"Day and Night the MixMaster is a Delight": Erotic Appliances

Last week I gave a talk at the University of Roehampton on appliances, race, and domestic labour in the twentieth-century American home that culminated with a discussion of the erotic subversion of domestic labour in Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion's song and music video, #WAP (you can read the transcript here). An audience member, Mollie Clarke, who is writing her PhD on turn-of-the-century representations of sexuality, asked about whether the vibrator might be seen as a subversive domestic appliance, insofar as it does away with the need for men. Well! I have a lot to say about this subject. Because, in short, YES. The vibrator was originally marketed as a domestic appliance, using the same rhetoric used to sell electric irons and egg beaters. You can read more about this history in Rachel Maines' fabulous history, The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (1999). But also, there's more! In this post I'm going to explore how twentieth-century US writers engaged with (a) the connections between the vibrator and other time- and labour-saving domestic appliances, and (b) the tendency of post-war advertisers to imply that appliances were so gratifying as to be veritable sources of sexual pleasure. I'll focus on a selection of depictions by Gertrude Stein, William Burroughs, Bob Rosenthal, James Tiptree, Jr. (the pseudonym for Alice B. Sheldon), and Joanna Russ... but these are just a few examples.

Kinky Mixers: Gertrude Stein

On 22 December 1939, while she was living in Ain, France, Gertrude Stein wrote a letter to her friend, the professor of English literature Samuel M. Steward, in which she described her and her partner Alice B Toklas's yearning for a Sunbeam Mixmaster -- a standing mixer introduced to consumers in 1928 that promised to facilitate mixing, egg beating, and even meat grinding. Stein beseeched Steward to not purchase a Mixmaster for her and Toklas however, for “$25 is not cheap it is a helluva lot of francs […] and besides in this particular moment, everybody has time enough to mix by hand all the mixing that needs mixing.” [1]

By "this particular moment," of course, Stein meant the recently commenced Second World War, which made such things as speedy batter mixing suddenly appear very trivial. This letter sparked the beginning of a six-year correspondence revolving around the Sunbeam Mixmaster, which Steward bought Stein and Toklas despite Stein's admonishments. In these letters, we can feel Stein's excitement at what were still relatively new technologies combined with a perhaps disproportionate desire stemming from their wartime scarcity. We can also feel a palpable sense of the machine's erotic dimensions.

Thus, in March 1940, Stein exalted to Steward:

The Mix master [sic] came Easter Sunday, and we have not had time to more than read the literature put it together and gloat, oh so beautiful is the Mix master, so beautiful and the literature [enclosed pamphlet] so beautiful, and the shoe button potatoes that same day so beautiful, and everything so beautiful and now how much do I owe you Sammy dear because we are very happy to have it here, bless you Sammy, Madame Roux said oui il est si gentil, et en effet he is dear little Sammy […] Alice all smiles and murmurs in her dreams, Mix Master [sic] ….[1]

In this rhapsody to Mixmaster, Stein highlights at once the luxurious dimension of appliances in this period, their exoticism for European consumers (for whom appliances would become commonplace only in the 1960s), and such objects’ particular poeticity for a writer enthralled by the meanings of everyday objects. [2] Indeed, Stein’s depiction of the “oh so beautiful” Mixmaster recalls the language and style of her earlier exploration of domestic objects and spaces, Tender Buttons (1914). Meanwhile the allusion to “the literature so beautiful” underscores both the novelty of appliance pamphlets for a generation new to these technologies, and the sheer artistry expressed in these print materials until the 1980s, by which point consumers’ familiarity with them on the one hand and the explosion of specialist cookbooks on the other rendered redundant their curious mix of housekeeping pedagogy, propaganda regarding the merits of electrification, and recipe suggestions.

The mixer Stein received was the Model 5, which was indeed a thing of beauty, the brand having commissioned a complete re-design in order to turn its product into a status symbol that housewives would be proud to display in their kitchens rather than hide away. [3] Here it is:

This image is from the website of the 2019 exhibition, Modern By Design: Chicago Streamlines America.

