vibrators, vibe curators, and dieter rams
What fresh hell hath my hyperfixation wrought for this edition? Jump in, scroll through, and find out.
What fresh hell hath my hyperfixation wrought for this edition? Thanks to my friend Flav unintentionally breaking my brain via Instagram DM, I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time in the last week thinking about the words “vibe curator” and “vibrator” – specifically, how to hot glue them together to make some statement on culture. This is what happens when someone with over a decade of dangerously close contact with the World Wide Web (and microwaves) decides to write a newsletter on whatever they want.
Spoiler alert: it did not work. Luckily, one thing I’ve learned from being terminally online and chained to the media industry is that not everything needs to be something. Sometimes the real treasure is the weird internet holes you fell into along the way.
Welcome to 5 pebbles vibrators.
01: dieter rams did not spend decades popping his braunussy just for me to waltz in here and bastardize his design concept, yet here we are
“Less, but better” is one of the 10 Principles of Good Design, as laid out by legendary product designer Dieter Rams. I think about the idea a lot, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has seen my sparse, Sims-like wardrobe or “tiny home tour” YouTube viewing history. What can I say? This bitch loves reduction! “Less, but better” (and Rams’ entire design history) influenced Apple’s former chief design officer, Jony Ive. It’s been used to make aggressively boring coffee shop interiors seem more interesting and sell oversized and overpriced tote bags. It’s the title of Rams’ book, which is currently gathering dust on my nightstand underneath three other books, a lamp, and my eyedrops.
02: the vibe curator to vibrator pipeline is not up to code
When I began the Sisyphean task of trying to less-but-better my way into reducing “vibe curator” into “vibrator,” I thought I was onto something. What is a vibe curator, if not a person capable of harnessing the vibrations of culture to bring about an overwhelming sense of euphoria? Turns out, the answer is what the fuck am I talking about. I learned a lot in my thought exercise, including that actual so-called “vibe curators” tend to be the absolute worst people you’ve ever seen. I had to take my glasses off multiple times in my research because I had seen enough.
At this point, I must say that as a Capricorn with Taurus rising placement pumping through my veins, it’s impossible for me to be wrong or admit defeat. This is not me waving a white flag. I’m simply choosing to blow up the vibe curator to vibrator pipeline. It was simply not up to code and I value safety. Thank you, god bless, and here’s Honest Abe.
03: Four score and seventy thousand iterations of the sex toy ago…
When Abraham Lincoln began his Gettysburg Address in 1863 with talk of “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he could never have fathomed that a bolder, more world-altering invention than the United States would debut two decades later. The vibrator was not conceived in ecstasy, nor was it dedicated to the proposition that all sexual organs deserve to vibrate – at least not at first.
When the British doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville created the world’s first vibrator in the 1880s, it was used as a medical device on men to treat pain, spinal disease, and, somehow, deafness. Its only sexual use was to help men with impotence by pummeling their “perineum” — what we would now call the gooch, runway, or landing strip in the year of our lord 2024.
The device's official meet-cute with the clitoris took decades and was, naturally, strictly prohibited by the man doctors of the era. As the gynecologist James Craven Wood wrote in his 1917 book Clinical Gynecology: “The greatest objection to vibration thus applied is that in overly sensitive patients it is liable to cause sexual excitement. [However] if “the vibratode is kept well back from the clitoris, there is but little danger of causing such excitement.” Men! They really do know best!
In a shocking twist and big L for patriarchy, women figured out how to work the vibratode into their #SelfCare routine, which, uh… opened the floodgates. Many years and many rudimentary sex toys (that look like torture devices) later, the vibrator was embraced publicly by radical feminist Betty Dodson in her 1970s-era masturbation workshops. The use of vibrators is now as mainstream and acceptable as using selfie sticks in public or having the mental illness of liking Taylor Swift’s music. They are as much an accessory telegraphing your personality as the latest Stanley Quencher — though hopefully not covered in lead.
03: Four score and seventy thousand iterations of the sex toy ago…
When Abraham Lincoln began his Gettysburg Address in 1863 with talk of “a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” he could never have fathomed that a bolder, more world-altering invention than the United States would debut two decades later. The vibrator was not conceived in ecstasy, nor was it dedicated to the proposition that all sexual organs deserve to vibrate – at least not at first.
When the British doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville created the world’s first vibrator in the 1880s, it was used as a medical device on men to treat pain, spinal disease, and, somehow, deafness. Its only sexual use was to help men with impotence by pummeling their “perineum” — what we would now call the gooch, runway, or landing strip in the year of our lord 2024.
The device's official meet-cute with the clitoris took decades and was, naturally, strictly prohibited by the man doctors of the era. As the gynecologist James Craven Wood wrote in his 1917 book Clinical Gynecology: “The greatest objection to vibration thus applied is that in overly sensitive patients it is liable to cause sexual excitement. [However] if “the vibratode is kept well back from the clitoris, there is but little danger of causing such excitement.” Men! They really do know best!
In a shocking twist and big L for patriarchy, women figured out how to work the vibratode into their #SelfCare routine, which, uh… opened the floodgates. Many years and many rudimentary sex toys (that look like torture devices) later, the vibrator was embraced publicly by radical feminist Betty Dodson in her 1970s-era masturbation workshops. The use of vibrators is now as mainstream and acceptable as using selfie sticks in public or having the mental illness of liking Taylor Swift’s music. They are as much an accessory telegraphing your personality as the latest Stanley Quencher — though hopefully not covered in lead.
04: HUGE DILDO PACK Vol2. 1.0.0
Growing up with an overactive imagination, a PC the size of Big Baby, and very few friends meant I spent a lot of time playing The Sims. While I’ll save my opinions on the game for another time and another newsletter, I will be touching briefly on the mod community’s shoehorning of sex toys into the game. As Dean Martin presciently crooned in 1953: “When the vibrator hits your Sim’s eye like a sex rocket in the sky, that’s amore.”
For as long as Sims have walked the virtual earth, horny gamers have found a way to turn up the eroticism to 100. Just months after The Sims was released in October 2003, a forum called SexySims opened. Now, 21 years later, anyone hungry for some pixel porn has options. There is LoversLab, a kind of yassified SexySims (I can’t believe I’m typing this) full of sex toys, porn, and other erotica for The Sims, Fallout, Skyrim, and other games.
But the holy grail, the fertile soil from which all great horny Sims content has sprouted, is Wicked Whims. I won’t say how many questionable google searches it took to learn more about this, but I will say I now know that pubic lice are possible in The Sims 4, along with nudity, sex animations, periods, porn, masturbation, sex toys, condoms, birth control, and an attraction system.
If you need me, I’ll be researching horny video gaming and contemplating what my life would’ve looked like had I discovered sex mods as a teenager playing The Sims. Please enjoy an image of some of the many sex toys contained in the HUGE DILDO PACK Vol2. 1.0.0 by Fallen Angel Games (or FAG, if you’re familiar with the term).
05: eau du bean flicker 5000 (by Chloe)
My flatmate loves three things in this world: sex toys, perfume, and five-hour YouTube videos about American Girl dolls. While I haven’t quite figured out how to get her to contribute on that latter one, I did ask that she combine two of her three interests to conclude this newsletter. Join me in daydreaming about the vibratory smells she dreamt up – and if you’re able to make this, please email me.
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