My Case Against Vibrators
Why the mechanization of orgasm is bad for our health and feminine awakening
your body is the first temple
and you would not let that temple go uncleaned
you would not let the temple go undecorated
your body is the only place
your becoming will occur
it is your closest mirror
your first and last companion
the vessel of all that you will ever be
- Brianna Wiest, from her book Ceremony
In this essay I will be de-centering the vibrator in women’s pleasure, in order to inspire us into deeper embodiment, sensitivity, and pleasure. Additionally, I am motivated to raise awareness of the dysfunction, tension, disassociation, and desensitization caused by using a machine to stimulate ourselves.
Do you also feel that you can’t orgasm without the ‘help’ of a vibrator? Have you been simply using vibrators because they make it easier, quicker, and simpler to orgasm? Do you use them because you have the impression that they are the mark of a modern woman’s sexual empowerment? If so you’re not alone.
The common impression of a woman with a selection of boudoir toys is that she is standing on the peak of Female Pleasure Mountain, and considering the history of women’s pleasure narratives, this is partially true.
However, I am going to share with you in this essay why the use of vibrators is actually limiting our pleasure potentials. I will also share the negative consequences of vibrator use for the female sexual anatomy and pelvic health, and there are many. So many that I actually tell most of my clients to ditch their vibrators for long periods of time, and sometimes for good.
This can be a really frustrating process, weening off the buzz, but it’s ultimately very rewarding and worth the efforts. I’ll get into all the juicy details a moment, but first a little herstory lesson.
There is a generational sadness that is caused by a lack of ceremony in the way we worship our sacred vessels as women.
Not that long ago women needed the pretense of illness to justify buying a vibrator. The illness that they were being diagnosed with, en masse: Hysteria.
From a Scientific American article titled The Vibrator:
Derived from the Greek word for “uterus,” hysteria occurred in women with pent-up sexual energy—or so healers and early physicians believed. Nuns, widows and spinsters were particularly susceptible, but by the Victorian era many married women had fallen prey as well. In the late 19th century a pair of prominent physicians estimated that three quarters of American women were at risk.
The prescription of clitoral orgasm as a treatment for hysteria dates to medical texts from the first century A.D.
The invention of electricity made the task easier. Joseph Mortimer Granville patented an electromechanical vibrator in the early 1880s to relieve muscle aches, and doctors soon realized it might be used on other parts of the body. That innovation shortened treatment time for hysteria, fattening doctors’ wallets.
In 1952 the American Psychiatric Association dropped hysteria from its list of recognized conditions. When the vibrator was again popularized years later, women no longer needed the pretense of illness to justify a purchase.
In reality, the epidemic wasn’t one of hysteria, it was one of ignorance about female anatomy and pleasure. Not to mention, women were grieving from the centuries of abuse, in a culture that forgot how to worship them as a sacred vessel.
The fear of women’s erotic potential worldwide has driven medical brutality and mutilation practices, mass murders and executions, sexual slavery and trafficking, female genital mutilation, and still today, state issued control of our reproductive rights.
It’s insulting that those ‘doctors’ thought they were able to relieve women of their generational, centuries old sexual trauma and frustration with the wave of one magic wand… and render women more ‘tolerable, obedient, and docile.’ They gave us sexual encounters with a little less pain and boredom, and that was considered good enough.
We have accepted this solution because we have forgotten our true erotic potential, forgotten the sacred feminine within us. We have accepted that pelvic pain, prolapse, incontinence, horrible periods, endometriosis, vaginismus, and diminishing libido are just part of being a woman.
Some of us have accepted the narrative on repeat - that our female bodies are dysfunctional, unable to experience pleasure without mechanization, unable to menstruate without pain, unable to conceive without ‘science’, unable to perform birth without intervention.
Well none of that it true, and a lot of it is exacerbated by vibrator use.
We have been indoctrinated by a culture that loves hard, fast, and convenient. Vibrators offer a quick sneeze of an orgasm without any of the deep physiological benefits that orgasm can provide. Female physiology is all about slow simmering, gentle steadiness, and full engorgement.
The female body has just as much erectile tissue as men’s bodies, only it’s all internal. Read that again. We have equal amounts of erectile tissue. Only ours takes much longer to become engorged, typically between 25-45 minutes depending on the phase of the cycle a woman is in, her connection with her body, how well she’s slept, her nutrition, and sense of safety etc.
Many women I work with have never even experienced their vulva and vagina in this fully engorged state before penetration, because their sexual pace has always been measured by men’s timelines and standards. And their mother’s and her mother’s… and many women do not even know where to start to discover more.
Our physiology is designed to ripen slowly and welcome penetration hungrily, but only when we’re ready. We override our innate design when we allow ourselves to be penetrated before our body is ready, before full engorgement. On some level, for most women this registers as trespass inside the body.
