ShareThisIf you walk into CVS and head toward the back, past the assorted Band-Aids and the Icy Hot, across from the Gold Bond and the lice treatment, you'll get to the pregnancy tests and condoms. Next to that, nowadays, you'll find a titillating piece of the reproductive marketplace, a tool of satisfaction at your, uh, fingertips.
Vibrators.
They were once scored by ducking into a neon store with your hat low and your collar high. But vibrators have buzzed into the ho-hum world, appearing on drug-store shelves and in plucky TV commercials, peddled as stocking stuffers for that special someone.
One of condom maker Trojan's latest vibrator models, the Tri-Phoria, comes with interchangeable tips and sells for $40. It's more derivative than literal, like a smooth lavender rocket. The commercials air late, and in prime time. They say "vibrating personal massager" instead of "vibrator."
One takes place at a bridal shower.
"Who got me the Tri-Phoria?" says the bride. "That would be from me," says her friend, whose hair shoots straight back. "No, wait," chimes another. "That would be from me." She has the hair, too. "Well," says a final lightning-coiffured gal-pal. "It looks like she's going to have three!" They all cackle. The tagline is "So good, it'll blow your hair back."
Sex toys are almost as old as sex. Academics have traced 8-inch rod-shaped stone pleasure objects back 30,000 years. Hippocrates in the fourth century B.C. claimed a woman's uterus could dry out from lack of sex --a.k.a. "hysteria." The purported solution? Prodding from a stick thing.
Hamilton Beach patented the first take-home vibrator in 1902, before the electric iron or vacuum cleaner. It looked like a drill locked inside a black briefcase. Vibrators were accepted as health devices until they started appearing in pornography. Then, people got disturbed.
The women on "Sex and the City" chatted about the Rabbit-brand vibrator over breakfast on a 1998 episode. "You don't even need them to have sex with anymore," said Miranda of men. "As I've just very pleasantly discovered."
But were real people actually using them?
"Women in general are becoming more comfortable with their sexuality," said Hannah Webster, 19, a sex and love columnist at the University of Tampa's Minaret. "It's not something that needs to be hidden. ... I definitely talk about it with my group of girlfriends."
Trojan worked with Indiana University to conduct the largest vibrator study ever, published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Researchers surveyed women and men age 18 to 60. They found 53 percent of women and 45 percent of men had used a vibrator. More than 90 percent of women liked them, and most used them with a partner.
"That really brought it home to us," said Bruce Tetreault, group product manager at Trojan. "The people who are using these are part of a sexually healthy relationship."
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service www.scrippsnews.com)
Must credit St. Petersburg Times.
