The Sexual State of the Union by Susie Bright

Author:Susie Bright
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: A Touchstone Book
Published: 1997-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Sex

Toys

The Vibrator Clerk Chronicles

WHEN THAT BOOK All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten came out, I remember pausing to think whether that were true for me as well, and then shaking my head. No, everything I need to know I learned in a vibrator store.

I spent my most satisfying job years working in a feminist vibrator emporium in San Francisco, Good Vibrations, which in the early eighties was a very small shop, more of a missionary outpost than a profit-making center. I liked it because it was very slow; I could read all the sex books on the shelves waiting for one customer to come in, and then, since we were alone, s/he would usually take a chance and tell me what was on her/his mind. It was not the sort of place where people just drove up and asked for a Hitachi Magic Wand and plunked the cash on the table. People came seeking information, therapy, a clue. It was very rewarding to help them, if I could, and afterward it would gall me terrifically how much people were suffering for the lack of the most basic sex education, and how women in particular lacked confidence about fundamental sexual matters. I wanted to put up billboards; I wanted an emergency broadcast system to interrupt network television and tell everybody, “Listen, pull down your pants and follow the bouncing ball.”

The biggest irony of the sexual confessions I heard was that truth-seekers came to the store barely able to utter their concern since it was so unique and knotty, but their questions were very similar. It was like the same five problems coming in all day, every day. If I hadn’t been sworn to discretion, I would have handed out phone numbers: here, this is a list of the forty-two people from last month who have the exact same shameful secret as you. “This isn’t a personal problem, this is a social problem!”—is all I kept thinking, and like so many other things about sex, the question that people walked in with was often just the tip of the iceberg.

The most common problem for women is orgasm, and their facility in bringing it about. About a quarter of the women I spoke to had never come, or weren’t sure they had. But at least half were hamstrung by feeling that their orgasm depended on a very vulnerable thing, or situation, or lover, without which they were incapable of coming. Without their vibrator, or their ex-husband, or the smell of gardenias at noon, they couldn’t get off. Finally, the smallest minority were the women who said they could come at the drop of a hat; if anything, they wished they could restrain themselves. Yeah, I envied them, too.

One of my most quoted lines is, “I never met a man who told me he didn’t know how to come, or didn’t know where his penis was.” That pretty much sums up the dilemma of women’s sexual responsiveness. Lots of women

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