In honor of national Masturbation Month (only nine days left! But we’re not rushing you — you can celebrate all year), we’d like to offer this article from The Atlantic. Titled Can a Better Vibrator Inspire an Age of Great American Sex? and written by Andy Isaacson, it’s about about Ethan Imboden, the founder of Jimmyjane. Jimmyjane has been a pioneer in designing high-end vibrators with excellent materials, an aim for longevity and normalizing the sex toy-buying experience, and an eye for design that owes more to Apple than Hustler.
The article covers Imboden’s engineering and design background, the history of vibrators (and their ads in magazines) back to the Victorian era, the treatment of ‘hysteria’ back to antiquity, as well as the trend toward placing sexual health devices among other home and lifestyle wares in upscale boutiques. I can’t really do the article justice in trying to summarize it, but I found it fascinating. Here’s one excerpt I got a particular kick out of:
‘Ethan has an intellectual curiosity and an emotional maturity that doesn’t stop him from exploring something that a man ‘shouldn’t,’ said Lisa Berman, Jimmyjane’s C.E.O., who came from The Limited and Guess and is among the company’s all-female executive team. ‘He is a real purist in the way he thinks, not just about engineering and design but the emotional connection that these products might assist in a relationship. He can do that better than anyone that I’ve met.’
Imboden enlisted his mother and sister to help him start the company. These made for some strange moments, as in the time when his mom complimented him on a well-written description of how a vibrator could be inserted safely for anal use, calling out from across the room, ‘Ethan, you handled the anus beautifully.’ His friend Brian and other close friends invested initial seed money. Professional investors were intrigued but hesitant; here was a first-time entrepreneur, making a consumer product that was not, strictly speaking, technology (being the Bay Area this mattered)–and it was about sex. ‘They were scared of it,’ Imboden said. (Banks still refuse their business, citing vague ‘morality clauses’.) Tim Draper, a prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist known for backing ventures like Skype and Hotmail, thought differently. ‘He had a unique way of looking at the world, and a great sense for product design,’ Draper wrote to me in an e-mail. ‘He understood branding.’