Good Vibrations
CAN YOU SUE a PR flack for sexual harassment?
Among various press releases recently, we received a sample of “a new advance in feminine relaxation and pleasure: the Natural Contours line of personal massagers for women, available through the Adam & Eve mail order catalog.”
Starting with learned references to the Journal of the American Medical Association and Viagra, the release declared that the item’s “unique shape was specially designed to fit the contours of a woman’s body, without the usual phallic appearance” of the typical vibrator.
The press kit was sent to reporters covering new products. (DIRECT doesn’t review new products per se, which didn’t stop one publicity checker from listing me as the new products editor.)
While we found the kit amusing, some recipients could take offense. According to Tiffany Maxwell, spokesperson for Natural Contours, the company respects the feelings of reporters and editors who aren’t comfortable with such products. The company, as well as the product, is about choice and the right to choose.
She adds, however, that while the journalist may not be interested in the product, his or her audience might be. Adam & Eve’s typical customer, she notes, is a middle-class American married woman with a couple of kids.
Maxwell may have a point. Vibrators are much in the news these days. Alabama has tried to outlaw such sex toys and at least one serious study has been published: Rachel P. Maines’ “The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Press, 1999). Even the staid New York Times covered the topic in a recent issue.
It turns out the vibrator has a long, if not quite honorable, history. Originally marketed to doctors to aid them in caring for women suffering from tension or neurasthenia, early entrepreneurs figured there was more money to be made through direct-to-consumer advertising and sales, rather like in today’s pharmacological industry. -JB
