By Peter Berton
SEATTLE – Some look like torture devices created by steampunk aliens. Others make one think of a livestock insemination aid or a jetpack.
All of them are vintage vibrators collected by women-centric adult novelty chain Babeland. The virtual museum, accessible at VintageVibrators.com, displays many of the gadgets in their original packaging, implying the original owners treated their high-tech-for-the-day gadgets with the respect and awe they deserved.
Claire Cavanaugh is co-founder of Babeland and a driving force behind the vibrator collection.
YNOT.com: Is the Vintage Vibrator museum available only online, or does it exist in the real world, too?
Claire Cavanaugh: We have several tools to showcase the history of the vibrator and our collection. There’s a website we launched a few years ago and continue to maintain. The site contains images and information about nearly 50 of the vibes in our collection, as well as a section on the development of the vibrator and its role as a pleasure object.
We have displays in two stores, too. Babeland SoHo in New York City has about a dozen along with the history, and Babeland Seattle has half a dozen that customers can learn about.
Why did you start the Vintage Vibrator collection?
Rachel Venning, the other co-founder of Babeland, and I both found some of them, and it was really interesting to see this historical perspective. We wanted to share this fascinating history with a larger audience.
Where does one find vintage vibrators?
Various places: garage sales, eBay, friends gave them to us.
What are some of the most striking pieces?
I like some of the older ones that have original packaging. Babeland stocked some modern-day equivalents for years.
Some hand models are pretty intense.
What does the collection tell us about the evolution of both vibrators and attitudes about sex?
Vibrators were first developed to relieve the stress injuries of doctors who were stimulating their female patients to orgasm manually as a treatment for hysteria. That says a lot about how women’s sexuality was viewed in the late 19th Century.
We’ve come a long way to the mainstream pleasure objects that pack our shelves today, and statistics say more than 50 percent of women have used a vibrator. I think it’s a marker of how we’ve changed culturally and socially when it comes to sexual repression.
Do you ever look at some of these vintage devices and shudder a bit?
Well, yes, maybe a little. Some of them aren’t very friendly-looking.