The pamphlet that Stein received would have been How to Get the Most Out of Your Sunbeam Mixmaster (1939), whose cover illustration featured a crowd of women of different ages, each proffering a plate of baked goods, against the backdrop of a larger-than-life Model 5 Mixmaster:

Contrary to later editions, the 1939 pamphlet made no mention of the war that had just begun, and in reading its pages outlining recipes, suggestions for use, and recommended additional attachments, one might have easily assumed that life continued as usual. [4] Stein’s strange ode to the appliance belies a delight in, and craving for, such messaging.

Meanwhile, the description of Alice B. Toklas—who was a cookbook writer and chef—murmuring the Mixmaster’s name in her sleep imbues the appliance with an erotic charge. This eroticism might have been coincidental, or it may be that Stein knew about the Mixmaster’s origins.

For the "universal" (AC/DC) motor eventually used by Sunbeam was originally invented by L.H. Hamilton and Chester A. Beach for the vibrator, which had been invented in 1880 as a tool for medical doctors to use on women to “cure” them of their hysteria—and to render this masturbatory labour less onerous. [5] The inventors’ employers, Fred Osios and George Schmidt, patented the motor in 1902. And due to the disrepute into which vibrators had begun to fall since becoming associated with underground pornography in men’s clubs and brothels, Osios and Schmidt re-purposed the motor to develop the standing mixer, blender, coffeemaker, and deep fryer, which, from 1910, they sold under the brand name Hamilton Beach. [6] The frequency with which vibrators in the 1900s and even 1910s had been advertised as domestic appliances helps to explain why re-purposing the motors for use in cooking utensils was a logical move. It also encourages a reading of Stein’s descriptions of the Mixmaster that acknowledges their erotic dimension—even if she knew nothing about the appliance’s history (Juffer, 85). Such a reading would chime with analyses of Stein’s writing by Jody Cardinal, who interprets Stein’s 1927 poem, “Patriarchal Poetry,” as an “elaborate display of the success of her sex life with Toklas” that “makes an implicit case for the stability—and indeed legitimacy—of their union” tied in part to associations of companionate marriage at the time with both national stability and whiteness. [7]

These themes are apparent in Stein’s next letter to Steward, dated 4 April 1940, which opened with the proclamation:

Day and night Mix master [sic] is a delight […] first we had to work it together but now Alice works it all alone and it saves her hours and effort, she can write a whole advertisement for Mix master [sic] she is so pleased […] I can’t tell you how happy Mix master [sic] makes the home, we do not know whether [the pet dogs] Basket and Pépé know the difference but the rest of us do […] thanks again and again and again for Mix master, three long cheers, neither war nor anything could stop it, bless Sammy (DS, 148).

The reference to day and night, and to the “working” of the implement together and then alone, is redolent with connotations of both conjugal sex and masturbation, while the ensuing image of a household rendered content by the whirring appliance while the pets remain blissfully oblivious suggests at once post-coital bliss and the marital harmony that appliance advertisers promised their products could bring thanks to their labour-saving benefits, which would render wives less tired and prone to crankiness. The last line in celebration of the device in turn lends itself to multiple readings. On one level, it suggests the endurance of the machine’s own motor, capable of both outpacing and drowning out the war itself. But on another, it intimates the affinities between the persistent, repetitive percussion of the revolving Mixmaster and the slow build of female orgasm, whose pleasure “neither war nor anything could stop.” In this way, Stein’s veiled accounts of the Mixmaster at once seize upon and fundamentally subvert appliance manufacturers’ wartime messages, their sanitisation of marital relations, not to mention their implicit heteronormativity. Finally, the humorous tone of this and the earlier reference to Toklas murmuring the name Mixmaster in her sleep suggests this is a parody of the erotics of appliances, and of heterosexual relations as depicted in appliance advertising (no less given Stein’s explicit mention of Toklas’ suitability for writing such ad copy). In other words, it would be precisely like an appliance manufacturer to describe their product as blocking out, or lasting longer than, the war. Later references to how "Alice just can’t tear herself away from the Mix master [sic] to tell you how she loves it but she will,” extend this playful parody of heterosexual marital relations, in which the blissed-out wife is too absorbed with her gadget to remember her manners (DS, 149).

