Betty Dodson with Carlin Ross

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Dear Rachel,

How delighted I was to read your "The Technology of Orgasm" revealing the history of electric vibrators -- a sex toy that I continue to teach women how to use to this day.

In the book, you made the statement that feminists in the sixties brought back the electric vibrator as a sexual aid. Closer to the truth was most feminists resisted using vibrators, saying they were too mechanical, not natural. And many feared vibrator addiction.

To set the record straight, I am insisting upon my place in history as the FIRST recognized feminist to publicly reintroduce electric vibrators to women solely for their orgasmic benefits. I made drawings illustrating their use, wrote straight forward articles about their most effective use, and taught women how to use them for best orgasmic results in workshops.

Let me share a little personal history: My boyfriend first introduced me to the Oster vibrator in 1966. He was getting his scalp massaged by a barber when he thought, "This would be great for clitoral stimulation" and he bought one from a Barbershop supply store. After vibr

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ator ads disappeared in the twenties, they were co-opted by men to prevent baldness. Wouldn't you know those guys would be vibrating the wrong end.

In 1971, I had a shocking one woman show of four bigger than life masturbating nudes. One of my female nudes was using the same Oster vibrator. Well, you've been there so you can imagine the response I got. It ended my career as a serious artist.

In 1971, the newly formed Ms. Magazine requested an article from me on female masturbation after I'd been profiled in Evergreen Magazine as an erotic artist who supported women's sexual liberation. During the interview I gave masturbation rave reviews. After submitting a seventeen page manifesto titled, "Liberating Masturbation" to Ms., it was held up for two and a half years because the Ms. collective feared losing subscriptions. That was the first but certainly not the last time I would be censored by other feminists.

To show the prudes at Ms. I meant business, I went out and bought a case of electric vibrators to begin what I thought of as a part-time job of running Sexual CR Groups. I also got together a group of my girlfriends so we could take portraits of our genitals to create what I called, "the first feminist split beaver slide show" to teach women genital appreciation. At the time it seemed quite simple. I'd show the different styles of women's sex organs so we'd stop thinking our own were ugly or deformed. Then I'd teach women how to masturbate with electric vibrators so they could have all the orgasms they wanted.

At the 1973 NOW Sexuality Conference in New York City, I presented the female genital slides to over a thousand women. I also did a workshop where I showed two electric massagers: The Prelude and the Panabrator. The first one was shaped like a gun with vibes I didn't like, nasty little attachments, but it was nearly silent- a consideration for women who were not living alone. But the Prelude heated up and many women were using potholders to keep vibrating. Although the Panabrator sounded like a truck in low gear, it was by far the best for creating orgasms. It had a twelve inch handle with a big vibrating head and a real motor that didn't heat up after several hours of bliss.

That same year, I had a retrospective exhibition in San Francisco that showed more drawings of women masturbating with electric vibrators. After Ms. rejected my seventeen page manifesto, I'd self-published several hundred copies and the gallery was selling them. The feminists at Berkeley who were teaching sex got hold of several copies and they began using masturbation to teach pre-orgasmic women. But even the West Coast women rejected the use of electric vibrators. They were teaching manual stimulation of the clitoris so a woman's partner could eventually be the creator of her orgasm- still androcentric but at least the clitoris had become part of female sexual arousal.

In '74, Ms. ran a heavily edited three page article titled: "Getting to Know Me." This was after ten edits and my agreement to say everything in first person. Talk about coming out of the closet! Every masturbation technique I spoke about including using an electric vibrator was what "I" did personally. At the end of the article, my editor wanted to test the market by telling readers they could order my illustrated seventeen page booklet for three dollars. Within a few weeks, I had four thousand orders. While letters continued to roll in, I expanded my material and self-published Liberating Masturbation, an eighty page book that became what everyone called "an underground feminist classic" even though I was selling it overground through the US post office.

Throughout my long teaching career, the women at Ms. along with many other "famous feminists" continued to be my harshest critics. Besides disliking the mechanical aspects of electric vibrators, they certainly didn't want to become responsible for their own orgasms. They wanted to have true love and romantic orgasms with Ms. or Mr. Right, not independent orgasms with a damn machine! However, there were many housewives in the city and suburbs who were more than interested in what I had to say about female masturbation, and my Bodysex Groups flourished for the next twenty-five years without a ounce of support from the feminist establishment.

In the beginning of facilitating my masturbation workshops, I was running all over the city to the small appliance sections of large department stores looking for electric body massagers. They were always hard to find, and since I needed them for my workshops, I finally convinced Dell Williams to start a mail order business selling the Prelude, the Panabrator, and my book. By 1975, she had opened the first sex store for women called Eve's Garden which still exists today. Currently I'm using the Hitachi Magic Wand which I originally called "the Cadillac of vibrators" as soon as it came out in the late seventies.

After distributing over 150,000 copies of my book (a ten year monumental handjob), in 1986 I sold the rights to Crown. Ten years later, I did a forty page revision, and Sex for One has become a classic quality paperback book that continues to sell. Today I have a private practice where I counsel women struggling to have their first orgasm, wanting to have better orgasms, and of course, those women who want to have orgasm "the natural way from intercourse," or "G-spot orgasms" which is the latest version of the old "vaginal orgasm." These women get the information and support they need to understand the clitoris, not the vagina, is our primary sex organ.

During the nineties, I produced three erotic sex educational video tapes. One is a documentary of my now infamous masturbation workshops, the second one documents the sex coaching I do in private sessions. Both of these tapes show the best use of electric massagers and dildos, while emphasizing the importance of breathing, pelvic movement, using the pelvic floor muscle, and learning to incorporate sexual fantasy. The third video, Viva la Vulva celebrates women's sex organs with ten women primping and posing for pussy portraits.

Congratulations on your successful book and all the attendant publicity which will surely help women embrace a sexual technology that is older than the history of electricity and time itself. It would be great fun speaking with you at some point so we could share our parallel paths of liberating electric orgasms.

In sisterhood,
Betty Dodson, Ph.D.

Dear Betty:

Many thanks for your e-mail! I have long admired your work. Several reviewers have complained that I don't mention you in my book, but I was doing a pre-feminist-movement history and thought that going from Hippocrates to Freud was enough ground to cover! The story of the vibrator since 1965 would, I think, be a different kind of book.

Loved your tale of woe about the early feminists. I too had run-ins over my interest in needlework ("That's not feminism!" I was told). I still run into feminists, especially young ones, who wish I'd just shut up about all this sexuality stuff. My husband calls this phenomenon the "Mrs. Grundy within".

Thanks again for writing. Hope we get a chance to meet in person one of these days.

Rachel Maines