ABSTRACT
Certain commodities are sold in the legal marketplace for which the expected use is either illegal or socially unacceptable. Marketing of these goods, therefore, requires camouflaging of the design purpose in a verbal and visual rhetoric that conveys to the knowledgeable consumer the item’s selling points without actually endorsing its socially prohibited uses. I refer not to goods that are actually illegal in character, such as marijuana, but to their greymarket background technologies, such as cigarette rolling papers. Marketing efforts for goods of this type have similar characteristics over time, despite the dissimilarity of the advertised commodities. I shall discuss here an electromechanical technology that addresses formerly prohibited expressions of women’s sexuality-the vibrator in its earliest incarnation between 1870 and 1930. Comparisons will be drawn between marketing strategies for this electromechanical technology, introduced between 1880 and 1903, and that of emmenagogues, distilling, burglary tools, and computer software copying, as well as the paradigm example of drug paraphernalia.