War encroaches instead in Stein’s later letters about the Mixmaster, where the appliance increasingly develops a personality of its own: in May 1940, the opening “Oh dear, well it is just oh dear the only comfort is the Mix master [sic] , who is so at home that it seems just like home to us and the Mix master [sic] ” ascribes to the appliance the capacity to placate wartime anxieties and create a sense of home in even the least homely circumstances (DS, 150). On 8 July 1940, just weeks after the end of the Battle of France, which saw Phille Pétain’s government move to Vichy, and four days after the British Government’s attack on the French fleet off Mers-el-Kébir in Northern Algeria, Stein wrote that “Here we are the Mix master [sic] and us have all weathered the storm xcept [sic] that just the last day, Alice dropped the big Mix master [sic] green bowl and it fell into little pieces on the kitchen floor, such lovely green pieces, and some day will you send another bowl” (DS, 151). Here the shattering of the Pyrex bowl is at once connotative of France’s defeat, and of a concerted effort to make no mention of the war—no less since correspondence would have been read by the authorities. In the letters following, it is difficult not to read Stein’s repeated references to the Mixmaster as an extended metaphor for normality—indeed, for precisely the imagery conjured by U.S. manufacturers to ensure their products would still have a market upon the war’s end. Thus in a letter from November 1940, Stein noted:

Alas there is not much to mix these days in the Mix master [sic] but when there will be it would appear that there is a metal mix master bowl and that we must have, Alice says she would not like it at all she does not want anything else, we are hoping that mixing will mix soon, you see you can use other bowls but they do not twirl around in that lovely green mix master way and when they do not twirl their contents instead of staying down rise up and spill and therefor [sic] the mix master will have to be the mix master still (DS, 151).

The future in which “there will be” “much to mix” again once (or if) rations end is juxtaposed with the prospect of “mixing” that will again “mix soon,” while Alice’s assertion that nothing but the bowl she broke will do gestures towards that which war has irreparably damaged. In these passages, the erotics of the Mixmaster is replaced by longing. The fact that the Mixmaster cannot twirl properly without its bowl in turn reads as a broader allegory of dislocation and (sexual and existential) impotence. That the Mixmaster might indeed be for Stein a “peacetime maker,” as Sunbeam proclaimed in its 1945 ads, is in turn suggested by her renewed request to “dear Sammy,” in October 1945, regarding whether “the Mixmaster [is] still recreated that is can one get spare parts” (DS, 155). In these by turns humorous, cheeky, and mournful letters, Stein and Toklas’s Mixmaster serves as the site for barely-stated longings and anxieties.

Stein's Mixmaster writings make us keenly aware of the erotic dimension of appliances. But she is only one of many writers to think about this eroticism. Parodying the orgasm-inducing qualities of a high-performing appliances became a common trope in the 1960s and 1970s, partly due to the overt references to sexual pleasure in appliance ads in this period, where, as the the titular protagonist of Sheila Ballantyne’s novel, Norma Jean the Termite Queen (1975), puts it, “some vague woman go[es] after dust balls with her Electrolux […] [and] ha[s] orgasms in the laundry room while inhaling the whiteness of her wash.” [8]

Horny, handsy appliances: William Burroughs and Bob Rosenthal An early example of the explicitly erotic appliance is William Burroughs' portrayal, in Naked Lunch (1959), of the anxieties of the “AMERICAN HOUSEWIFE (opening a box of LUX)” who frets:

Why don’t it have an electric eye the box flip open when it see me and hand itself to the Automat Handy Man he should put it inna water already… The Handy Man is outa control since Thursday, he been getting physical with me and I didn’t put in his combination at all… and the Garbage Disposal Unit is snapping at me, and the nasty old Mixmaster keep trying to get up under my dress… I got the most awful cold, and my intestines is all constipated… I’m gonna put in the Handy Man’s combination he should administer me a high colonic awready. [9]

