Dell Williams died last year at the advanced and venerable age
of 92. But only after having earned some highly deserved fame as the brave
feminist force behind the creation of Eve’s
Garden, widely recognized as the US’s first women-focused sexuality
boutique and mail order business back in 1974.
If you’re among the folk who’ve heard of Ms. Williams,
chances are that you’re also among the countless millions who believe in their
true hearts that women’s sexuality – specifically women’s orgasms - are both a
resource and a gift of the sort that keeps on giving, largely in direct
relationship to how much we honor it.
Born in 1922, Williams came into her own after pursuing multiple
other endeavors including acting and a stint in a branch of the armed services.
After all, coming into one’s own is a process sometimes. It happened for Dell
Williams after she attended a Body/Sex Workshop with the fearless, talented and
wholly inimitable sex educator Dr. Betty Dodson in New York . There, Ms. Williams’ epiphany took
a deep and life-altering hold on her as she learned to explore the liberatory
experience of taking charge of one’s own pleasure.
She learned about the power of her female body, and most
importantly, how to tap into the source of her orgasmic energy through tactile
manipulation and the use of vibrators. Not
to the exclusion of partnered sex, but as a way to be independent in the
pursuit of sexual fulfillment, Williams spoke of the sheer empowerment that
derives from being in charge of one’s own pleasure and not dependent upon the
involvement of anyone else.
It was, by her own admission, an epiphany of the first
magnitude, prompting her to put all she had learned into action. But it was the
humiliation of being mocked by a young male sales clerk when she attempted to
purchase a vibrator at Macy’s that motivated Williams to get to work and establish
her women’s sex boutique she named Eve’s
Garden – much to the excitement and utter elation of countless women
everywhere.
Williams opened Eve’s
Garden the year I turned 22. I remember hearing women on my college campus buzzing
about it in excited whispers, anxious to explore what the nacient women’s sex
shop had to offer, so spectacularly feminist and deliciously transgressive. A decade
past the free-love era of the 1960s, for some women who lacked Williams' moxie
and wouldn’t think of marching into Macy’s to buy a vibrator, the mere thought
of being able do so without fear of ridicule held excitement and promise. After
all, the sexual revolution of the 60s notwithstanding, the 70s were still a time
when not much had changed in terms of women taking charge of their own orgasms
in ways that privileged our own power rather than foregrounding the need to
stroke male egos in order to reinforce the power and the sexual primacy of men.
In fact, the idea that a woman might even consider using a vibrator to orgasm
made some men pretty uncomfortable, regardless of the circumstances.
But that’s certainly not
to say that the role of vibrators in bringing on women’s orgasms hadn’t
already been acknowledged, albeit in some pretty hard-to-imagine ways.
As far back as the first century A.D., medical practitioners
were employing a technique referred to as pelvic massage as a way of bringing
their female patients to orgasm in order to cure what they termed, female
hysteria. In fact, the writing of Hippocrates, the so called father of
medicine, mentions this notion of women suffering emotional distress that could
only be assuaged by expertly administered pelvic massage. As hard as it is to
believe today, the operative thought here was that women were prone to
hysteria, (literally, “womb disease” in Latin) because according to “medical”
theory at the time, a woman’s uterus could become detached and wander about
inside her body looking for a fetus to fill itself up with. Seriously… I couldn’t
make this up, people.
And what were the “symptoms” of this so-called “female
hysteria?” Let’s just say that pretty much any detectable mental state beyond
happiness could pretty well fit the bill – sadness, anger, listlessness, or no
emotional affect at all. Of course, the fact that penile penetration doesn’t
bring most women to orgasm on its own didn’t help, and in a male-centered model
of human sexuality this shouldn’t surprise us.
Again, according to the “wisdom” of the era, the only way to
fix things was to administer “pelvic massage” - a technique by which the doctor
massaged a woman’s genital area with his fingers to bring on “hysterical
paroxysm,” a kind of world-altering release of energy and tension known today
around the planet as a good, old-fashioned orgasm. After her treatment, and upon
payment of a tidy fee, the woman went home - happy and fully “cured” until the
next time.
So. At least a couple of thoughts come to mind here. On the
one hand, the whole notion that there’s some sickness attached to women wherein
their uteri become unglued, as it were, to go wandering around inside them would
be scary to the maximum degree, except that scarier still is the notion that
anyone ever believed this. Secondly, the idea that medically administered
pelvic massage began loosely around the time of Christ and continued up until
the early 1950s stretches the bounds of credulity, at least for me.
Beneath this crazy misogynist rubric, as you might imagine,
quite a lucrative arena for invention and manufacturing grew up to address this
“medically necessary therapy” enabling all manner of mechanical, electrical,
even foot-powered vibrators to flood the
marketplace - all in the service of medical men whose fingers got tired in the
service of their female patients.
My absolute choice for most appalling of this
ilk is the 19th century invention of a sort of water cannon, not
unlike a fire hose that the “doctor” aimed at the vulva of a nude and sitting
female “patient.” Unbelievably, the large and forceful gush of water was
supposed to bring on a "hysterical paroxysm," now known as an orgasm, thereby curing her. Of
course, while a strategically positioned water stream can certainly be
delicious, the angry blast from a water cannon seems a tad bit extreme.
And while there’s a long and vibrant history in the
world-wide annals of sex toys, (ancient dildos found in the volcanic ashes of Pompeii spring to mind), orgasm-producing
vibrators have their own storied journey through the dusty pages of time. In
the US and in Europe , they’ve ranged from huge, loud wind-up or
electric-powered contraptions that forfeited any hope of maintaining any discretion
to the tiny, silent remote controlled implantable
vibrators of today.
The odd thing was that even though genital stimulation was once
ubiquitously prescribed, the idea that women could or should stimulate themselves for the sheer pleasure of it was roundly
censured. In fact, women who used vibrators were most often thought wanton and
nasty, in desperate need of direction and guidance by some omniscient,
omnipotent man.
Feminist entrepreneurs like Dell Williams, thankfully, see
it otherwise. An outspoken activist pioneer for a woman’s right to “define,
explore and celebrate her sexuality,” Dell Williams knew the worth of a
dependable vibrator. But more importantly, she also knew the soul-affirming value
of women being able to access pleasurable devices for themselves, sans the
judgmental scrutiny of a tone-deaf patriarchy, in an environment that honors
the nature of women and women’s bodies, empowered and duly lionized on our own spectacular
terms.
photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/71606984@N00/15430255120">Five Sexy Stars: Redux</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">(license)</a>
photo credit: <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/71606984@N00/15616665422">Five Sexy Stars: Redux</a> via <a href="http://photopin.com">photopin</a> <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/">(license)</a>
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