How the Rabbit Revolution Went Too Far
· The Atlantic
This is the moment I knew that the whole vibrator thing had gone too far: It was about a year ago, and I’d ordered a replacement rabbit, the model I’d fallen for around 2007, amid the vibrator renaissance brought about by Sex and the City. An early episode of that zeitgeist show features the prudish Charlotte, having reluctantly bought a “Rabbit Pearl” on the advice of her friend Miranda, becoming so addicted to her new toy that she stops leaving her apartment, thus turning the rabbit into a cultural icon for female pleasure.
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More than a quarter century had passed since that innocent moment, and the rabbit—once a battery-operated device with a clunky rotating shaft and dainty bunny ears that shivered with astonishing proficiency—had turned sleek and space-age. The rabbits I ordered had USB chargers and a variety of speeds. They had safety locks and silencers, like guns.
I didn’t want all these added features—22 speeds was about 20 too many—but I could never remember the name of the most recent one I’d ordered, so I had to Google best rabbit vibrators, a quest that once upon a time had taken me to niche women’s websites but now took me to The New York Times’ Wirecutter.
It’s not that the newer rabbit models don’t work; it’s that they do too much. I mean, I wouldn’t buy a spatula that also dusted the floor. My latest model was so fancy and complicated that it took me a while to figure out how to switch it on, but the real problem was that, once it was on, I could not figure out how to turn the thing off.
The day I received it, I was about to record a podcast, a detail that sounds irrelevant until you realize what I was up against: I could not have a vibrator droning on in the background of an hour-long audio conversation. I spent minutes that felt like hours desperately pushing three buttons in alternating sequences only to be thwarted—the rabbit would not turn off. It thumped, it jittered, it whirred round and round. I determined that the only way to shut the damn thing up would be to run down its battery. Racing to beat the clock before the podcast began, I bolted to my front door to place the infernal device outside, where its insistent whirring wouldn’t be picked up by the mic. Just before I got there, I somehow hit the right sequence, and the vibrator finally shut down.
What a sad modern portrait: a single woman, living alone, with a rabbit vibrator jackhammering haplessly against her door.
Around that time, I happened to be listening to Dax Shepard’s Armchair Expert podcast when I heard a sex therapist say, “Turn down the speed on your vibrators.” Shepard—a modern man in the sex-positive mold—sounded confused; he seemed to be under the impression that vibrators were good for women.
Weren’t we all?
I’d been thinking about turning down the speed on my vibrator for a long time, but I’d considered my affliction personal, not society-wide. Now it was dawning on me that the problem wasn’t simply mine. Women are being sold egg-shaped suction devices in the pages of New York magazine, and BookTok influencers pair with sex-toy companies for promotional collabs. Yes, there is a bookmark that doubles as a vibrator. (“Building a world where women choose their pleasure + their power,” reads the Instagram bio for Her Little Bookmark.)
Does this consumer game of one-upmanship amid the mainstreaming of vibrators even matter? There are too many varieties of women’s razors, too, and I don’t care. But what worries me is how this points in the direction in which so much of modern life has been barreling: self-pleasure, self-love, self-care, self, self, self.
This is where my mind goes when I read or hear a certain type of brittle “Don’t need a man, I have a vibrator” argument, a flex that’s been prevalent on social media for at least a decade. I’d love to see a chart of the well-documented sex recession laid across a chart of vibrator sales. A vibrator may get you off better than a man (or a woman, for that matter), but will it clean the gutters? Hold you in the dark? Kill the rat skittering around the attic? I write these words, and then I think: But wait, what if one day it can?
I arrived late to vibrators, or perhaps I should say masturbation, in the relatively vibrator-shy ’90s. I was a few years out of college, sharing pitchers of beer with my buddy Aaron, and we were about halfway through the second pitcher when I shared a very personal detail: I’d never had an orgasm.
Not ever? Aaron was fascinated but not judgmental; in fact, another female friend had recently confessed something similar, and he’d researched the problem late one night (he was in law school, and miserable) and discovered that her predicament was both common and easy to solve.
“You need the Cadillac of vibrators,” he said, referring to the Hitachi Magic Wand, a personal massager that resembled a large white microphone. The Hitachi, he’d learned, launched women into such paroxysms of pleasure that it had acquired cult status. And he’d heard that you could buy it at Walmart.
Walmart? I was incredulous. Walmart had famously eighty-sixed popular albums by Marilyn Manson and (of all people) Sheryl Crow, but Aaron explained that this was part of the ruse. All of those “personal massagers” I’d seen in Sharper Image catalogs? Those were vibrators. Why else were they waterproof? I had to admit that he had a point.
[From the September 2026 issue: The great romance slump]
We drove to Walmart but it didn’t have the Cadillac of vibrators. Unwilling to end our adventure, Aaron picked up an alternate model he declared the “Ford Taurus of vibrators.” The picture on the front resembled a plug-in hand mixer. Whatever, I’d come this far.