Burroughs portrays the Mixmaster as an object with more agency than the housewife--and as more "handsy" than the handy man who makes unwanted advances. It is one more horny appendage to brush off/away. I don't know whether Burroughs was aware of the mixer motor's origins as a vibrator motor. But to someone who does know this history, the passage appears to portray the motor first developed as an efficient orgasm-inducer, and later "domesticated" and and desexualised by repurposing it as a cooking implement, as suddenly going rogue, and embodying stereotypical male patriarchal impulses. Again, this may well be a stretch since Burroughs was no feminist. But then, he wouldn't be the first male writer to be both a misogynist and very good at describing misogyny/the culture of misogyny! So perhaps this isn't too much of a leap. The repressed sexuality of the machine resurfaces, and cannot be stopped--so much so that it actually molests its user, and affirms her status at the bottom of a hierarchy, below the machines intended to serve her. The passage’s humour further derives from the housewife having been incapacitated by her push-button technology, so that she cannot countenance opening a detergent box manually and longs for a mechanical one to take its place—as if imagination, or indeed common sense, has been “programmed out” of her for the sake of efficiency.

Burroughs' text was implicitly responding to ads such as this one, for the In-Sink-Erator garbage disposal unit, which promised male consumers that installing an In-Sink-Erator would lead to their wives "want[ing] to thank [them] "three times a day": [10]

The slogan referred at once to the appliance's function after breakfast, meal, and dinner; the likelihood that the good mood of the housewife would make her more receptive to having sex multiple times a day; and that the time saved by the appliance might be "put toward" more regular sex. Indeed, it almost implied that flipping the garbage disposal switch might ignite a Pavlovian response, creating a new routine of meal preparation, consumption, disposal via the unit, and like-clockwork sex. Burroughs' text derides this mechanical and mechanised predictability. It also -- and this is interesting, for a writer known for his dislike of women -- appears to critique the lack of agency of the housewife who in accepting the gift of the garbage disposal unit relinquishes the right to say "no." Now, I have been unable to verify the exact year of this ad's publication -- sources suggest anywhere between 1958 and 1965 -- so it may well be that it was launched after Burroughs' novel. If so, this wouldn't be the first time that in revealing the subtext of a particular advertising trope, a novel anticipates the trope's next, more explicit, stage. In other words, if Burroughs isn't responding to this ad, he is responding to the subtext of an earlier generation of ads, which ads like this one in turn made explicit.

Beat associate Bob Rosenthal parodied the sexual dimension of this new generation of appliance ads in Cleaning Up New York (1976). This was a short prose poem-qua-memoir about his stint as a house cleaner. Take a look at this account of Rosenthal's effort to vacuum a stairwell:

Hoover and I are starting at the top. There is never traffic in the halls but this section is the most private […] We start down the steps and because of a bad design in [my] boxers, my cock falls through the slit and rubs up and down the soft denim. After a few steps go by, I begin to lose my concentration […] I unzip my fly to see what’s happening and a great erection grows out of it. Hoover is buzzing, humming next to me. I pull the rug attachment off and contemplate the bit on the hose. Now in my adventures, I can go all the way! I fuck the sucking vacuum. The suction is just strong enough to give realistic tension to the skin of my cock. It is nice. But it doesn’t go anywhere, there is only one speed. I try altering the air valve on the side but it is boring. Fantasy might do, but I start to become too aware of Hoover and my best fantasy of an obliging vacuum cleaner doesn’t do anything for either of us. So I pack it in. ‘We really came close!’ I reflect while putting the rug attachment back on the Hoover. [11]

The exclamation, “Now in my adventures, I can go all the way!” followed by the graphic statement “I fuck the sucking vacuum” deftly pokes fun at the ecstatic statements made by and about housewives in ads like these:

In-Sink-Erator's 1969 campaign, “The Loved One,” portrayed the appliance as a purveyor of sexual pleasure [12] Thermador's ad for “stacked” ovens compared these to the “stacked” (full-breasted) model standing in front of them (amusingly, the actor in this ad, Richard Deacon of The Dick Van Dyke Show fame, was actually gay). [13] Perhaps unsurprisingly, however, no U.S. advertisement for an appliance was quite as explicit as French brand Samy, which advertised its vacuum cleaner with a photograph of a scantily clad housewife in the throes of ecstasy, the placement of the words “ce que toute femme désire” appearing to have been ejaculated from the appliance’s tip. [14]

