The comstock act made it a criminal offence to send obscene lewd, lascivious, immoral or indecent publications in the mail. Vibrators were seen as such a magical sort of thing that they were used in part to sell consumers on the idea of signing on for modern electrical appliances. So lieberman's argument here is, you can't really make the claim that these were widely understood to be sexual if there's no evidence that they were.
It's a sexual health episode! This week, Mike and Aubrey dive into the hotly debated medical history of vibrators and ask: who fact-checks the fact-checkers?
Note: A previous version of this episode included language that referred to “the female downstairs,” implying both that gender is linked to genitals (it isn’t) and that vibrators were used primarily by cis women (they weren’t). We love our trans listeners and we don’t want to do anything that makes them feel excluded, so we’ve removed the sections where that language appeared. We'll be discussing this and our approach to handling feedback in more detail soon. Thanks to everyone who wrote in to let us know! — Mike
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