It’s hard not to love a book that starts with its author fearing a police sting while flogging sex toys at a hen party in Texas. The year is 2004 and Hallie Lieberman is attending grad school in Austin and supporting her studies by working as a home party organiser for Forbidden Fruit, local purveyor of marital aids: ‘Christy is rattling off her order: a jelly vibrator, a cock ring, a bottle of Eros lubricant.’ Just one snag; devices that are intended ‘primarily for stimulation of the human genital organs’ are deemed illegal in the state of Texas. They’re illegal to this day in Louisiana.
So Lieberman has been trained to say her wares are designed for ‘artistic, educational and scientific purposes’, which puts a new spin on the Rampant Rabbit. Prohibited from explaining the true function of a vibrator, Lieberman finds herself talking gobbledegook to customers, ‘And once you put your massager on the man on the boat, you’ll want to go out to sea every day!’ As Lieberman admits, this might make more sense in a notoriously repressive nation: ‘But I lived in America, where strip clubs abound, binge-drinking is celebrated, and possession of semi-automatic weapons are legal. So why the hang-up on sex toys?’ Before you can say ‘Spanish Fly’ Lieberman has signed up to study for a PhD in the history of marital aids in order to wrestle this complex question to the bedroom floor.
Lieberman’s diverting book Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy is as much a study of sexual mores — and hypocrisy — in the United States, as it is the story of a multi-million dollar industry. Legislators throughout history were keen to shore up the view that women’s sexual satisfaction (or dissatisfaction) should take a back seat to men’s. While Lieberman was trying to circumvent the prohibition on the sale of vibrators and dildos in Texas, Viagra was available nationwide, covered by health insurance and even promoted by the US Senator Bob Dole.
We can place some of the blame on Sigmund Freud, who informed the world there were two types of female orgasm, the clitoral and the vaginal, and mature, psychologically healthy women graduated to the latter — conveniently implying a sane woman should hit the big O via penetrative sex alone.
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