Rosenthal’s subsequent matter-of-fact statements, which de-mystify the fantasy of utilising the appliance as a sex toy and reveal it to be “nice” but “boring,” explicitly counter the hyperbole of such ads and undermine the power of their erotic subtext by demonstrating its vacuity. To acknowledge the sexual dimension implicit in appliance ads will not result in a pornographic scene of appliance copulation but simply disclose the far more mundane reality that there is actually nothing sexually pleasurable about them. What is most compelling about Rosenthal’s experience, in other words, is not that he has tried to fuck a vacuum cleaner, but that he has failed to. The appliance has rendered him impotent, and thus effectively been unable to deliver on the promises its advertisers have more or less subtly suggested for the last two and a half or more decades. This failure is highlighted, in the last sentence, in the shift from personifying the appliance (“Hoover”) to referring to it as an object (“the Hoover”), which conveys both the fantastical nature of the advertising landscape’s anthropomorphising of domestic gadgets and the fantastical nature of sexual fantasies as a whole. The anticlimactic ending communicates a disillusion with the myth of the commodity akin to the thin trace of bewildered disgust that follows fantasy-induced arousal. Meanwhile the one-sidedness of the sexual encounter, wherein the only concern is Rosenthal’s pleasure, (unwittingly) literalises one of the most common criticisms of self-absorbed heterosexual men—that they treat women as things to fuck, rather than people with whom to fuck.

Sexual violence: James Tiptree Jr's vacuum cleaner analogy

We now move on to a more brutally violent appliance image. Set in an alternative version of the 1960s, James Tiptree Jr's science fiction story “Mama Come Home” (1968) is narrated by a male CIA agent working in an advertising agency that is a cover for a top-secret government department that aims to discover extra-terrestrial life. The agents eventually make contact with the Capellans, a species of giant females whose goal is to enslave Earth’s men. [15] The violent meanings and uses of technology are central to this parody of patriarchal imperialism, and, most notably, in the story’s parenthetical description of the “blaze of pain” the narrator experiences when a Capellan rapes him: “(Ever think about being attacked by a musth vacuum cleaner:)” [sic] (MCH, 69-70). To postwar popular culture’s ubiquitous depictions of women conflated with or reduced to appliances, Tiptree presents an extraordinary counter-image of an act of female violence as brutally efficient as a vacuum cleaner. The image of a vacuum cleaner that is either called “musth” or that makes the sound “musth” conjures latent fears about the violent potential of both the mechanical things used to clean the home, and the women who wield them. But from another perspective, the description of rape as an “attack by a musth vacuum cleaner” reveals less about either the reification of women or the brutality of rape, than about the unimaginativeness of this particular ad man, who in seeking to describe an act of violence by a woman fails to see beyond the world of female-coded consumer goods. In this reading, the vacuum cleaner is just a stand-in for the inconceivable and inexpressible—which is not the experience of alien assault, but of female assault. This unimaginability is alluded to by the colon, at the end of the parentheses, that leads to nothing. Tiptree’s description of a man’s incapacity to either imagine or articulate assault by a woman forms part of a broader indictment of patriarchal capitalism—while suggesting the extent to which the dismissal of women as the “weaker” sex paradoxically leaves men vulnerable to attack by them.

The significance of Tiptree’s vacuum cleaner analogy stands out all the more when read alongside the aerospace-inspired appliance designs that emerged in the late 1950s and 60, which were accompanied by a speculative, science fictional, marketing language that aligned these objects with a streamlined future characterised by space exploration, the survival of atomic war—or both. This futuristic ethos was exemplified by the short-lived popularity of “floating” appliances featuring hovercraft technology. The most famous of these, the spherically shaped Hoover Constellation vacuum cleaner, was launched in 1954 and featured a vinyl furniture guard around the middle resembling the ring around Saturn. The 1955 model contained an additional “Air-ride” feature that enabled the appliance to literally float on its own exhaust. [16] The replacement, in 1967, of the traditional housewife of the Constellation’s original print ads with a woman wearing a space suit aligned housework with intergalactic exploration, while divesting the appliance of its domestic connotations. [17]

