From whispering about sex to blogging about vibrators?

Way back, when I was a young teenager and living in a small industrial town in India, I had no idea about many of the facts of life.  

And then all of us grow up.  In the old days, the Tamizh saying was that "மன்மத கலை சொல்லி தெரிவதில்லை" (to mean that one doesn't learn the art of making love from classes.)  But, increasingly, it looks like those were the very old days, given the contemporary world in which seemingly everybody freely exchanges information and tips on sex.

When I worked and lived in California, one day colleague1 recalled a hilarious conversation he had had with colleague2 earlier that day.  Apparently irritated over the continued presence of the mother-in-law, colleague2 ranted away and told colleague1 that "she just sits there like a dildo."  A few minutes later, colleague2 rushes to colleague1 and says "I meant dodo. Not dildo."  I laugh even as type this :)

How much ever square I might be, there is, of course, plenty of sex-related intellectual stuff that has come across my computer screen and magazines.  In graduate school, I was more than flummoxed when in the academic article that I was reading the author characterized New York as a masculine city for its emphasis on a single-center of activity with phallic high rise buildings, and Los Angeles as a feminine city that demonstrated many centers of activity comparable to women having many pleasure points.  This was one particular moment when I thought that perhaps I had made a mistake in ditching engineering!  The nerd in me then read some more along these lines and came across a study that referred to research on measuring the location of the clitoris with respect to the distance from the vagina (which, now, is so easy to scan through at this Wikipedia entry!)

A few months ago, I was reading the New Yorker--always my favorite magazine--when I was blown away with:

For centuries, physicians had been treating hysteria in their female patients with “pelvic massage,” but in the early eighteen-eighties Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville patented the first electromechanical vibrator, which advanced this particular medical procedure considerably. (The vibrator was made available as an over-the-counter treatment two decades later, when it was the fifth domestic appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, the fan, the toaster, and the teakettle; it remains the machine most important to a great many smoothly functioning households.)

I was shocked.  This was not a Captain Renault kind of shocked, shocked, but a genuine one.  I had no idea that for centuries "physicians" had been treating hysteria in female patients by bringing them to orgasm!  And that the idea of a vibrator is not any recent, but was something sold even through catalogs just as toasters were sold.  WTF!

Last week, the Atlantic had a story that builds on all these: about the Steve Jobs of the vibrator and sex toys industry:

Ethan Imboden, the company's founder, is 40 and holds an electrical engineering degree from Johns Hopkins and a master's in industrial design from Pratt Institute. He has a thin face and blue eyes, and wears a pair of small hoop earrings beneath brown hair that is often tousled in some fashion. The first time I visited, one April morning, Imboden had on a V-neck sweater, designer jeans and Converse sneakers with the tongues splayed out -- an aesthetic leaning that masks a highly programmatic interior. "I think if you asked my mother she'd probably say I lined up my teddy bears at right angles," he told me.

What the ... what? The guy is a regular nerd with engineering and industrial design degrees from prestigious institutes?

In January 2005, the Little Gold made it into the Golden Globe Awards gift suite, the freebie swag lounge that, in those days, A-list celebrities actually visited. "To have a non-fashion item like that at one of these showcases was really unusual and groundbreaking," Rose Apodaca, the West Coast bureau chief of Women's Wear Daily at the time, told me. "It was the hot item everyone was trying to get their hands on." Teri Hatcher and Jennifer Garner, by picking one up, became among the brand's first celebrity endorsers. Apodaca wrote about it in WWD's awards season special. "Suddenly there's this tool for sex being featured in the bible of the fashion industry." After Kate Moss was spotted purchasing a Little Gold from a Greenwich Village lingerie boutique -- a "buzz-worthy bauble," Page Six wrote -- Jimmyjane appeared in Vogue.

Thus, as you can imagine, I was not in any kind of a shock when I came across this piece in which the author writes about having been to the "vibrator museum."  I scroll down after reading that to find another piece on Maggie Gyllenhaal talking about her "vibrator movie"

“Hysteria,” the charming, lightweight feminist farce from director Tanya Wexler that explores a key event in the history of female sexuality: the invention of the vibrator by Mortimer Granville, a Victorian doctor who was seeking to cure the mysterious “female malady” that lends the movie its title.

Wow!  So, they even made a movie out of this Victorian invention; as always, I am late to this party too :)