Obscenity, Pleasure, and Orgasm: The Transformation of Gender/Sexuality Scripts of Vibrators in Taiwan (1980-2012)

• Main Authors: Zhu-Jie Ke, 柯筑傑
• Other Authors: 吳嘉苓
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2013
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/78994066330212140864

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 社會學研究所 === 101 === The purpose of this study is to capture the gender/sexuality order of vibrators negotiated between the government, adult novelty industry (retailers and designers) and adult novelty lay-experts from 1980s in Taiwan. I found three main changes in gender/sexuality scripts of vibrators for the past 30 years. First, women’s sexual subjectivities become more and more visible. In the “obscene object script”, prosecutors, polices, and judges regard vibrators as obscene objects, and they consider women as desexualized victims. But in the “adult novelty script”, adult novelty designers gradually change the presumed consumer of vibrators from men to women. Also, female adult novelty lay-experts construct the “hedonistic femininity” and claim that women can experience diverse sexual pleasures through self masturbation and can even further transform male’s bodies by vibrators. Second, the phallus-centered body has diminished. The traditional vibrator is designed to copy huge and erect penis, which monopolizes the female pleasures by penetration. The new design and promotion of vibrators begins to emphasize that clitoris, and g-spot and anus are also important erogenous zones for women to explore. Third, the space of sexual pleasure for women has expanded. While female adult novelty commercial promoters and lay-experts extend the space of having sex for women from bed, bedroom, bathroom, motel to everywhere, female users are encouraged to become confidential and sophisticated to enjoy their sexual pleasure. However, regardless of the emancipation meaning emphasized by designers, female adult novelty lay-experts are still constrained in heterosexual one-to-one intimacy. In the ideology of dichotomy between whore and good girl, they have to set their adult novelty expert identity apart from their own everyday life self-identity.