Beyond plug and play: The acquisition and meaning of vibrators in heterosexual relationships

Abstract

This article presents an exploration into women's purchasing of vibrators and how they negotiate the meaning of these sex toys with their partners' preferences and attitudes. Drawing on semi‐structured interviews with 32 female consumers, the study identifies ways in which emotional, transformative and contextual aspects of meaning revolve around choosing, buying and using vibrators in heterosexual relationships. In analysing such experiences, the article points to the potential of vibrators to become imbued with notions of desire, maintenance, privacy and preference. Overall, this research draws attention to salient and nonsalient meanings attached to vibrators that constitute the sex toys' significance beyond simply functional elements. The paper enriches research on consumer behaviour and vibrator use in sexual relationships and proposes an understanding of object relations grounded in the intimate spheres of consumer studies.

What do we know about consumers' ontological security in disaster scenarios?

“…Following seminal studies with interpretive qualitative explorations (e.g., Koen et al, 2018; Li et al, 2018; Mayr, 2021), we adopted an interpretative phenomenological approach to obtain a deeper understanding of how our discussants were interpreting their experiences within the contexts and phenomena in question. The goal of the interpretative phenomenological approach is to obtain a first‐person description of specific experiences by asking descriptive, open‐ended questions concerning the topic (Thompson et al, 1989, p. 138).…”

Toy stories: The role of vibrators in domestic intimacies

“…How a woman goes about the appropriation of a vibrator is potentially an important aspect of intimacy in terms of using it alone, sharing it with a partner or “feeling a man’s body”. There is already literature about the ways sex toys are integrated into sexual relationships, developing and mobilizing sexual intimacy (Mayr, 2020a; Waskul and Anklan, 2019; Wood, 2019). The examples of this study, however, highlight a particular type of interim disposal of vibrators—one that shifts from being single to being in a relationship.…”