By Natalie Silver

It was a moment of innocent serendipity.

The five-year-old girl was in a pool with her father and a blowup whale named Humphrey when she accidentally slipped down into the rabbit hole and caught a glimpse of her future. Straddling Humphrey’s back in just the right way, she was swept into the vortex and thrust into sensory overload, journeying down the mysterious and titillating path to a secret wonderland of unprecedented physical pleasure—a place she would not truly understand for years but would always remember.

“I had a sudden pinpoint sensation where my private parts are,” UC Berkeley sophomore Charlotte Jamar recounted of what she describes as her first sexual experience, in which she discovered clitoral stimulation while playing with Humphrey. “I felt a lot of things: surprise, curiosity, shame, pleasure. I felt like I discovered something I wasn’t supposed to know.”

Jamar’s sense that she was trespassing into precarious territory seems almost primal, as it was her first introduction to a centuries-old strain of misogyny in sex. At the backbone of this history is an androcentric, or male-centered, structure of power and privilege regarding sexual pleasure, in which the intersections of gender, religion, medicine and pop culture have woven together an apparatus which serves to both support the patriarchy and stifle the female orgasm into silence. 

Yet the young Jamar, too wide-eyed and unscathed to understand the context of her initial anxiety, felt an innate duty to remain silent about it despite her lack of knowledge. She didn’t know of the oppressive, cross-cultural history of genital mutilation, or misdiagnoses of orgasm as “hysteria,” or the virginity testing in medieval times, part of which called for midwifes to inspect hymens. She had no way of knowing about the male gaze rampant in 21st century media texts, the glorification of teenage male masturbation, or of the social pressures caused by the early hyper-sexualization of the adolescent female body and their ensuing mental health problems. She couldn’t know that this sensation was something separate from the discourse of reproduction, nor could she know that 40% of women report to experiencing their first orgasm from masturbation, rather than vaginal intercourse. The young girl could not know that this strange, yet pleasant, sensation, which she at the time feared, was something she had the right to.

So when I dragged the now 22-year old with me into Berkeley’s Good Vibrations, a sex-toy retailer founded by a feminist sex-educator, she walked out of the store with a 10-dollar vibrator and a newly solidified sense of agency. The adult emporium is unique in its feminist mission and in its dedication to providing the resources necessary to create a safe space for this sexual self-actualization, acting as a haven away from an outside world of the shaming and silencing of female pleasure, serving as a vessel to transcend it.

GOOD VIBES

Nestled next to a café, behind frosted windows and less than two miles from campus on San Pablo Avenue stands the clean and organized sex-positive adult emporium, which was founded by feminist sex-educator Joani Blank. The store strives to legitimize and celebrate diversity in consensual sexual activity, desires and fantasies, promote ongoing education, and create a shame-free, communicative, and non-judgmental environment safe for open sexual expression.

The eclectic assortment of products at the store includes the “I Rub My Duckie” waterproof vibrator for the bath, a shelf holding 17 types of best-selling condoms, a “Clone a Willy” moldable dildo, handmade bulges to pack in underwear and help facilitate gender expression, the “Little Book of Big Penis,”, vagina shaped chocolates, kegel exercisers, a bondage starting kit, glory holes, cock rings, harnesses, vegan condoms and lubricants, and even “ecorotic” green sex toys.

The Berkeley location was founded in 1994 and is the second-oldest out of the chain’s eight locations—which are all, except one in Massachusetts, clustered in the Bay Area—equipping this vibrant and notoriously provocative college town with a goldmine.

Good Vibrations was a trailblazer in the emergence of “sex-positive” shops, which were the result of the sex-positive feminist movement in the 1970s. These clean, high-end boutiques not only began to offer safe methods of discovering and enhancing sexual experience, but also were leaders in culturing an inclusive environment that offers people the chance to find their “authentic sexual selves,” support for the discovery of this across the gender continuum, and celebration of pleasure as a birthright, rather than a privilege.

PLEASURE AS A PRIVILEGE: THE HISTORY

The sheer introduction of the term “birthright” into the discourse of sex is jarring evidence of progress from that same discourse’s oppressive roots, which snowballed into a global stranglehold on female pleasure. Some of the earliest traces of such interference with female sexual autonomy are also some of the most violent manifestations of it.

Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) dates back to 25 BC, when it was first referenced by a Greek geographer who visited Egypt. According to the World Health Organization, FGM has absolutely no health benefits and yet entails severe health risks including death, hemorrhaging, and reproductive or childbirth complications. More than 3 million girls are estimated to be at risk annually, and the practice is recognized internationally as a violation of human rights.

The cultural procedure is performed with the intent of preserving premarital virginity and preventing extramarital sexual acts by reducing the woman’s natural libido. Yet this age-old, androcentric desire , has manifested in many other forms, including the fetishization of virginity in medieval times and the commodification of sex.

As explained in Rachel P. Maines’ book “The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ The Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction,” women’s sexuality has been institutionally oppressed in explicit rhetoric since at least the 19th century. The societal suppression of female arousal often manifested as anxiety, irritability, sleeplessness, erotic fantasy and vaginal lubrication, but was then diagnosed as “hysteria,” a condition that required medical correction.

This attitude makes sense given the androcentric model of sexuality and patriarchal marriage at the time. This model defines sex as composed of three steps: foreplay, penetration, and male orgasm. Female pleasure was excluded from the entire framework of understanding and discussing sex.

The cure to this hysteria was induced orgasm—or as it was called then, “hysterical paroxysm,” placing female arousal as a clinical condition that called for treatment, and orgasm as a cure that must be administered by a patriarchal power source. Thus, female pleasure was placed in the hands of those in power. In this case, it is neither treated as a birthright nor a privilege; it has been reduced to a prescription to be administered by those already in power. Therefore, this laid down the medical foundation for the patriarchy to have exclusive power over female pleasure.

Prior to the invention of the first vibrator in the 1880s by a British physician, these hysterical paroxysms were to be induced by doctors. It was a chore, “a job nobody else wanted,” that Maines says was compared to playing that difficult game where you simultaneously rub your belly and pat your head.

Indiana University Informatics professors Jeffrey and Shaowen Bardzell, who research sex and gender, explain how vibrators emerged in an oppressive landscape dismissive of female pleasure and as a means of institutional control.

Between 1920 and 1960 they were sold by traveling salesmen as tools to induce sexual pleasures in women, which at the time was framed as forbidden, taboo, and immoral. Though the 1960s saw a sexual revolution that began to frame pleasure as a birthright, rather than a secret and immoral flaw, even in seemingly open-minded and progressive places like Berkeley, the modern landscape is ridden with taboo and social stigmas regarding sex and female pleasure.

THE CURRENT PROBLEM

We need to repurpose the structures of power and privilege from an androcentric model to a feminist one, as it affects how women treat themselves, questions their role in sex, and triggers masturbatory guilt. This is a job that Good Vibrations takes seriously; the business stands out among other sex-toy retailers due to it’s feminist social agenda and emphasis on education, safety and shame-free pleasure.

In the 1990s feminist BUST magazine, Marcelle Karp and Debbie Stoller highlight the mistaken conflation of sexual satisfaction and sexual attractiveness.. In a 1999 issue they say: “If we just cut all the fat from our diets, go to the gym three times a week, and wear the right lingerie, we’ll be able to attain sexual nirvana. Of course, that’s not how it works. The thing we women are never encouraged to do is to focus on what actually makes us feel good.”

The focus on image, especially during the teen years, coerces us to treat ourselves as objects of desire. Dr. Caitlin E. Welles, who has a PsyD child psychology, explains how sexualized dress codes perpetrated and circulated by the overall patriarchal and elite media community establish a template for femininity that is designed to excite the opposite sex. As a result, young girls in the midst of adolescent identity crises are thrust into an insatiable dilemma in which they must balance being feminine, and thus sexually attractive, without being deemed “easy.” 

It makes sense that such an impossible and ridiculous task would give way to new problems. Welles specifically cites that they quite often dangerously manifest in the form of mental illnesses or eating disorders.

Religious institutions are another power structure that have denounced the right to pleasure. Some religious leaders have referred to it as “self-abuse,” “defilement of the flesh,” and “self pollution,” according to J. Kenneth Davidson, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, and Carol Anderson Darling, who researches sociology and psychology  at Florida State University.

The consequences of these fear tactics disallow people the freedom to both observe certain religions and feel pleasure outside of heteronormative, vaginal, reproduction-focused sexual intercourse in which the male role has traditionally been valued more than that of the female.