And so, the vibrator feels like a savior, because it makes possible female pleasure on male physiological timelines. Only, the vibrator-given O is like fast food, lacking in nutrients, compared to the love-labor of a slow-cooked roast that is the alternative: the gentle and slow tending of your own loving hands, breathing and pacing with your very own heartbeat, exploring your own pleasure edges towards full engorgement, without any agenda or rushed clenching towards climax.
The expectation that women’s bodies should go from 0-60, climaxing after five or ten minutes of clitoral buzzing is unrealistic, and it needs to be unplugged. We are the ones who will have to pull the cord.
We are the generation to replace taboos with the factual anatomical truths of female physiology, and foster the remembrance of our sacred vessel.
The female arousal cycle.
The female arousal cycle is a full, deep, wave-like physiological event. There are four phases of the arousal journey: tumescence, orgasmic plateau, climax, and refractory period. Of course, climax gets all the attention, and much of our sexual conditioning teaches us to focus there, but the earlier stages are actually the most important (and often contain hidden layers of pleasure potential).
During tumescence the arousal wave begins to build and this stage can last minutes to hours. The clitoral shaft and glans begin to swell, labia engorges, the deep clitoral structures and erectile tissues inside the vagina begin to self lubricate and engorge.
The orgasmic plateau is the stage where continuous arousal brings you to a higher plane, when your body is given space and time to fully ripen. This is where the most oxytocin and nitric oxide (the chemicals that give you all the health benefits) are made. Yes, you get an extra boost of both during climax, but you make SO much more if you remain in the orgasmic plateau stage as long as possible.
In the plateau stage breathing changes, heart rate rises, the uterus lifts in the pelvic bowl and the anterior vaginal wall lengthens (making room for penetration). Yes, you read that right, arousal actually causes your organs to move. Penetration before full arousal can be painful, if the cervix and uterus are bumped before they are ripe, and before they have had time to rise up and out of the way.
The plateau stage is the crescendo, the liminal space of a sexual experience, where we can lose our self-obsession and become fully embodied and present. It’s a portal to the sacred feminine, the unknown, the transformative. If we slow down, give ourselves permission to fully ripen, our bodies can unravel immense amounts of tension, stress, trauma, and forge deep bonds of safety and connection (with our selves or with partners.) This is what the tantrikas were talking about, and where they accessed the felt experience of worshiping the Goddess within.
In comparison: with fast vibrator orgasms which are often focused on the clitoris, the most highly enervated of all female arousal tissues, the sensitive nerve endings begin to get fried, decreasing their sensitivity, increasing numbness, creating tension throughout the nerve, fascia, muscles, and organs of the entire pelvis.
A machine can never replace this physiological interaction, and the power that lies therein, of touching our own genitals with our own hands. The feedback loop between your finger’s nerve endings transmitting signals up to your brain, and then from the brain back down to the nerve endings in your pussy cannot be mechanized.
We cannot forgo this physiological miracle, the hormone releases, chemical reactions, and neurological patterning that occurs with slow full engorgement sexual experiences (solo or partnered), the deep embodied pleasure, and expect it to be fulfilling.
Why the mechanization of orgasm is bad for female health:
I’ve touched on the concept of hypertonicity in my recent essays on the physiological needs of women in movement spaces, and on tremoring the pelvis back from trauma.
Hypertonicity is a muscle tone weakness that happens when the tissues cary too much tension that cannot release. When they are thus frozen and cannot fully expand or contract, this causes weakness in the chain of muscles. This is different from the opposite pelvic diaphragm weakness called Hypotonicity, which is a muscle tone weakness that happens when the tissues have been over stretched, atrophied, or under strengthened - often a result of childbirth.
Hypertonicity or weakness from too much tone/tension happens more than you think. When females are in neutral pelvic alignment, the weight of the pelvic organs and all the organs above them, is supposed to be supported by the bony structure of the pelvis - specifically the pubic bone - and not by the muscles of the pelvic diaphragm. These bones have evolved to support the majority of the weight of the body, while muscle simply cannot handle that kind of prolonged pressure.
However, when our posture fails us, this weight gets distributed entirely to the soft tissues of the pelvic diaphragm. This load on the tissues creates tension and holding patterns, which can become chronic.
Sitting is the most common harassment of our posture. When we sit, we are usually sitting back towards the tailbone, putting all the weight of the organs above in the wrong place, and training our pelvic posture to be more posterior than is anatomically supportive. Women’s pelvises were built to be mobile and flexible, and have a more anterior tilt. Male pelvises were built only for mobility (not for stretching open to allow childbirth to occur), and therefore can better handle the pressures of posterior posture and sitting.
Constant tucking under or posterior position of the pelvis shortens the pelvic diaphragm muscles, strains and overstretches the connective tissue and ligaments of the pelvis, and also requires them to stay firm to support the weight above. Add on the loads of terrible habits like sucking in the belly, bearing down while eliminating, exercising like small men, using vibrators to climax, clenching the inner thighs, glutes, improper kegeling, squeezing everything ‘down there’ – and you’ve got yourself a dysfunction called Hypertonicity.
Hypertonicity can also be caused by physical pelvic trauma like a car accident or falling on your tailbone while snowboarding, emotional trauma like sexual trespass, spanking or childhood abuse; over-exercise and improper engagement of the muscles of the pelvic diaphragm, like doing kiegels, mula bandha, or other ‘core-strengthening’ without understanding your individual pelvic tonicity.
When women have hypertonicity in their pelvises that goes unaddressed, it leads to some pretty terrible outcomes. My biggest frustration with the medical and fitness industries is the misunderstanding of these potentials, and the lack of interest in preventing them.
Here is a short list of female health issues that stem from hypertonicity, and are exacerbated by vibrator use.
Birth trauma - often women’s ‘failure to progress’ has its roots in hypertonicity, and lack of preparation of the tissues and psyche.
Cesarian - an outcome that sometimes saves lives, but at the current rates of over 30% in most developed nation’s hospitals, this is clearly a symptom of widespread disconnection and hypertonicity.
Hysterectomy - again, sometimes life saving, most often this surgery is the first option offered to women with painful menstrual cycles. There is no attention paid to the health of her uterus, her pelvic musculature, or her possible trauma healing, and how these deeply affect her physiology.
Menstrual Cycle Dysfunction - when there is hypertonicity present, then blood flow, lymph flow and energy flow in the pelvis is diminished. This is a huge problem, because then the uterus cannot release and flush properly, and must contract to empty out. This causes a chain reaction of all sorts of whole body issues, because every system revolves around the female reproductive system. It’s truly the 5th Vital Sign for female physiological health, and therefore a catalyst.
Prolapse - this is when pelvic organs fall out of the vagina or rectum (or are pushed out). This has everything to do with tension of the pelvic diaphragm. Vibrator use (amongst other unhealthy lifestyle issues) can literally cause the pelvis to expel organs, one millimeter at a time.
Incontinence - Specifically Urge Incontinence, which is when the bladder is constricted by pelvic pressure or a misaligned uterus, and the urge to urinate comes on fast, with little time to make it to the bathroom. The pelvic pressure is often exacerbated by hypertonicity, especially if vibrator use is confusing the neurology near the clitoris and urethral sphincter.
Vulvadynia - this is a pain in the vulva, which is exacerbated by hypertonicity that is caused by vibrator use.
Vaginismus - this is a shrinking of the vaginal opening, which makes penetration of any kind painful and even impossible. Often medical interventions and pelvic floor PT treats this with muscle stretching and dialating, but does not address the underlying issues of why this hypertonicity is present.
Irritable Bowel Syndrome - (IBS) this includes constipation and/or diarrhea. If there is pelvic tension present, of course the lower digestive track is effected, when the natural down and out energetic flow is disrupted by the holding in and up (which is the energetic of hypertonicity), and is the same energetic of sympathetic vibrator orgasms.
Painful Intercourse - the narrative that this is just how it is for some women is UNTRUE. There is often hypertonicity (and lack of full engorgement) at the root of painful penetration, and we are making matters worse by vibrating and rushing to orgasm to mask that pain. Frictionless, fully engorged penetrative sex should be the standard for all women, no exceptions. We must speak up and value ourselves enough to stop tolerating painful sex.
Diminished Libido - just a symptom of aging or a sign that most women are far from thriving? Considering all you have read so far, I think the truths are becoming clearer.
The energetics and neurology of gourmet orgasms
The nervous system imprint of a quick vibrator orgasm is stimulating, up-regulating, and triggers a sympathetic nervous system response. The sympathetic nervous system carries the messages of ‘fight, flight and freeze’ to the brain. This can cause (or reinforce) loops of anxiety, stress triggers, and re-traumatization.
On the contrary, slow deliberate tender stimulation resulting in full engorgement can encourage a totally different nervous system experience, a parasympathetic full-body orgasmic release. This is nourishing to every system of the body.
In the photo at the very beginning of this post, my client understood this difference. Together we have been working on training her body away from using a vibrator for a few months now, and finally her efforts have paid off. A whole new world has opened up to her, one that will nurture her fertility, her sense of empowerment, her sacred connection with her body, and the bond between her and her partner.
In my work, the journey unravelling pelvic hypertonicity requires intuition and trust, and it is different for each woman. It requires a similar patience and long term vision as the engorgement and full arousal process does. This practice of releasing urgency from the body, of slowing down and luxuriating in the unfolding, is often an imprint that catalyzes a deep healing on every level of being.
It’s important for us as women to reclaim our physiology, because as Brianna Weist says so eloquently in the poem at the start of this essay, the body is our first and last companion. And as I like to say, the pelvis is Living, and how we worship this living part of us can change everything.
Sarah does deep-dive immersions with women who are interested in reclaiming their sacred vessel, their living pelvis. Contact her to set up a Living Pelvis Discovery Session to design your unique journey.