Decoder Ring | Off-the-Wall Stories of Off-Label Use
Slow Burn
The Unintended Uses of Everyday Products
This chapter delves into the unexpected history and uses of Q-tips, originally designed for baby care, yet frequently misused for ear cleaning. It highlights the phenomenon of off-label product usage and the tension between marketing warnings and consumer behavior.
Products often tell you exactly how they’re intended to be used. But why leave it at that? As a culture, we have long had a knack for finding ingenious, off-label uses for things. In this episode, we take a close look at a few examples of products that are ostensibly meant for one thing, but are better known for something else entirely. We explore Q-tips, which we are explicitly told not to put into our ears; the Hitachi Magic Wand, the iconic sex toy marketed as a body massager; the musical washboard; and the children’s electrolyte solution Pedialyte that many adults swear by as a hangover cure.
You’ll hear from Hallie Lieberman, author of Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy; Jacqui Barnett of the Columbus Washboard Company; Christopher Wilson, curator and chair of the Division of Home and Community Life at the Smithsonian; musician and educator Súle Greg Wilson; zydeco musicians C.J. Chenier and Steve Nash; Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall, author of Hungover: The Morning After and One Man’s Quest for the Cure; as well as writers Roberto Ferdman, Dan Brooks, and Kaitlyn Tiffany.
Decoder Ring is produced by Willa Paskin, Max Freedman, Katie Shepherd, and Evan Chung, Decoder Ring’s supervising producer. We had additional production from Sofie Kodner. Merritt Jacob is Senior Technical Director. Special thanks to Kate Sloan, Dr. Carol Queen, Bryony Cole, Amber Singer, Molly Born, Laura Selikson, and Nell McShane Wulfhart.
If you have any cultural mysteries you want us to decode, please email us at DecoderRing@slate.com, or leave a message on our hotline at 347-460-7281.
Sources for This Episode
Bishop-Stall, Shaughnessy. Hungover: The Morning After and One Man’s Quest for the Cure, Penguin, 2018.
Brooks, Dan. “Letter of Recommendation: Pedialyte,” New York Times Magazine, Jan. 26, 2017.
Comella, Lynn. Vibrator Nation: How Feminist Sex-Toy Stores Changed the Business of Pleasure, Duke University Press, 2017.
Dodson, Betty. “Having Sex with Machines: The Return of the Electric Vibrator,” Dodson and Ross, June 9, 2010.
Feran, Tim. “Pedialyte Is Not Just For Kids,” Columbus Dispatch, July 19, 2015.
Ferdman, Roberto A. “The strange life of Q-tips, the most bizarre thing people buy,” Washington Post, Jan. 20, 2016.
Kushner, David. “Inside Orgasmatron,” Village Voice, March 26, 1999.
Lieberman, Hallie. Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy, Pegasus Books, 2017.
Lieberman, Hallie. “Selling Sex Toys: Marketing and the Meaning of Vibrators in Early Twentieth-Century America,” Enterprise & Society, June 2016.
Russel, Ruth. “Hangover Remedies? I’ll Drink to That!,” Idaho Statesman, Jan. 1, 1978.
Sloan, Kate. Making Magic, 2024.
Tiffany, Kaitlyn. “How Pedialyte got Pedialit,” Vox, Sep. 10, 2018.
Williams, Dell. “The Roots of the Garden,” Journal of Sex Research, August 1990.
Wulfhart, Nell McShane. “The Best Hangover Cure,” Slate, Aug. 29, 2013.
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