Frigidaire imitated this approach in 1965 with the launch of their “Space Age Refrigerators,” which they supported with a two-year print campaign. In “Frigidaire Announces the Space Age Advance in Refrigeration,” a group of female astronauts appeared to ride the “1966 Frigidaire Custom Imperial Nineteen Refrigerator” like a spaceship. Call-out images promoted the appliance’s engineering worthy of a NASA spaceship [18]

In “Another Space Age Advance,” identical twin models wearing “Space Age fashions from Harper’s Bazaar” promoted “The Gemini 19 New Refrigerator Freezer Twin.” [19] The name referred to the side-by-side “twin” refrigerator and freezer compartments as well as NASA’s second human spaceflight programme, Project Gemini, which ran from 1961 to 1966.

Meanwhile “Frigidaire Refrigerators That Glide on Air” emphasised the range’s optional add-on feature, the “Ride-Aire,” which relied on the same principle as the Hoover Constellation. [20] Hooking a vacuum cleaner to a valve on the refrigerator’s front created exhaust that “literally lift[ed] the refrigerator off the floor,” allowing the housewife to move it with just “the touch of a finger” and easily clean behind it. [21] Tiptree’s story about giant women raping men with the efficiency of a vacuum cleaner, in which it is the suction itself that causes pain, exposes the floating, spaceship-shaped Hoover and space-age refrigerator to be quaintly retrograde. It likewise parodies the erotic dimension of space age designs like that of Hamilton Beach’s milkshake maker, whose bulbous top resembled aerodynamic testicles and the bottom of whose stand recalled an engorged vulva—and, whether intentionally or not, appeared to reference the erotic origins of hand-held appliances themselves. [22] Honestly, just look at that thing: does it not just look like a giant dildo?

Tiptree’s story playfully references each of these dimensions of the appliance, while suggesting that a truly radical future is not one in which women ride refrigerators into outer space or clean underneath their flying appliances. It is one in which appliances are able to eradicate patriarchy entirely. More specifically, Tiptree subverts the trope of the powerful appliance endowed with more agency than the passive housewife it serves by conflating the appliance with a violent femininity and violent female sexuality in whose face men are powerless. The In so doing, she playfully undermines the links between post-war appliances and the Military-Industrial Complex (it would take another blog post to go into this, but suffice to say that most of the big appliance brands were also involved in military weapons research and production).

Smart homes and appendage-replacers: Joanna Russ

Before I leave off and go enjoy the Saturday sunshine, I want to touch on one more example, which comes closest to what Mollie Clarke, the PhD researcher I mentioned at the beginning of this post, posited in her suggestion that domestic electrification in the form of objects of sexual pleasure might do away with (heterosexual) women's need for men. This example is from Joanna Russ's feminist science fiction classic, The Female Man, which was published the same year as Rosenthal's book. [23]

The Female Man (1975) follows four versions of the same woman who each inhabit alternate realities: angry feminist Joanna, who lives in Manhattan in 1969; Jeannine, who inhabits a 1969 in which the Great Depression never ended and the absence of economic growth precluded the birth of Second-Wave Feminism; Janet, a police officer living in a future called Whileaway where men don’t exist; and Jael Reasoner, an assassin from a future in which the two sexes are locked in an endless war against each other for world domination. Where Jeannine awakens every morning to new layers of dirt requiring cleaning, Jael Reasoner lives in a self-cleaning smart home named “House” surrounded by an electrified fence that keeps nature at bay, and equipped with a kitchen consisting of “an armchair with controls like a 707’s” that renders other appliances obsolete (FM, 179). House is assisted by “Telephone” and “Phonograph,” the capitalisation of whose names contributes to the impression they are alive (FM, 179). This impression is amplified by Jael’s overt objectification of Davy, her robot manservant: Where Telephone and Phonograph are attributed personhood, this machine-man has been reduced to an appliance whose brain receives electronic alerts from House’s central computer every time Jael wants sex. And where Jeannine’s narrative involves a domestic space whose malfunctioning gadgets continuously threaten to revert her home to the pre-industrial era, Jael’s narrative suggests one of the more extreme potential outcomes of combining the pursuit of efficiency with the desire to destroy the patriarchy: a mechanised world in which men are either killed or turned into male equivalents of the "Stepford Wives" envisaged in Ira Levin's science fiction classic, The Stepford Wives (1973).