That night, alone in my garage apartment, I unwrapped the box, drank some red wine to set the mood, and plugged the Ford Taurus of vibrators into an outlet, only to discover that the cord didn’t reach the bed. Was there an extension cord around? Never mind. I lay down nervously on a small braided rug, staring at the slowly rotating blades of the ceiling fan, and turned on the power, only to discover that hell no. It felt like industrial turbines were juddering against my most sensitive spot. Hard pass.
But a few nights later, I got an idea. Back in high school, my mother had given me a Brookstone mini-massager she’d bought at the mall, a stocking stuffer for a teen daughter with D cups and upper-back pain. I’d been lugging it from apartment to apartment like a kitchen utensil I never used. It was demure and beige, the size of a small flashlight, and it was waterproof. Huh, never noticed that. Drumming up my courage, I closed the curtains, lit votive candles, uncorked a bottle of wine, and settled under the covers with a device I would eventually know as the “pocket rocket.”
And that name fit. I felt like I was being shot into space.
The history of vibrators is a bit murky. In the Next Room (Or The Vibrator Play) is a 2009 Broadway production dramatizing the idea that Victorian doctors used early vibrators on women deemed “hysterical,” a term derived from the Greek word hystera, for “womb,” the supposed origin of women’s madness.
Did this happen? I like to think so. Evidence suggests that even the ancient Romans applied this approach to treating female mental illness. The second-century physician Galen wrote of treating a woman whose brain he believed to be dangerously bathed in her unreleased sexual fluids. He applied “manual stimulation,” and ta-da, “she was cured.” (The patient “took great pleasure from this,” Galen noted.)
Of course, the technology that transformed society, according to most accounts of women’s liberation and the sexual revolution, was birth control. The pill came out in the ’60s, but in many states only married women could get a prescription. It wasn’t until the ’70s that the pill went mainstream, allowing women to set a course for their own reproduction, a power they’d never had, at least in such potent and efficient form. But the sexual revolution and women’s liberation could also be at odds with each other. On one hand were Our Bodies, Ourselves, consciousness-raising sessions, hand mirrors held between the thighs. On the other hand were the normalization of casual sex without consequence, the “zipless fuck,” the rise of Penthouse and skirt hems—all seeming to serve men’s pleasure more than women’s. Or did they? Helen Gurley Brown and Erica Jong argued otherwise.
But then, in 1976, a sex educator named Shere Hite published The Hite Report, possibly the most revealing document ever produced about women’s sexual proclivities (more revealing, I’d say, than the more famous studies from Alfred Kinsey). To read The Hite Report now is to be gobsmacked by the sheer industriousness of women in the pre-vibrator era. Everyday items such as carrots and candles became ersatz phalluses; women sought climax under running bathwater or against the flat, vibrating side of an electric shaver. One woman even made creative use of an ashtray. The raw-liver scene in Philip Roth’s 1969 novel, Portnoy’s Complaint, may be the most famous over-the-top depiction of masturbation in American literature, but The Hite Report may be Portnoy’s feminine counterpart, with its robust chronicle of women’s sometimes Byzantine pursuit of pleasure.
For all The Hite Report’s descriptions of private erotic delight, though, the book’s strongest running theme is the deep and shameful fear expressed by women who were not getting themselves off, and didn’t know how. “I finally had an orgasm,” a woman tells people at a swanky party in 1979’s Manhattan, “and my doctor told me it was the wrong kind.”
By the ’70s and ’80s, bored grocery shoppers could flip through Helen Gurley Brown’s Cosmopolitan to find new blow-job techniques while in the checkout line. But in the 1989 film Parenthood, a family dinner is interrupted by a power outage, and the everyman played by Steve Martin searches for a flashlight only to find his divorced sister’s big dildo buzzing in his hand as the lights flicker back on. She’s mortified.
I got the message: As a woman, giving pleasure to your partner was good; seeking pleasure for yourself was embarrassing. As a teen, I had Parenthood and Fast Times on VHS, and I studied them to become a more sophisticated version of myself. Believe it or not, the idea of masturbation never occurred to me. Put my hands down there? That was my boyfriend’s business. Not long after he and I broke up, he started hanging out with a cool college girl who drew a map of the clitoris. When he told me this over the phone, I was furious and humiliated. And also: Could I borrow that drawing?
For women of my generation, messages about sexual pleasure were mixed at best. Dr. Ruth was on the airwaves, adorably chirping about the joys of sexual freedom and toys that could assist women in their quest. But when I was in college, Joycelyn Elders was forced to resign as Bill Clinton’s surgeon general. Her alleged crime? She talked about the benefits of masturbation.
Self-pleasure is the foundation of all human sexuality, the late Betty Dodson used to say. Dodson was a pioneer of sex-positive feminism who taught workshops for women with the same body hang-ups she’d once had. Dodson died in 2020, but her legacy is etched across the early 21st century, in shows such as Girls and stores including Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, which infamously sold a jade egg for insertion into the vagina.
By the 2010s, sex toys were everywhere. Posters for Grace and Frankie, a Netflix comedy starring 70-something Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, featured the silver-haired heroines holding purple vibrating-wand massagers like light sabers. A charming 2016 Netflix series called Love, about dating in Los Angeles, features a scene wherein the beautiful but troubled protagonist tumbles into bed with her suitor only to reach into her bedside drawer, pull out her vibrator, and go to town on herself as he waits, awkwardly, for her to finish.
I took the point—self-pleasure could go too far; moderation was the prudent path—but I was about 40 when I saw that Netflix show. I was chronically single and trying to date sober (another story entirely), and I was not ready to slow down the odyssey of delights kicked off by my Brookstone pocket rocket. My bedside drawer was filled with items bought on a whim (a tongue-shaped pink vibe, a pocket rocket shaped like lipstick to sneak past airport security). I collected vibrators from online depots that sent the products in discreet packaging.
The idea that vibrators, touted as a way to encourage women’s sexual exploration, might be keeping them from experiences they craved—intimacy, physical touch, actual relationships—was something of a taboo subject in those years. I doubt many sex therapists wanted to be on record telling women to masturbate less when many women didn’t masturbate at all. The arrival of the MeToo movement in 2017 pushed the battle of the sexes closer to a full-scale war; shocking reports about “good guys” such as Charlie Rose and Matt Lauer (Matt Lauer?!) left women I knew wondering whether it was simply safest and best to opt out of dating entirely.
But I was dismayed to find women on social media braying that they didn’t need a man if they had a vibrator. Because … was it possible that part of the reason I hadn’t found the long-term partner I wanted so badly was that I had too many vibrators? I’m not saying vibrators kept me from dating. I dated a ton. I’m saying that when the dating market proved challenging and the men not quite right, it was all too easy to return to my empty house at the end of a less than stellar evening, pluck out a buzzing rocket ship from my nightstand drawer, and find release.
[Read: Are we in an intimacy crisis?]
I think it was 2022, late in the pandemic era, when I started wondering whether that drawer, so clogged with toys that it was becoming hard to shut, had turned into a paltry substitute for the beauty I had assumed life would deliver, to love and be loved by another. I noticed that sex with a man I cared about left me feeling saturated and soul-satisfied, whereas getting off with a mechanical device left me sleepy and only lightly relieved, like I’d managed to scratch a stubborn itch.
I dated a man who stroked the pale skin of my inner elbow in the most electric way, and when he was gone, I tried replicating this in my bed, but it never worked. I needed the surprise of his touch. I have spent most of my adulthood alone, at least from a relationship standpoint, and it’s not a bad way to be, but therapists and dating experts will tell you it’s only in relationship to others that we truly know ourselves.
“You’re too picky.” I’ve heard it a million times, and I’m guilty as charged. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I’ve fought too hard for this odd, beautiful life to share it with a man who doesn’t fit. And yet I know from my closest friendships and creative partnerships that living side by side requires work. Conflict, civil disagreements, crossed wires that leave me feeling rattled and badly misunderstood—that’s how I learn. That’s how I grow.
I worry that technology-induced orgasms on demand made it too easy for me—and made it too easy for society at large—to stay cocooned in a little pod of self-gratification: Netflix, DoorDash, Amazon Prime, conversations that weren’t real conversations, mediated through the flat screens of text and social media. It feels good in the instant, and it can feel awfully empty as the years pass. If you keep scratching that stubborn itch, do you ever address the reason you’re itching in the first place?
When Gloria Steinem died last month, I thought about the line she made famous in the ’70s heyday of second-wave feminism: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Was it a joke? A slogan more than a commandment? In 2000, Steinem married the entrepreneur David Bale, and after he died, she was grief-stricken. I doubt that line, clever and quotable, was ever meant to be taken literally, but the glib notion that women don’t need romantic love remains one of the most pernicious strains of the female-empowerment age.
I am now 52. I’ve never been married, and I’ve never had kids, and although I’ve come to terms with that, I wonder how the combination of certain early-21st-century ideas about women’s independence and certain vibrator technologies shaped the trajectory of my romantic life.
I don’t plan to give up masturbation, or vibrators, though I’ve tossed several, including the jackhammering rabbit of doorstep-thumping fame. A technological assist can be helpful—and fun—but when it becomes a crutch, or even a solitary delivery system, maybe it’s time to rethink how we’ve valorized the vibrator, or at least the notion of vibrators everywhere all the time, every day of the week. I’ve started to see vibrators as proto–sex robots that have been Trojan horsed into the culture under the guise of female pleasure only to acquire Bluetooth capabilities and talismanic status among the women who swear by them. How long before these things start talking with us? Answering our emails? Doing our taxes?
We live in a convenience culture whose engine runs on the tantalizing promise that we can skip the hard parts—the cooking, the cleaning, the infinite search for a better half—but I have learned that the hard part is also, in many instances, the best part. Pushing past those frustrating challenges into discovery can be a source of such pleasure.
The great lie of modern culture is that we don’t need one another. Maybe not all women need men, but I’ve come to realize that this one does. Of course, men need women too. Men need men, and women need women, and so on. The salesmen of the 21st century will keep slinging their wares: DIY! AI companion! Chatbot boyfriend! Like so much of our day-to-day lives, getting off is becoming more efficient, easier, faster.
But has it gotten better?