The Good Vibrations Antique Vibrator Museum

Good Vibrations' founder, Joani Blank, collected antique vibrators for over 20 years, which prompted their customers to begin sending the vibrators they found at flea markets and their relatives' estates.  The vibes are a collection date from the late 1800s up through the 1970s. Dozens of styles of electric vibrators, just like those in their exhibit, were available to the discriminating medical professional -- and very shortly thereafter, to home consumers as well. They display alongside their company collection online and in their San Francisco Polk Street Store.  The vibrator was marketed as a home appliance in women's magazines and mail order catalogs. Ads proffering "health, vigor and beauty" promoted the vibrator as a health aid. By the 1920s, doctors had abandoned hands-on physical treatments for hysteria in favor of psychotherapeutic techniques. But vibrators continued to have an active commercial life in which they were marketed (much like snake oil) as cure-alls for ills ranging from headaches and asthma to "fading beauty" and even tuberculosis! The ad copy for these vibrators was coy and ambiguous. "Be a glow getter," one package insert suggests. And who wouldn't be tempted to experience "that delicious, thrilling health-restoring sensation called vibration," when assured that "it makes you fairly tingle with the joy of living"? As vibrators began appearing in stag films of the 1920s, it became difficult to ignore their sexual function. Probably as a result, advertisements for vibrators gradually disappeared from respectable publications.