“You look happy!” I fanned at them with my copy of the Chronicle.
“Do you want Lana to show you more?” he asked me. She stared at me down her aquiline nose. Ouch.
In my fantasies, I was beautiful too, not like the stepsister sleeping in the ashes.
“No, I’m good,” I said.
Lana hooked up her toga and they swept off into their chariot. It was the week of vibrating dangerously.
Another customer walked in, right in their wake, with a honey beehive and sensible pumps.
She spoke up loud and clear, “I have to GOT to get a Magic Wand; all the other girls at the switchboard have one!” She was an AT&T switchboard operator. She didn’t share one furtive glance, one troubled whisper.
I felt a click, the chamber turning. Here was someone who wasn’t claiming to be sick, troubled, widowed, hopeless… just a hip chick who wanted to get what all the other gals were talking about.
She pointed at the small labels on the plastic vibrators that said, “Do not use on unexplained calf pain.”
“What’s that for?”
“It’s just as silly as you think . . . it’s a response to a lawsuit from so long ago that even the manufacturers don’t remember. No one uses battery vibes on blood clots, let alone on their calves.”
“No shit!” she said. “Is there such a thing as “explainable” calf pain?”
“That’s a great question!” I wish the novelty factory morons could meet women like her. They didn’t even understand there was such a thing as a woman who bought sex toys. They didn’t get that we wanted toys to be attractive and witty and not like some kind of crutch.
The phone rang. It was Olive Oyl. At least, that’s exactly what she sounded like, Olive Oyl after a pack of cigarettes. She said her name was Dori Seda, a cartoonist, and she wanted to come down with filmmaker Terry Zwigoff and cartoonist Robert Crumb and a second model— and tie themselves up in vibrator bondage and shoot a “photo-funny” — like the kind you once saw in a Tijuana Bible.
“Okay, I have to call my boss Joani and then I’ll call you right back. What’s your number?”
Joani was a reliable iconoclast. “Oh, it’s for Last Gasp,” she said, “the underground comix publishers. Ron Turner’s an old friend of mine.” He was going to be publishing Crumb and Dori’s mad comic, Weirdo.
“Of course,” she said, “Give them my love— and no smoking in the store!”
I told the Weirdo crew to come over when the store closed, so they didn’t scare anyone away. I said, “You know, there’s no curtains in the windows, so you have to put up with whoever’s walking by. We’re a block from a Catholic Church.”
No problem. Dori led her troupe in. She was the only one babbling. I just loved her with her big dark eyes and painted Twiggy eyelashes, as tall and knobby as a popsicle stick.
Robert kept his comments to things like picking up the most unusual object he could find on the shelf, and asking, “How exactly is this used?” He was already drawing it in his mind.
Terry chain-smoked. But I didn’t want to kill the mood.
“Could I be your vibrator bondage choreographer, or something?” I said. “Because this will take forever if you don’t know the toys.”
“Oh yes!” They were in unison.
Their narrative structure was Girls Turned Into Vibrator Zombies. I did the draping and artful slipknots with electrical cords. I picked up the rabbit-fur mitt and stroked the Dori’s cheek with it. “Oh my god, that feels so good.” She sighed against my hand.
“Everything in here feels good, but you have to endure a photo shoot instead.”
Dori told me she regularly woke up at noon and went to bed at dawn, that she lived right around the corner. She invited me to come over and try on rumba panties and draw and drink with her, draw the new feminist revolution comic book.
“I can’t draw and I can’t really drink, but I sure would like to visit you.”
I had other customers I fell in love with for other reasons.
One day two nuns walked in. That’s how they introduced themselves. They were both women who’d left their order, five years previously. They had both been novitiates at the same time, as teenagers, and had fallen in love. They left the convent to be together openly. The two of them dressed as modestly and primly in my vibrator store as any nunnery would’ve required.
They wanted a vibrator and “something for vaginal penetration.” They conferred with each other patiently. They’d been saving up for this purchase the way someone else would be socking it away for a car. I wanted to give them everything for free.
“How long have you been together?” I said.
The younger one with button blue eyes cocked her head. “Oh, twenty years, right?”
Her lover concurred. They were delighted at the number. “It’s our vibrator anniversary!”
I was single. I had never been with any one person seriously more than, I don’t know, six months. I was friends with many of my ex’s, and loved them as family. But day in and day out, for twenty years? How did they do it?
“What’s your secret, why aren’t you grumpy and bored and itchy?” I pulled my hair up into a bun, like Marion the Librarian.
They laughed, their voices like wind chimes on a lanai. I wanted to go on vacation with them, have them rock me in a hammock.
The older one— with crows’ feet around her eyes— she said, “I think it’s just because . . . we love each other, so much.” She slowed her words down, each one followed by a little pause.
I shook my head, not sure if they were teasing me. I guess I had to humor them. Call Dear Abby, call the Vatican, we have the answer here. Love! But I was disappointed. I wished they would uncork that potion and show me what it was really all about.