Patented Pleasures: Sextech’s Fascinating History Revealed
Gazing back at some of the industry’s earliest and often strangest devices
I’ve always said, “sexology is where you find it.” Recently, someone who knows me quite well shared some rarities from his collection of ephemera and oddments: two binders chock full of sexuality related patents from the mid-1960s to the early 1990s.
And what a rich treasure trove of inventive obsessions these were! The illustrations were priceless. Of course I was agog!
From a vibrator attachment resembling a rustic cracker barrel with a protruding handle (circa 1983) to a “vibrating breast dilating apparatus” from 1962, many and varied were the “marital aids,” “amusement devices,” and “penis and testicles enhancement support devices.”
But these precursors to our modern sex tech revolution weren’t all fun and more fun.
For example, 1979’s patent for an anti-rape vaginal insert armed with a stabby thing was rather more serious in purpose than 1978’s U-shaped rocking sex chair for two (vibrator optional). Other serious purposes include various designs for male and female wearable prophylactics and heaps of penis supports, implants, and augmentations.
Dry words, wet reading
I was also amused (and even slightly titillated) by the dry language of inventors describing their devices, the ways in which they strained (overmuch) to convey a sense of respectable purpose for items as outre as a “folding chair aid for sexual relations” or an “over the bed support structure.”
Here’s how the inventor of patent number 4,825,855 describes his brainchild:
“…a rigid frame supported above a bed, an elongate panel of cloth, and means for suspending the cloth section from the frame… the lowest portion of the cloth panel whereby the opening exposes the genitalia of a user seated thereon…”
Let’s get real here. Who among us has NOT fantasized about the ultimate suspended sex sling? Well, this fellow actually designed one–and that’s kinda hot, even if his design is somewhat incomprehensible.
The buried history of erotic patents
My sexological education included an emphasis on erotology, the study of erotic art, literature, and artifacts. These binders of sexy patents opened up a whole new area of appreciation for me—not just for the debt owed to these often clunky devices by our current sophisticated sex toys—but also to the history of the impulses, interests, and inventiveness behind them.
I wanted to find out more. I wanted to have a clear patent path between George Taylor’s steam-powered vibrator of 1869 and Jessie O’Rourke’s portable vibrator of 1976, all the way through to Lelo and Kiiroo’s state-of-the-art playthings and others that may have US and international patents. I tried the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Public Search only to find it doesn’t recognize search terms like “vibrators,” “marital aids,” and the like.
In fact, the search term “vibrators” yields patents like 2024’s “Apparatus and Method for Deep Segmental Denoising Neural Network for Seismic Data.” Even though the earth can frequently move, if you know what I mean, I don’t think the above device is quite what I’m looking for.
The patent numbers weren’t much help either. Most of the time I couldn’t find any documentation of the patents of the devices in the binder.
What these patents can tell us
This inability to search the patent database using appropriate and accurate terms means a rich and important history of sexual technology is almost completely buried and closed to scholars of history and sexology as well as the general public.
Decades of social conventions pertaining to physical attractiveness and sexual norms are embedded in these patents too. Breast size, male sexual “performance,” the ability to prolong sexual intercourse (always described as heterosexual), and ways to control, position (e.g. a sex harnesses), or improve a (generally) female partner’s pleasure are presented as problems the inventors sought to mechanically solve.
Patent number 1,795,073’s 1929 illustration of a woman passively seated in a chair, with a complex bust development device attached to each nipple tells us all we might want to know about the fads of fashion on the eve of the Great Depression as well as the female inventor’s assumption that other women would accept being bored out of their gourds for the sake of an enhanced bustline.
Today’s sex tech is certainly far more empowering for people of all genders. And for that I am more than glad. But the patent office’s search term censorship, intentional or not, is decades out of date. We must do better than that.
Image sources: Courtesy of A. R. Marsh, provided by private collector