While the description of Jael’s home initially appears an indictment of mechanisation’s nefarious potential, attention to an essay Russ published three years after the novel, “Science Fiction and Technology” (1978), suggests the merits of a more nuanced interpretation. In this essay, Russ argued that the “technophobia” apparent in science fiction by male writers reflected the vast differences between men and women’s material conditions: for women, the “non-technological past” was far from idyllic. [24] Russ defined "technophilia," or love of technology, as stemming from possession of or proximity to power, and "technophobia" as the scapegoating of modern industrial society by those who feel they have a right to control it. Both the technophile and the technophobe are male. By contrast, “women, non-whites, the poor” become neither technophiles nor technophobes, having neither proximity nor a sense of entitlement to power. From this perspective, Jael’s automated house appended with a male sex-bot reads as neither a condemnation nor a utopian daydream of automation but, rather, a parody of the technophilia of science fiction by white male writers (where the prime function of artificial intelligence is to create female robots to provide sexual pleasure), the techno-utopian discourse of mid-century architecture and domestic technology from which such fiction borrowed and to which it contributed, and the technophobia of certain conservative strains of science fiction by white male writers (Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, John Wyndham) for whom, according to Russ, technology posed a threat to individual agency.

If Jeannine’s old refrigerator is a reminder of the very material need for certain kinds of domestic technologies that by 1975 would be taken for granted, the smart-home equipped with a male sex robot in these final pages of the novel simultaneously plays with the post-war era’s reification of white middle-class women and conflation of them with their implements, and inverts the trope of the mechanised housewife—not to mention that of the femme-bot ubiquitous to science fiction of the same period. Where the In-Sink-Erator ad I mentioned earlier promised that if a man bought his wife a garbage disposal unit she would “want to thank you three times a day,” Jael’s home is wired to do all the housework for her, and her man-appliance is wired to thank her… as many times a day as she likes. The self-cleaning house equipped with a vacuous male sex-bot responds both to the limitations of post-war appliances and to the objectification of housewives themselves by appliance advertising. Jael’s reply to Janet, Jeannine, and Joanna’s expressions of horror at this technology highlights the inevitability of women being blamed: “‘Alas! those who were shocked at my making love that way [through anal penetration] to a man are now shocked at my making love to a machine; you can’t win’” (FM, 192).

I am still working through what some of the ramifications might be of these different engagements with the erotic dimension of appliances, and their potential to replace humans. I am especially curious as to how we might relate these discussions to contemporary sex technology, and particularly "smart" vibrators. For now, I'll just remind you that the links between the domestic appliance and the vibrator continue to be mentioned in contemporary popular culture, my favourite reference of which is Brie Van De Kamp's description, in Episode 19 of Season 8 of Desperate Housewives, of the wedding show gift she has gotten her neighbour Renée.

"I used to do it by hand but now it's so much faster," she tells Renée, whose interest is immediately sparked.. .only to give way to disappointment, when she discovers the gift is not a vibrator, but an immersion blender. [25] It sure is fast: but does it give as much pleasure? Alice B Toklas (according to Stein) would probably say yes, yes, yes!

A heartfelt thank you to Mollie Clarke for encouraging me to revisit this subject!

Footnotes: [1] Dear Sammy: Letters from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, ed. Samuel M. Steward (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1977), 144-155. Henceforth, DS.

[2] See Rebecca J. Pulju, Women and Mass Consumer Society in Postwar France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), which shows that 72.1% of French households owned a refrigerator by 1968; Katherine Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995); and Jackie Clarke, “Work, Consumption and Subjectivity in Postwar France: Moulinex and the Meanings of Domestic Appliances 1950s-70s,” Journal of Contemporary History 47.4 (October 2012): 838-859.

