In 1973, Betty Dodson started masturbation groups for women to raise their sexual consciousness, and she introduced them to the wonders of the Hitachi Magic Wand, which she contended could wake the most somnambulant clitoris. Her book Sex for One was translated into eight languages. That same year, Eve's Garden, a sex shop for women, opened in New York City. Good Vibrations followed nearly five years later in San Francisco.

Vibrators came back into the mainstream in the 1990s, thanks not to radical feminists but to the Reagan administration. With the public health threat of AIDS looming, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop mailed out a list of safe-sex options to every household in the land in the late 1980s. Vibrators were on it.