The Dead Vibrator Joke Has Run Out of Batteries

I recently had the pleasure of stumbling upon the unreleased song “Vibrator,” recorded in 1983 by Prince’s former girlfriend and protégé Vanity, of the girl group Vanity 6. It’s a campy track about a woman and her sex toy that has died (doing what it loved), followed by her desperate hunt for batteries. At her first stop, the suspicious clerk offers to take her “body massager” downstairs and install the batteries for her. Vanity, though, is uninterested, retorting, “You and your rubber glove can go downstairs, and I’ll take my business elsewhere.” Fortunately, at the next establishment, Prince gives her the batteries free-of-charge and sends her home to have a song-concluding orgasm.

The track was scrapped shortly after it was recorded when Vanity left the group, but it was discreetly released on Prince’s Dirty Mind and Jewel Box bootleg albums in the early 1990s. Vanity went on to become a born-again Christain and severed her ties with the entertainment industry, but her climax was sampled by other artists Prince worked with, as well as on his aptly titled 1994 song “Orgasm.” (In the liner notes, Vanity is credited with “she knows.”)

“Vibrator” is just one example of a dated trope that haunts pop culture — a woman who is insatiably horny for batteries. Whether she’s taking the AAs out of the smoke detector like Nancy Botwin on Weeds, the TV remote like Susan on the British sitcom Coupling, or just telling her husband, “If you had what other men had, I wouldn’t need batteries anymore,” the way Peg Bundy did on Married… with Children, the thirst of this cliche is something not even the Energizer Bunny can keep up with. 

But as sex toys have evolved to be more environmentally and user-friendly over the past decade, USB ports have made ladies in lusty pursuit of batteries largely a thing of the past. Gigi Engle, sexologist and author of All The F*cking Mistakes: A Guide to Sex, Love and Life, points to 2010 as the tipping point for when a majority of companies pivoted primarly to rechargeable products — across the spectrum of consumer-electronics products (vibrators obviously included). From an environmental standpoint, when batteries decompose in landfills, the heavy metals pollute the water supply, contaminate the soil and release greenhouse gases into the air. By the late 1990s, consumers were starting to catch onto these dangers, and by 1996, the Universal Serial Bus (or USB) was first introduced. Within the next dozen years, it was the mainstream way to power rechargeable devices. So much so that disposable battery sales have declined by an estimated 21 percent since 2009. 

“USB chargers also show a general shift in attitudes about sex and masturbation, making sex toys more modern and showing that higher quality toys are in consumer demand,” Engle tells me. “Just like with our phones, laptops and other electronics, more and more, we’re shifting away from low quality into a higher quality market.”

Along those lines, Casey Tanner, sex therapist and expert for the toy brand LELO, suspects that by designing sex toys to be just as easily powered as in iPhone, it further popularized them. “As we made a cultural shift to using USBs for phones and laptops, toys began to follow suit, affirming the idea that erotic products can be just as sleek, convenient, mobile and normalized,” she says. 

Still, battery-powered vibrators aren’t entirely obsolete. Sandra Larson, nurse and co-founder of the website My Sex Toy Guide, notes that the PicoBong Zizo and Fun Factory’s Mr. Boss are “fine examples of battery-powered sex toys.” Battery-powered vibrators are also often available at drug stores at a lower price point for impulse buys. (That said, buying batteries repeatedly over time can eventually add up.)

All the while, it’s entirely possible that some women continue to get by with their battery-powered toys from the early aughts. “A vibrator can last up to 10 years; however, there’s no set time until it goes bad,” Larson says. 

To be fair, USB rechargeable sex toys die off eventually as well, but what’s more likely to happen is the charger cord fraying first. Perhaps one day that will lead to a more accurate but equally horny trope: A woman frantically ordering a charger from Amazon.

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Lauren Vinopal

Lauren Vinopal is a writer and stand-up comedian based out of New York City, who writes mostly about health, science and men. She is the host of the Mid Riff Comedy Show in Brooklyn, a frequent podcast guest all over, and lives the life of a teen who looks like they haven’t slept in years.