[3] William E. Meehan Jr., “Sunbeam Mixmaster,” in Art Deco Chicago: Designing Modern America, ed. Robert Bruegmann (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2018), 312.

[4] How to Get the Most out of Your Sunbeam Mix Master (Chicago, IL: Chicago Flexible Shaft Co., 1939). [5] Rachel P. Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 15 and 135.

[6] David John Cole, Eve Browning and Fred E. H. Schroeder, “Kitchen Appliances: Motorized,” in Encyclopedia of Modern Everyday Inventions (Westport, CN: Greenwood Press, 2003), 169; E.J. Levy, “Of Vibrators,” in From Curlers to Chainsaws, 70-77; Jane Juffer, “The Mainstreaming of Masturbation?” in At Home With Pornography: Women, Sexuality, and Everyday Life (New York: NYU Press, 1998), 85-86.

[7] Jody Cardinal, “‘Come Too’: 1920s Erotic Rights Discourse and Gertrude Stein’s ‘Patriarchal Poetry,’” in Primary Stein: Returning to the Writing of Gertrude Stein, ed. Janet Boyd and Sharon J. Kirsch (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 57-76. Citations on 66-67.

[8] Sheila Ballantyne, Norma Jean the Termite Queen (New York: Penguin, 1983 [1975]), 4.

[9] William Burroughs, Naked Lunch: The Restored Text, ed. James Grauerholz and Barry Miles(London and New York: Harper Perennial, 2005 [1959]), 104. Henceforth, NL.

[10] In-Sink-Erator, “She’ll Want to Thank You THREE TIMES A DAY!” (1959). Perhaps feigning unawareness that the ad would appeal more to men than women, the company advertised its advertising strategy in the NAHB Journal of Home Building that same year, noting that “ONLY In-Sink-Erator talks the language of women—your best prospects—in big-space ads in magazines women read most […] trust most. You know that a woman can make or break your sale” (NAHB 10. 7-12 (1956)).

[11] Bob Rosenthal, Cleaning Up New York (New York: The Little Bookroom, 2016 [1976]), 38.

[12] In-Sink-Erator, “The Loved 1,” LIFE (13 June, 1969): 66

[13] Thermador, “STACKED for Convenience” (October 1973): 197. House and Home 217. [14] SAMY, “L’Aspirateur SAMY: Ce que toute Femme désire,” Vendre (1958): N.P.

[15] James Tiptree Jr., “Mama Come Home” (1968), in 10,000 Light Years from Home (New York: Ace Books, 1978), 54-85. Henceforth, MCH.

[16] Carroll Gantz, The Vacuum Cleaner: A History (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011), 130-131. “New Hoover Constellation,” LIFE (21 March 1955): 119.

[17] Hoover, “Hoover’s incredible flying machine,” LIFE (25 August 1967): 17.

[18] “Frigidaire Announces Space Age Refrigeration,” LIFE (19 November 1965): 49; LIFE (14 January 1966): 7; LIFE (18 March 1966): 15; and LIFE (24 June 1966): 57.

[19] Frigidaire, “Another Space Age Advance: The Gemini 19… New Refrigerator-Freezer Twin,” LIFE (20 May 1966): 31; Better Homes and Gardens 44 (1966): 429; Harper’s Bazaar 99 (1966): 49. See also Archer, 168.

[20] Frigidaire Sales Brochure, “New! Frigidaire Refrigerators That Ride on Air! RIDE-AIRE” (November 18, 1966).

[21] Frigidaire, “The Ride-Aire,” House and Garden 129 (1966): 66; American Home 69 (1966): 128; Author unknown, “Home Appliances: How Smart Can They Get?” Popular Science (March 1966): 99; 206.

[22] Hamilton Beach Milkshake Maker. Circa 1960.

[23] Joanna Russ, The Female Man (London: Orion/Gollancz, 2010 [1975]). Henceforth, FM.

[24] Joanna Russ, “Science Fiction and Technology,” Science Fiction Studies 5. 3. 16 (November 1978).

[25] Desperate Housewives, S08E19, "With So Little To Be Sure Of," 1:24. 1 April 2012.