It also could contribute to phenomena that Davidson and Darling identify as the “vaginal imperative” and “masturbatory guilt.” The destructiveness of the “vaginal imperative’—an ideal similarly produced by the androcentric model in which the penis is seen as the dominant instrument in sexual intercourse—reinforces the idea that men have more sexual drive than women, because many women do not feel pleasure in vaginal intercourse. Given this framework of interpretation, the female orgasm outside of vaginal sex is seen as wrong.

This negative judgement, however, doesn’t stop women from seeking pleasure; rather, it coerces them into a trap of self-inflicted guilt. Davidson and Darling cite that in the 1980s, 46% to 85% of college women reported that they masturbated. These numbers increased to 53% to 84% during the 1990s. That said, in a study with college women subjects, 30% cited “shame” as a reason for not masturbating, while only 50% of these women believe that it is a healthy practice. Although the data shows many women engage in the practice, it is still evident women are still choosing to not masturbate (or report that they are) due to externally imposed shame.  

FEMSEX AND BERKELEY

Within this context, Good Vibrations’ approach that celebrates pleasure as a birthright rather than as an appendage to heterosexual skin-to-skin sex makes the store stand out as a revolutionary institution that has helped women regain sexual agency.

This ethos strikes a chord with UC Berkeley’s own FemSex DeCal, which takes a field trip every semester to the San Pablo location as part of the class’s “Self Love, Pleasure, Orgasm and Sexual Practices” section. During these tours, the class sees demonstrations and receives discounts on the products.

The field trip offers students resources that encourage self-exploration. This ties into one dimension of the FemSex mission: to create a safe space for its participants, which can incite them to explore these desires.

“It helps to destigmatize sexual practices and allow people and students the freedom to explore those desires,” former FemSex facilitator Chandler Le Francis, a UC Berkeley Media Studies graduate, said of the tour.

This destigmatization accompanies a critical exploration of power and privilege. Isabel Johnson, a third Environmental Science student, and FemSex and Vagina Monologues participant, explained power and privilege , or the societal structures that dictate dominance and status in relationships. Typically, the white, heterosexual, cisgender male occupies such a position. But in terms of sex and pleasure, understanding power relationships is a discussion of consent.

Disproportionate levels of power and privilege within a sexual partnership can interfere with consent, such as if one partner is financially dependent on the other, if one partner is more sober than the other, or if one partner’s pleasure is prioritized over the other’s. Johnson sees the issue of pleasure as one of the biggest obstacles to equality in sexual relationships.

When both partners in a sexual interaction understand that pleasure is something they are entitled to, sexual roles become understood as active ones rather than passive ones. By effect, this helps establish consent as something natural and mutually expected rather than forced or unimportant. 

THE SOLUTION

For Jamar, the decision to buy a vibrator was made with some uncertainty because she  felt the toy was a superfluous addition to using her fingers, and that it was an unnecessary, hedonistic move to seek further enhancement. “I felt like I was cheating the ‘natural’ way of things or admitting that sex didn’t fulfill all of my sexual desires,” she said.

This is something we are still recovering from, and something we must find a way to completely heal. We must neutralize the history of oppression by utilizing the resources we have to change it.

Good Vibrations accomplishes this by creating safe space for this exploration, and by repurposing a societal model of power and privilege from a historically oppressive one to one prioritizing freedom, equality, and the celebration of the quest in finding our authentic sexual selves.

 In our historically progressive Berkeley community, it is absolutely essential that we, as students, and as young agents in this world, embrace this power fostered through pleasure and the agency that is undeniably laced within it. We must have the courage to know that we can in fact, control our own pleasure, and that it’s not selfish or a threat to the fabric of society to please ourselves.

“Being able to know your own pleasure, communicate to get it, and to feel joy in sexuality and other forms of pleasure is satisfying, supportive of intimacy, and a source of happiness—and those things make the world a better place,” Queen said.

Pleasure makes us happy. Pleasure makes us who we are, as it activates an agency within us that, when synergized with parallel good vibrations among us, could spark a wave of collective happiness that, if spread, is capable of seducing community as a whole. It’s a powerful thing. It’s something we all have. It’s something that we all have the right to. It’s special. And because of that, because of its power, because of our ability to claim that power back into our own hands, it is something that we must celebrate.  Pleasure is your birthright.  Celebrate it every day.

By doing this, Jamar severed the dependency between pleasure and partner, and was quick to recognize the self-empowerment her first toy engendered and cited it as the best ten dollars she’s spent.

“Wherever he is,” she said smiling, “Humphrey would be proud.”