IMAGINE an article in a mainstream newspaper celebrating the freedom of heterosexual men to obtain sexual gratification outside normal relations with women. I have never seen a mainstream ad or newspaper piece ooh-ing or aah-ing over male use of prostitutes or pornography. And, yet it is now normal to read about how wonderful sex toys and auto-eroticism are for women. 

This recent piece in The New York Times about the marketing of vibrators in drug stores and online sites is a case in point. This puff piece would have been unthinkable 50 years ago – but that, we are told, is good. There is not a single cautionary word in the entire article. No acknowledgment of the potential for sex addiction in women. The past was one long siege of repression and now women are liberated to achieve sexual ecstasy outside intercourse or even a relationship with a man.

Vibrators come in perfume boxes and can be programmed by an Ipod. Who would ever have thought that giving one to a teenager daughter was anything less than generous? “A woman who has thoroughly explored her own body, both alone and with or without whichever toys she finds interesting, makes for a significantly better lover.” The vibrator is neat, “an ongoing source of fascination,” the road to freedom after millenia of darkness, not a crude device that subverts love and creates hours of easy, impersonal sex that is immoral and undermines appreciation of the real thing.

Women have traded love and early marriage for bedtime with a dime store contraption.

                                                               — Comments —

Victoria writes:

A most excellent trade.

Laura writes:

Perhaps soon there will be special hotel packages. Romantic weekends for women alone with themselves and their mechanical toys. The ads could show a woman alone on a bed and say, “Be with the one you love.”

Jeff W. writes:

That modern women go to bed with sex toys may be all for the best. According to this interview on NPR, between 50 and 75 percent of unmarried women between the ages of 40 and 50 now carry the herpes simplex 2 virus.

It has occurred to me that the most enduring gift that sexually liberated modern women have given the world is incurable herpes.

Please follow and like us: