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- Title
Good Vibrations: Eros and Instrumental Knowledge .
- Authors
Hall, Dennis
- Abstract
The article features the history of San Francisco, California-based sex oriented business enterprise Good Vibrations and its business strategy. Good Vibrations describes itself as promoting sexual health and pleasure since 1977 by selling toys, books and audiotapes, and videos, and claims $5,000,000 in sales in 1996. Good Vibrations, whatever else may be said of it, is clearly a player in an expanding effort to socially sanitize an interest in and the use of a variety of sexual goods, especially apparatus, among middle-class U.S. consumers. The history of the trade in sex goods is, of course, long and lurid, and a deliberate sleaziness continues to dominate selling in the market, as anyone who visits the typical sex emporium or who drops the keyword vibrator into a search engine will attest. Good Vibrations, along with the Xandria Collection and a few otters, takes a subdued approach to the trade, but the company is the least coy of the lot in its treatment of various sexual practices, and it is downright aggressive in marketing both the apparatus and the knowledge that facilitate their use as well as marketing itself. Indeed, Good Vibrations is an exemplar of this move in the venereal marketplace and of the cultural turn it reflects.
- Subjects
GOOD Vibrations (Company); SEX industry; PORNOGRAPHY; BUSINESS enterprises; STRATEGIC planning
- Publication
Journal of Popular Culture, 2000, Vol 34, Issue 1, p1
- ISSN
1540-5931
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.0022-3840.2000.3401_1.x