Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure
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Format: Paperback, Illustrated
Description
In the 1970s a group of pioneering feminist entrepreneurs launched a movement that ultimately changed the way sex was talked about, had, and enjoyed. Boldly reimagining who sex shops were for and the kinds of spaces they could be, these entrepreneurs opened sex-toy stores like Eve’s Garden, Good Vibrations, and Babeland not just as commercial enterprises, but to provide educational and community resources as well. In Vibrator Nation Lynn Comella tells the fascinating history of how these stores raised sexual consciousness, redefined the adult industry, and changed women's lives. Comella describes a world where sex-positive retailers double as social activists, where products are framed as tools of liberation, and where consumers are willing to pay for the promise of better living—one conversation, vibrator, and orgasm at a time. Read more
Publisher : Duke University Press Books; Illustrated edition (September 8, 2017)
Language : English
Paperback : 296 pages
ISBN-10 : 0822368668
ISBN-13 : 63
Item Weight : 14.4 ounces
Dimensions : 6 x 0.73 x 9 inches
Best Sellers Rank: #1,200,495 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Customer Reviews: 4.0 4.0 out of 5 stars 23 ratings
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Top Amazon Reviews
Needed the book for school and the kindle price was much better than any Soft our hard copy.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on December 30, 2019 by Veda
Had to read this for a class. It's interesting and shows a real growth in women's perception of their sexuality. There are interesting parts, but it is incredibly repetitive. The same story is told time and time again, chapter after chapter. This could have been an article on a website and would not have been any less informative.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on February 18, 2020 by Mr. Nadman
The book covers some key points but it is so repetitive that you can get the entire story by just reading the preface.
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on October 12, 2018 by MMJM65
Boring
Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on April 1, 2018 by customer
Some background for you before I start the review. I have my BA and MA in History, so I’m coming at this from an academic history background. I’m going to do my best to not make this a homework assignment, but I’m also going to give you a bit of an academic review on this since this is an academic work. Although Vibrator Nation is an inherently academic work, it is incredibly readable for non-academics. The language is not overly complex and the author doesn’t couch everything in three dollar words and field specific language. If you are interested in how female-run sex shops shaped feminism, female sexuality, and sex politics, I think you would get a lot out of this. In this book, she argues “that feminist sex-toy stores have created a viable counterpublic sphere for sex-positive entrepreneurship and retail activism, one where the idea that the personal is political, is deployed in the service of progressive—and potentially transformative—sexual politics.” This book provides ample sources to prove her argument and she does a good job of not letting the sources overwhelm her own arguments and point of view. To some, the book might seem to get repetitive at some points since she talks about the same shops in different chapters, but she is using these shops to talk about different points she is focusing on. This is very smartly done because she could have ended up with long narrations about each shop, instead she focuses on her chapter themes and brings the shop into that discourse. In this way, it was very well organized and made the chapters clearer. In my opinion, this book did a really good job dealing with two really important ideas that I appreciated as a feminist and an academic, who focused a lot of Subaltern history (google that because the explanation would take up this page): It clearly deals with intersectionality in Feminism (i.e., women of different backgrounds, races, ethnicities, and incomes will have different experiences as feminists). It also shows how sex shops and sex toys benefited men who did not fit in with the “masculine ideal”, so to speak. These things are really important to the progression of feminism, because feminism is supposed to be helping everyone and it’s not helpful to ignore certain perspectives just because you have yours. The author made the point several times that when women started opening up sex shops they were picking out things based on their specific tastes. So when different people with different tastes started working and shopping there, then what the shop sold expanded. I liked that she was talking about how they weren’t trying to purposefully exclude other people, but they did have a limited view on sexual preferences, because it was such an unspoken thing at the time. It really shows how the sex-positivity movement grew to be more inclusive towards trans, genderfluid, and lesbian women as well as straight cis men as more people got involved. A plus for queer readers