In a Goop-ified world where one can purchase sleek, luxury vibrators for up to three figures, how has one sex toy that’s existed for 55 years garnered such devotion? It’s a question the sex writer Kate Sloan explores in Making Magic, a new podcast about the clunky, white-and-blue, straight-from-a-70s-porn-set Magic Wand Original Massager.
Sloan first became interested in the Magic Wand when she was a 19-year-old spending her gap year writing a sex toy review blog called Girly Juice. Later, while working at a sex store, Sloan noticed how customers would come back to buy the Magic Wand over and over again, eager to replace their old ones with the same model.
“I haven’t really seen that happen with any other toy on the same scale as I saw it happen 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 to 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 wasn’t able to speak with the woman who plays the most important role in the Magic Wand’s story: the late Betty Dodson, a pioneer of sex-positive feminism and the vibrator’s greatest evangelist, who everyone credits as the reason the toy achieved such a mythical status.
Sometimes called “the mother of masturbation”, Dodson was born in 1929 in Wichita, Kansas, where she, like most women of the era, 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 it was advertised by the Japanese conglomerate Hitachi as a “body massager”. Dodson got hooked on the device, releasing a self-love handbook called Liberating Masturbation in 1974.
She also hosted Bodysex, a workshop on female pleasure, out of her apartment, until the course became such a phenomenon she took it on the road, teaching her method in sex stores around the country. (Bodysex still operates, run by Carlin Ross, chairperson of Dodson’s foundation – this October, interested attendees can pay up to $2,586 for a long weekend pleasure extravaganza, Magic Wand included, in the Catskills.)
“Betty had a confidence and charisma to her that made it feel like the advice she gave was hard-won, secret feminist wisdom being passed down by a brilliant elder,” Sloan said. “She would get women to strip naked, sit in a circle, and talk about body image, masturbation, and sex. Then she would hand out the Magic Wand, because she felt that it was the best tool for the job.”
Sloan learned during interviews with Dodson’s contemporaries that the sex educator felt she deserved compensation from the brand for turning their device into a masturbation must-have. “She wasn’t apparently thrilled that the Magic Wand company never paid her for having popularized the toy,” Sloan said. “She always felt that she should’ve received a cut of [sales]. I think that’s fair, though I’m not exactly sure what that would’ve looked like.”
Over the years, the Magic Wand’s cultural stature grew, featured in movies (including a stripper scene in the 1984 Tom Hanks film Bachelor Party) and television (of course Sex and the City’s hyper-sexed Samantha Jones, played by Kim Cattrall, was a fan). Plugged-in fans referred to the item as a “Hitachi”, which made executives at the ultra-conservative company nervous.
“It’s up for debate how much Hitachi knew about how their ‘body massager’ was being used,” Sloan said. “Some people say that the off-label use went above their heads, but if you look at vintage advertising of the 70s and 80s, there is some euphemistic language like ‘tension relief’.” At one point, Hitachi considered discontinuing its breakout device in order to maintain its reputation. Instead, Hitachi handed the reins to Vibratex, which distributes the toy, and took its name off the packaging.
“A lot of people were afraid that the product would change,” Sloan said. A 2000 headline published around the time of this frenzy read “Panic in bedrooms as Magic Wand, Cadillac of vibrators, disappears”. But after the hiccup, Vibratex became the sole importer of the wand to the US, which it remains to this day. The Napa, California-based company updated the design – slightly – by creating a rechargeable version instead of one that needs to go into a wall socket, and releasing a mini option. Dan Martin, who leads Vibratex with his wife, Shay Martin, told Sloan: “Why would we fuck with the golden goose?”
These days, dupes abound online, including fakes advertised on sites like eBay and Amazon as the real deal. The device has also inspired creative fan tributes, such as a $40 Etsy embroidery, a $50 joint holder, and earrings that actually vibrate.
Though historians may forever associate the Magic Wand with 70s cis feminists, Sloan says that the toy has long held significance for queer and gender-nonconforming communities, as well. She dedicated an episode to this element of the story.
“Since the wand isn’t gendered and it’s not especially sexualized in the way it looks, I’ve heard that it helps people in the LGBT community,” Sloan explained. “I’ve heard from people who used it after gender-affirming surgery, and it’s used in queer porn. That’s not to say straight people can’t or don’t use it, but it can be used on anyone, regardless of gender or anatomy.”
Much of the discourse on sex in 2024 surrounds concerns that no one’s having it – we are living through a “sex recession”, some say, with fewer young people doing it than previous generations. A deeper look past scare quotes shows that’s not always a bad thing: many young people are prioritizing quality over quantity, and not feeling pressured to have bad sex.
“From the interviews I’ve done, especially with women, if you have access to a device like the wand that makes you come on demand, you might make less decisions that you end up regretting,” Sloan said. “I’ve had so many terrible, unsatisfying hookups where I had no sense the person cared about my pleasure at all. But when I’ve had toys that consistently get me off, I can sit and think, ‘Do I really want to go on this date? What would I get out of seeing this person?’”
Decades after it first hit the market – and on the heels of a pandemic-era sex toy boom – Sloan believes that the Magic Wand remains just as radical. “We’re living through a cultural moment where it feels like the pendulum is swinging back toward Puritanism in a weird and unexpected way,” she said. “Queer and trans people are getting called groomers, and kinky people are called abusers, and that feels 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 this has reminded my why it’s important to fight for sexual inclusivity and demolish sexual shame.”
This article was amended on 30 May 2024 to remove a description of Vibratex as a subsidiary of Hitachi.
