IIn a hacked-up world where you can buy sleek, luxury vibrators for up to three characters, how did one sex toy that’s been around for 55 years gain such a cult following? That’s the question sex writer Kate Sloan explores in Making Magic, a new podcast about the clunky, white-and-blue Magic Wand Original Massager porn set straight out of the 1970s.
Sloan first became interested in the Magic Wand when she was 19 and spent her year off writing a sex toy review blog called Girly Juice. Later, while working at a sex shop, Sloan noticed customers coming back to buy the Magic Wand again and again, eager to exchange their old ones for the same model.
“I really haven’t seen it happen with any other toy on the scale that I’ve seen with the wand,” she said. “The wand takes on this larger-than-life symbolism where it seems to mean more than just being a vibrator for people.
Sloan spent a year reporting for the podcast, which features interviews with more than 30 sex and relationship experts and is produced by Vibratex, the company behind the wand. But she couldn’t talk to the woman who plays the most important role in the Wand story: the late Betty Dodson, a pioneer of sex-positive feminism and the biggest vibrator evangelist who everyone credits as the reason the toy made it. such a mythical state.
Dodson, sometimes called the “mother of masturbation,” was born in 1929 in Wichita, Kansas, where, like most women of the time, she experienced a sexually repressive upbringing. She later moved to New York and married an advertising director, but she described the union as passionless and they divorced after six years.
Single again at the dawn of the sexual revolution, Dodson discovered the magic wand in a department store, where the Japanese conglomerate Hitachi advertised it as a “body massager.” Dodson got hold of the device and in 1974 published a self-love manual called Liberating Masturbation.
She also hosted Bodysex, a female pleasure workshop, in her apartment until the course became such a phenomenon that she took it on the road and taught her method in sex shops around the country. (Bodysex is still in business, run by Carlin Ross, president of the Dodson Foundation—this October, wannabes can pay up to $2,586 for a long weekend extravaganza, wand included, in the Catskills.)
“Betty had the confidence and charisma to feel that the advice she gave was hard-won, secret feminist wisdom passed down from brilliant elders,” Sloan said. “She made the women undress, sit in a circle and talk about body image, masturbation and sex. Then she handed out the wand because she felt it was the best tool for the job.’
During interviews with Dodson’s contemporaries, Sloan learned that the sex educator felt she deserved compensation from the brand for turning their device into a masturbation necessity. “Apparently she wasn’t thrilled that the Magic Wand company never paid her to popularize the toy,” Sloan said. “She always felt like she should get a cut. [sales]. I think that’s fair, although I’m not entirely sure what it would look like.”
Over the years, the Wand’s cultural stature has grown, appearing in film (including a stripper scene in Tom Hanks’ 1984 film Bachelor Party) and television (of course, Sex and the City’s hypersexed Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall, was a fan). Involved fans referred to the item as “Hitachi”, which unnerved the ultra-conservative company’s management.
“It’s debatable how much Hitachi knew about how their ‘body massager’ was used,” Sloan said. “Some people say the off-label use has gone over their heads, but if you look at old advertising from the ’70s and ’80s, there’s some euphemistic language like ‘tension relief.’ At one point, Hitachi considered discontinuing its breakthrough device in order to maintain its reputation. Instead, Hitachi created a subsidiary company called Vibratex to distribute the toy and removed its name from the packaging.
“A lot of people were afraid the product would change,” Sloan said. A 2000 headline released at the time of this craze read “Panic in bedrooms when magic wand goes missing, cadillac of vibrators”. But after a hiccup, Vibratex became the sole importer of the wand into the US, which it still is today. The Napa, Calif.-based company has updated the design — slightly — by creating a rechargeable version instead of one that has to go into a wall outlet and releasing a mini option. Dan Martin, who runs Vibratex with his wife Shay Martin, told Sloan, “Why would we fuck the golden goose?”
Scams abound on the internet these days, including fakes advertised on sites like eBay and Amazon as the real deal. The device has also inspired creative fan tributes like a $40 Etsy embroidery, a $50 knuckle holder, and earrings that actually vibrate.
Although historians may forever associate the wand with cis feminists of the 1970s, Sloan says the toy has long held significance for queer and gender non-conforming communities as well. She devoted an episode to this element of the story.
“Because the wand isn’t gendered and it’s not particularly sexualized the way it looks, I’ve heard it helps people in the LGBT community,” Sloan explained. “I’ve heard from people who have used it after gender-affirming surgery, and it’s used in queer porn. That doesn’t mean that people directly can’t or don’t use it, but it can be used on anyone, regardless of gender or anatomy.”
Much of the discourse about sex in 2024 concerns the fear that nobody has it – we’re experiencing a ‘sexual recession’, some say fewer young people are doing it than previous generations. A deeper look at the scary quotes shows that it’s not always bad: many young people prefer quality over quantity and don’t feel pressured to have bad sex.
“From the conversations I’ve had, especially with women, if you have access to a device like a wand that makes you come on demand, you might make fewer decisions that you end up regretting,” Sloan said. “I’ve had so many terrible, unsatisfying hookups where I had no idea the person was even interested in my pleasure.” But when I have toys that keep taking me off, I can sit there and think, ‘Do I really want to go on this date? What should I do if I saw that person?'”
Decades after it first hit the market – and on the heels of the pandemic-era sex toy boom – Sloan believes the magic wand remains just as radical. “We’re living in a cultural moment where we feel like the pendulum is swinging back to Puritanism in a strange and unexpected way,” she said. “Queer and trans people are called groomers and queer people are called abusers, and that’s really discouraging.” But I feel like The Magic Wand is such an important symbol in the history of sex-positive feminism, and the process of working on it reminded me why it’s important to fight for sexual inclusivity and destroy sexual shame.”