I n a Goop-ified world where one can purchase sleek, luxury vibrators for up to three figures, how has one sex toy that’s existed for 55 years garnered such devotion? It’s a question the sex writer Kate Sloan explores in Making Magic , a new podcast about the clunky, white-and-blue, straight-from-a-70s-porn-set Magic Wand Original Massager. Sloan first became interested in the Magic Wand when she was a 19-year-old spending her gap year writing a sex toy review blog called Girly Juice. Later, while working at a sex store, Sloan noticed how customers would come back to buy the Magic Wand over and over again, eager to replace their old ones with the same model.
“I haven’t really seen that happen with any other toy on the same scale as I saw it happen with the wand,” she said. “The wand takes on this larger-than-life symbolism, where it seems to mean more than just being a vibrator to people.” View image in fullscreen Early Magic Wand packaging.
The vibrator’s greatest evangelist was Betty Dodson. Photograph: Vibratex Sloan spent a year reporting for the podcast, which features interviews with more than 30 sex and relationship experts and is produced by Vibratex, the company behind the wand. But she wasn’t able to speak with the woman who plays the most important role in the Magic Wand’s story: the late Betty Dodson , a pioneer of sex-positive feminism and the vibrator’s greatest evangelist, who everyone credits as the reason the toy achieved such a mythical.
