(no subject)

Happy birthday, james_davis_nicoll and perennialanna!

Kudos to her, but not the only story

Ann Summers supremo Jacqueline Gold dies aged 62:

[Her father gave] her work experience at Ann Summers in 1979, when she was 19, having bought the four-store sex shop business a few years earlier. Unimpressed by the men-only atmosphere, she went on to take the brand into women’s homes, organising Tupperware-style selling parties, bringing vibrators into the sitting rooms of middle England and giving women a chance to earn their own money.

(My recollection is that the Ann Summers shops had already been trying to create a 'woman-friendly' sex-shop space during the mid-70s, but this hadn't entirely worked out....)

Jacqueline Gold’s proudly smutty Ann Summers changed the UK high street. Well, maybe, but:

[R]ecognising there was a big untapped market of women who wanted the goods but would not step inside the shops, Gold created the party plan as soon as she arrived: basically Tupperware parties, except with sex toys, underwear, my guess is quite a lot of prosecco or, back in the day, Babycham. By 2003 there were 4,000 parties a week in the UK. They were eventually capsized, partly by the internet, partly by the growing realisation among party planners that it was quite hard to make a living. But the brand had more to gain from the worldwide wonder web than it lost: the year after it went online, it sold 1m units of its own-brand vibrator, the Rampant Rabbit, in the UK alone.

That sex toy trajectory, where vibrators went from being a thing women were too embarrassed to be caught shopping for, to a thing they would give each other as a gift, is often put down to the Sex and the City effect, one episode in particular, The Turtle and the Hare, where Miranda lends Charlotte her Rabbit. But more influential in the UK was the grassroots effect, thousands of women a week, over two decades, talking about sex toys quite freely in a social setting. Or who knows, it could have been started with second-wave feminist consciousness-raising groups, but I do not get the sense they centred pleasure in quite the same way.

I remember, I remember, ads for vibrators in Spare Rib from a fairly early state of its existence, discreet though they were. And you could purchase them discreetly by mail-order.

And there was a point when they were also to be found in the small ads at the back of more mainstream magazines like Cosmopolitan.

Certainly they were mentioned in CR groups. There were also feminist workshops specifically on sexuality in which they featured.

So there were these other stories around. (Not, alas, I thought, told in Rachel Wood, Consumer Sexualities: Women and Sex Shopping (2019))

But it does seem like an entirely different story from the US one in Lynn Cornella's Vibrator Nation (2017)