is that the author discusses queer (lesbian, genderfluid, and transgender people) experience with these stories as well. She explicitly talks about how they had different experiences with sex toys and how this was encouraged by sex shops because they wanted women to discover their own sexuality. In summary, this book was very active instead of passive about its queer positivity and discussing queer positivity in the sex shop community. Her main focus was the shop owners and the shops themselves, which limited that part of the discussion. That being said, I don’t know enough about this topic to really assess if she included as much as she should/could have about the queer perspective in this. I would recommend Vibrator Nation to both academic and non-academic readers. Comella did a great job of making this a readable book without turning it into a “popular history” book, that skimps on scholarly analysis in favor of gaining readership. *I received an advanced copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on September 22, 2017 by DMac
During my job at a local sex toy retailer, my coworker regularly discussed writing a book of our experiences. Lynn Comella has done that and more. Pulling from her own sex retail experience and years of research, Comella has brought us Vibrator Nation, a brilliant examination of the history of adult stores. Comella is an expert on the adult entertainment industry, and has studied many sociological themes through her research, including consumer culture, gender, sexual politics, and the relationship between them. Not one to slouch in academia, Comella has a Ph.D. in communication, an M.A. in gender studies and feminist theory, a B.A. in psychology, and minors in anthropology and women’s studies. Vibrator Nation is smartly written and well-researched. Comella gives her audience a history lesson on culture, society, politics, and economics as they pertain to feminism and the sex toy industry. She also dives into the lives of the inspiring and problematic creators of the most well-known of these establishments. While sex toy stores have been around for a long time, they started out as creepy places that catered to male audiences. As Comella points out, “many women saw the sexual revolution as a decidedly male revolution that had left sexism largely in place” (pg. 19). While the new feminist establishments were meant to do away with the sexism, they actually reversed it, refusing entry to any and all men. Women became the only audience, and a few of the owners saw women as a collective ‘we,’ a “presumed sisterhood” (pg. 35) rather than individuals of vastly different backgrounds, experiences, and ways of thinking. Even the products that were sold were geared towards the belief of women as a collective. If an owner hated dildos, BDSM, and porn, it was assumed that all women did. What these owners failed to realize was that “people commonly do not know their sexual desires until they find them … [People] have a stake in a culture that enables sexual variance and freely circulates knowledge about it. Without these things people have no other way of discovering what they might or might not want when it comes to sex” (pg 14). The feminisms on which these businesses were based, and that led to this way of thinking, are picked apart by Comella throughout the book. Comella questions the meaning of ‘for women’ establishments and products, and discusses the “generational divide over what counts as feminism” (pg. 172). Another aspect of feminism that is discussed is its approach to business. Here is where one can find proof that feminism is not simply one way of thinking, but many. To many feminists, “money, and not sex, was viewed as an impurity” (pg. 191). Good Vibrations relied on the inheritance of creator Joani Blank, because sexual well-being took precedent over profit. Feminists argued over whether feminism and business could even go together. Part of the effort put into reconciling this notion included spreading information to make it more easily accessible. The Briarpatch Philosophy played a large part in this, meaning that small businesses had social responsibilities, and utilized skills in cooperation and sharing resources to help them thrive on less. This included providing sex education classes in the stores themselves. In Vibrator Nation, we see that sex education is not only concerned with how-tos and anatomy, but safe sex, including what makes a sex toy. This was an inclusion that made me really proud of Comella. She told the tale of Smitten Kitten, who received a box of melted product, and put safe sex toys into their mission as a business. Outside of the blogging community and a few select stores and manufacturers, product safety doesn’t seem to be a big concern or topic of popular discussion. The fact that Comella voiced this concern in the book gives me hope that more people will hear the message. There is nothing about Vibrator Nation I didn’t love. Comella is a great writer and historian, and her awareness of social and political influences as well as her willingness to vocalize them means she covers all her bases.
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Reviewed in the United States 🇺🇸 on March 25, 2018 by amy nichole gill