This comic is a completely true story, except it was less Josh yelling at a Brookstone employee and more me and my wife making fun of all the vibrators masquerading as “personal massagers” on their shelves.
If you start on the left side of the “massager” section, you see some plausibly legitimate, semi-medical devices. There are some big, sturdy pieces of machinery with multiple rubberized contact points contoured to the shape of the human spine. As you move to the right, it’s like the evolutionary chart of the vibrator. They get smaller and more cylindrical, lower power (more buzzing and less percussing), more ergonomically shaped for one handed use and more focused on stimulating a specific, conspicuously vagina-sized area. The packaging also shows less and less people making the “OUCH! My back hurts!” face and more of the “I’m having a glass of red wine, taking a hot bath, then laying a towel down over my good sheets,” face.
Of course, if you look at it from right to left it just seems like ladies are demanding more and more cumbersome and industrial erotic implements. It’s like the tiny ones on the right are for humans and the multi-pronged jill-hammers on the left are for bears and rhinos and to aid in the collection of bull semen.
In reality, people have been using personal massagers to get themselves off since their inception and some clever marketing person just decided to start designing them towards their actual use rather than their intended purpose. Still, the cheeky box art, exploding with innuendo is rather amusing.
Speaking of bang-machines, have you seen the trailer for Hysteria? It looks pretty great as far as lady-gasm based films go.
COMMENTERS: What’s the silliest “this is totally a vibrator” item you have ever seen in a store? When’s the last time you saw a product advertised as one thing that was CERTAINLY supposed to be used as another thing? Are “massagers” the only industry that does this? Why can’t we just sell vibrators on regular store shelves next to the tupperware? People need to keep their leftovers from spoiling and they need to get off.