This is not your average home-appliance store.
Walk through the doors of Polk Street’s, Good Vibrations, and you’ll find the thrilling Antique Vintage Vibrator Museum. It consists of a collection of vibrators dating back to the 1800s, which were collected by the store owner, Joani Blank, over a period of 20 years.
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Pleasure yourself! Those are the doctor’s orders – or, at least they were in the Victorian age where women, and only women, were awoken from “spells of madness” with a quick zap of a vibrator. Initially, “hysteria” was a term doctors used to describe anything from emotional outbreaks to extraordinary sexual desires, and the bogus mental illness was cured by a flick of the ol’ bean. After years of labor-intensive arm-jerking, the docs finally came up with a more sustainable plan, the vibrator.
While we still haven’t been able to shake the elaborate discriminatory diagnosis of women, the battery-operated plastic toys have played a key role in putting the power of pleasure into the hands of the people.
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Many of the museum’s orgasmic treasures are more akin to a vintage hairdryer, projector, electric mixer or even a fishing rod than the smoother pocket-sized variety you’re used to seeing today. However, the mildly intimidating devices may just be a little less terrifying than the ad copy that accompanies them, with lines like “cure the pain” and “an aid to better health”.
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