This marketing overtly portrayed vibrators as nonsexual while covertly conveying their sexual uses through imagery and the sale of phallic, dildo-like attachments.
How was vibrator advertising able to become so ubiquitous during the early twentieth century, despite draconian antiobscenity laws and antimasturbation rhetoric? This article argues that companies achieved this result by shaping the meaning of vibrators through strategic marketing. Vibrators are widely sold today, however, as instruments for masturbation, a use that was rarely mentioned but well known before World War II. Companies marketed vibrators to grandparents, mothers, infants, and young adults. Ads appeared in the pages of The New York Times and Scientific American and plastered street cars. In the first three decades of the twentieth century, however, marketing of vibrators as consumer appliances became pervasive. The electromechanical vibrator originated in the late nineteenth century as a device for medical therapy.
