Hallie Lieberman: Buzz: The Stimulating History of the Sex Toy (2017)
I was predisposed in favour of this book because Lieberman co-authored an article which showed on what very specious evidence Maines had based her dubious contentions in her notorious and unfortunately influential work.
The book does indicate that the whole Victorian doctors and 'hysterical paroxysms' and vibrators is a MYTH, but in a fairly muted fashion in the main text although goes into a fair amount of detail in endnotes, for those of us that get that far...
However, does rather imply that women themselves were repurposing widely sold massage implements for personal pleasure, which I think is rather a reach, especially when you get to her chapters on sexual liberation and second-wave feminism and the discourse around masturbation and female sexual pleasure and how much hesitation and stigma there still was even by then.
(I also, ahem, have my doubts based on Kinsey and other sexologists who - apart from one whom I consider a very dubious source - did not consider mechanical devices a significant statistic in female modes of self-pleasuring, well into C20th.)
But to look at the book as a whole, I felt it was simultaneously trying to do too much while not doing quite enough. So that it was covering a lot of really, really diverse ground, that perhaps one wanted explored in more depth.
Okay, kudos for an amazing amount of research into the people who in the days when this was not spoken of made sex toys - or, sexual devices, as one of them was in fact devising prosthetics for people with various disabilities that created problems around sex - and the various channels by which they came to be distributed.
(Possibly more could have been made of those entirely reputable household-health massagers sold in electrical departments of department stores and drugstores and so on?)
There were some very colourful tales (and I do feel there was probably more of a narrative involving organised crime in some of them, just saying).
There's also perhaps a feeling of more stories to be told not just about the conflicts within feminist circles between radical feminism and the sex-positive strand, but what comes over as some rather unsisterly feelings among the latter over ideas being taken over, etc, and upheavals within the various businesses that got set up.
(It's doing very different work to Comella's Vibrator Nation which must have come out much about the same time.)
There's also a lot about how there was a distinct trending towards branding sex-toys as 'marital aids' and subsuming them into supporting heterosexual monogamy, and selling them alongside 'pleasing the husband' stuff.
So, yes, it is telling a complex story and not trying to over-simplify it, but I think it is not quite as great as it could have been. This might because I am a big old academic nerd and this is really being pitched to The General Reader.
(ETA Should probably mention that it's very much the USA story with all the various legal/societal attitudes angles that involved, that would pertain, or pertained with different emphasis, in e.g. European settings.)
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