SEXIS WRONG

“Two! Four! Six! Eight!
Let Alabama Masturbate!”
Rachel Maines
When my book The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the
Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction was first published
by Johns Hopkins University Press in 1999, I received a call
from a Swiss manufacturer of upscale vibrators. He was in
the United States trying to buy advertising for his company’s
device and had targeted slick, upmarket women’s magazines
like Vogue and Glamour, which were publishing ads for Viagra.
None would accept his company’s advertising. Baffled
and frustrated, he asked why and was told, “Viagra is for men
having sex with women. Vibrators are for women having sex
by themselves, and we can’t endorse that.” Looks as if the
double standard is alive and well, raising both its ugly heads
in American advertising, as well as American law.
Southern legislatures acted against
the dire threat represented by
women discovering that vibrators
produce their orgasms much more
reliably than penises do.
According to the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report, more than
16,000 murders were committed in the United States in
2003, along with more than 93,000 rapes and 413,000 robberies.
In Alabama, Texas, Georgia, and Kansas, law enforcement
extends beyond these obvious threats to what some
legislators apparently believe is a more subtle and insidious
threat to American morals: the sale of vibrators and dildos.
Until the arrest of Passion Party’s Joanne Webb in Burleson,
Texas, in 2003, which generated a veritable storm of media hilarity
and bad jokes, few Americans were even aware that the
sale of vibrators and the possession of more than five (count
‘em!) is against the law in some states. Those who did know
usually assumed that the laws against them were decrepit
survivors of the Comstock era. Some of them are—Massachusetts
still has such a law on its books, dating from 1879,
in the same section of code that prohibits the dispensing of
contraceptives, both judiciously and judicially ignored since
Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). The anti-obscenity laws of
Texas, Alabama, and Georgia, however, don’t even have the
excuse of antiquity to explain their existence, let alone their
enforcement.
South Dakota has the dubious distinction of having led this
modern wave of sex-negative legislation in 1968 by including
vague warnings in its anti-obscenity act, SD Code § 22-
24-27, regarding unspecified “equipment, machines or materials”
that might appeal “to the prurient.” That same year,
Kansas drafted legislation, KS § 21-4301, which in its present
(amended) form prohibits the sale of “a dildo or artificial vagina,
designed or marketed as useful primarily
for the stimulation of human genital organs,
except such devices disseminated or promoted
for the purpose of medical or psychological
therapy.” This statute was successfully
challenged in 1990 and has not been officially
enforced since, although a citizens’ group in
Abilene recently convened its own grand jury
and indicted a local sex-toy store owner.
Texas’ and Georgia’s statutes date from the mid-1970s, apparently
a response both to technological change in the sextoy
industry that made possible more lurid anatomical representation,
and, more ominously, to the then-new association
of vibrators with feminism. Betty Dodson had begun her
campaign of teaching us to reclaim female sexuality from the
tired old “all she needs is a good fuck” model, and Dell Williams
had recently launched the world’s first feminist sex-toy
306 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG