Masters and Johnson, it turns out, are not the only sex — machine game in town. An entire subculture exists, with enthusiasts all over the country trading tips on Internet listservs. With the 2006 publishing of Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews, they even have their own coffee-table book. Coincidentally, a few days after the dispiriting Scott Johnson conversation, a newspaper editor I know forwarded me the press release for the Sex Machines event.
Now I’d be able to see, firsthand, whether and how the mechanical dick delivers.
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he Center for Sex and Culture does not court the curious passerby. No sign is posted on the outside of the building or inside the entryway. It is a nonprofit in a plain brown wrapper.[15] Eventually, you notice the street number, 298, on a window near the door. There is an intercom with a buzzer labeled CSC. When you ring it, a voice says simply, “Hello?” forcing you to announce that you are HERE FOR THE SEX-MACHINE EVENT. This being San Francisco—on a block where, not two minutes ago, a man in a cotton skirt descended from his flat to the sidewalk on a telescoping fire escape ladder and trotted away—no one finds the pronouncement to be worthy of especial notice.
On-time arrivals are asked to wait in the hall outside the door, because the machinists are not quite ready. Soon the line reaches all the way down the staircase. We are a mild-looking group. Based on appearances, we could be people in line at a Safeway or a Starbucks. A short man with a cane and a pencil-thin mustache has come with a conservative-looking woman in a navy and beige raincoat. One man I talk to is a physicist; one woman is a journalist. Mostly, I see couples and solo men who do not appear to be any particular type other than curious. A few gay couples are in line, but the event, like the machines themselves, seems to lean hetero.
CSC’s founder, the irrepressible and incandescent Carol Queen, a cultural sexologist, steps up to address the audience (“Ladies and gentlemen and everyone else!”), who have by now filed inside and settled into chairs. Queen introduces Timothy Archibald, the author-photographer of Sex Machines. Archibald is dressed in baggy orange painter pants and a red plaid shirt. He holds a bottle of Corona and occasionally reaches up to feel his shaved head. Archibald’s default expression is a relaxed smile. It is easy to see why the builders, with some cajoling, agreed to pose for him. Archibald is a respected fine art photographer, and his book (really and truly) is a fine art photography book. No one was photographed using the machines; the images are portraits of the inventors, all men, in their homes and garages, posing with their machines like 4-Hers with their stock. The friend who passed along the press release also gave me a review copy of the book, and it lay around in our living room enjoying pride of place with the other art books until my husband’s parents came out to visit.
The typical scenario, Archibald says, is a married guy “who likes building things.” He comes across someone else’s sex machine, is fascinated, decides to build one himself. “He presents it to his wife, who goes, <Wha?’ and then he sells it on eBay.” Only one of the machines here tonight is manufactured for general sale.
Someone has plugged in a homemade machine on the floor behind Archibald. The motor housing is the size of a lunchbox and is raised on one end, like a slide projector. A flesh-colored phallus on a stick slides quietly in and out. The erotic appeal seems limited. It would be like dating a corn dog. This is the basic setup for most of these machines and, I imagine, for Masters and Johnson’s device: electric motor attached to piston attached to phallus. Or as Archibald puts it: “something out of shop class, with a human appendage stuck to it.” The more sophisticated models include, as Masters and Johnson’s did, a control box allowing the user to vary the speed and the depth of the thrusting. A few of the phalluses can be set to vibrate, but most just go in and out, in and out.
Archibald winds up his talk and invites questions. A woman in wire-rimmed glasses and a green T-shirt raises her hand. “What we’re seeing is a lot of dildos going in and out of orifices. Given that the majority of women don’t orgasm this way, do any of these machines pay attention to the clitoris?”
Archibald concedes that the machines represent a stereotypically male notion of what women enjoy. Only one machine that he knows about—it is not here tonight—attends to the clitoris. Another woman raises her hand. So what, in that case, is the appeal? “Is it the eroticization of being fucked by a machine, or the regularity of the thrusting?” Archibald looks at his builders. No one seems to have a solid answer.
William Harvey had an answer. In 1988, long before the current Internet-fueled sex-machine boom, this man obtained a patent for a Therapeutic Apparatus for Relieving Sexual Frustrations in Women Without Sex Partners. Unlike the machinists here tonight, Harvey was very clear on the purpose of his machine. “Vibrators and sex aids. . . cannot satisfy the true needs of a partnerless woman who wants not only the ultimate climax or orgasm, but also the feeling that she is actually having sex with a partner.”
The partner Harvey invented took the form of a toastersized, unadorned metal box with a motor inside and a “continuously erect yet resiliently pliable artificial penis,” a. k.a. “penial assembly,” sticking out of the front of it. The box was mounted on a track, upon which it rolled to and fro, finishing each stroke with “a rapid cam-operated thrust.” On some level, Harvey must have sensed that certain aspects of an actual partner were missing—warmth, say, or personality, arms and legs, a head, a soul. Harvey could not provide these things, but he could provide “the look and feel of a male’s pubic hair.” At the base of the penial assembly was a wide, black, wiry cuff of “fur-like or hairlike material.” For the partnerless woman who wants not only the ultimate climax or orgasm, but also the feeling that she is actually having sex with a shoe buffer.
I wanted to ask Mr. Harvey how many units he has sold to partnerless women, and whether the women are sexually gratified by it. Whoever he is, he no longer lives in the town listed on the 1988 patent. A Web search turned up dozens ofWilliam Harveys. One had an email address. For the heck of it, I sent a note asking if he was the William Harvey who owns U. S. Patent 4,722,327, a Therapeutic Apparatus for Relieving Sexual Frustrations in Women Without Sex Partners. A reply arrived the following morning: “I am not the correct William Harvey, but your research does sound very interesting.”
Archibald takes one last question, and then the audience is invited to mingle with the machinists. Allen Stein, inventor of an elaborate, chair-mounted nightmare called the Thrillhammer, has an answer to the appeal question. Stein, an attractive, sturdy former marine waste engineer,* is the “chief visioneer” for a company that makes videos ^Company motto: “Number 1 in the Number 2 Business.” And Number 45 on the list of companies that come up on Google claiming the same motto. The list includes port-a-potty rentals, septic tank emptiers, Dr. Merry’s PottyPal Potty Seats, and, above all, pooper-scooper services. There are so many of these that they have their own professional group (the Association of Professional Animal Waste Specialists) with its own Statement of Philosophy. Members are obliged to “operate in such a manner as to reflect honor upon the animal waste industry” and “to place service to. . . the animal waste industry above personal gain,” and you’d need a pretty big scoop for that load.
featuring models in flagrante with sex machines. Stein says the site appeals to men who like heterosexual pornography but are uncomfortable looking at the naked men that the naked women are having sex with. It is, he says, “porn for homophobes.” Additionally, Stein says, some couples buy sex machines because the idea of a threesome appeals to them, but they are nervous about inviting a stranger into their lives. (A similar trepidation also prompts the occasional closeted gay man to experiment with a machine.) Stein puts his hand on the seat of the Thrillhammer. “Here’s a third party who’s safe, who’s not going to take over the relationship.” The Thrillhammer is eight feet tall and makes a sound like an off-balance washing machine.
“I don’t know about that, Allen.”
When asked whether he knew of any women who get off solely on repetitive mechanical thrusting, Stein says he doesn’t keep in touch with his customers, so he doesn’t really know. “Ask her,” says Stein. The woman with the wire-rim glasses is preparing to board the Thrillhammer. She has changed out of the green T-shirt and into a floor — length black satin nightgown. The eyeglasses are gone. This woman, it turns out, is a friend of the CSC and something of a luminary in the San Francisco sex scene. It’s possible she’s participating as a favor to CSC, to try to get the thus — far-nonexistent “play party” aspect of the event rolling. Or she may simply be curious. I did not ask. Allen shows her how to work the controls, and then retreats to the sidelines to check his BlackBerry.
Very few people have noticed that a woman is poised to mount a machine, or vice versa, I’m not really sure. The audience members are standing around chatting, holding plastic cups of wine and looking at the machines as though they were sculptures at a gallery opening.
Eventually, a small throng gathers beside the Thrill — hammer. The woman in the nightgown says that she is sixty-eight years old. I would have guessed fifty. She climbs onto the machine, which is mounted on a nineteenth- century gynecologist’s chair. Back then there were no stirrups, but instead long upholstered extensions where you rested your legs. She leans back and passes the control panel to a stranger, a quiet, suburban-looking woman with naturally blond hair and strappy, heeled sandals. “Surprise me,” this woman is told.
Allen hands the nightgown woman what looks like a microphone. “I include one of these free with every purchase,” he says to the onlookers. This might be more than I can take: a woman in her Social Security years, singing karaoke while being delved by a plunging, vibrating phallus. The woman places the microphone between her legs. It’s a vibrator—a Hitachi Magic Wand.
It is more interesting to watch the woman who is manning the Thrillhammer control toggles. She is making the sort of face I make when I watch those plastic surgery shows or pull off a Band-Aid. She seems worried that she might be inflicting damage. The woman in the nightgown reports that she finds the motion of the Thrillhammer’s flesh-tone appendage to be distracting. She has the blond woman slow it down and tries to focus on the magic of the Wand. Presently, the woman in the nightgown reaches a tidy peak. Watching her is no more erotic or awkward than watching a stranger sneeze.
To get back to the question at hand, we did not see a sex machine—at least, without help from Hitachi—escort a woman through even one complete cycle of sexual response. But there is at least one woman who has, as she put it, “had orgasms just off the machine.” She appears in a photograph in Archibald’s book, curled up nude on a floral couch with an unnamed machine parked on the carpeting at her feet. “I like it because I have total control,” she is quoted as saying. “If it were a guy he’d be doing it for himself, his own pleasure, but this is all about me.” Masters and Johnson observed this as well, noting in one of their books that “the biggest detriment for effective female response was male control of thrusting pattern.” In other words, a phallus is a welcomed addition to female pleasure, as long as the woman has some say about it—its speed, its angle, its depth, its outfit.[16]
In Alfred Kinsey’s sample of 8,000 women, 20 percent reported occasionally making some kind of “vaginal insertions” when they masturbated—though usually in addition to doing something directly clitoral. It was Kinsey’s opinion that many of these women penetrated themselves because their husbands liked to watch them, or because they didn’t know any better. It’s more likely that these women had discovered their G-Spot (or female prostate, or front-wall erotic zone, or whatever you wish to call it), and that they weren’t simply thrusting straight-on, like a penis in the missionary position. If vaginal stimulation didn’t contribute in any way to women’s pleasure, why would “rabbit”-style vibrators (with both a clitoral and an internal component) be the sales phenomenon that they are?
Some time later, I came across an explanation of the Masters and Johnson coition-machine mystery in a paper by feminist Leonore Tiefer, a professor of psychiatry at the
NYU School of Medicine and a vocal critic of the medical — ization of women’s sexual concerns. Tiefer points out that near the end of Human Sexual Response, Masters and Johnson reveal that in order to be accepted as subjects, women were required to have “a positive history of. . . coital orgasmic experience.” Far from being randomly selected representatives of average American womanhood, they were cherry-picked to be easily orgasmic.
Marie Bonaparte, the great-grandniece of the little guy in the wide hat, claimed to have found a simple answer to the question of why some women climax readily from intercourse alone and others don’t. She found it using nothing more elaborate than a measuring tape.
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