In early 1975, Blank published her first book: The Playbook for Women About Sex. She had left UCSF, acquired her Marriage and Family Counseling degree and was running Women's Sexuality workshops for small groups. She was also running sex communication workshops with her husband, marriage contract workshops, and the ever-popular women's sexuality workshops for men.
In her consciousness-raising group with Toni Ayers and others, there was some talk about vibrators and how fantastic they were for women to experiment with. Unless a woman was confident enough to march into an all-male adult sex shop, however, it was next to impossible to buy a vibrator. Most didn't even know what one was, let alone their power to unleash sexual satisfaction in a broad range of women. There should be a store where women can feel comfortable trying out the range of toys and literature, they decided, and by March of 1977 Blank had pulled it together.
Cathy Winks and Anne Semans, worker-owners who wrote the comprehensive Good Vibrations Guide to Sex in 1994, open their chapter on vibrators saying, "Vibrators are the best-kept secret of the twentieth century. We have waited on hundreds of people curious about vibrators who, up until their first visit to Good Vibrations, were unable to find out much about them."
In November of 1977 Blank's adopted daughter was born and she hired someone to help out in the store. They gradually grew from there. It went slowly, with practically no advertising, and there were days, Blank says, where she took in only twenty six dollars. But word-of mouth was a powerful force in the tight-knit feminist community of the 1970s, and soon Good Vibrations grew to be an integral member of the Valencia Street corridor of women's spaces. Frustrated by the missing information on vibrators, as well as the sexist perspectives of many manual writers ("Vibrators are no substitute for a penis"-- New Joy of Sex) Joani Blank, in 1977, wrote and published the only guide to vibrators that exists: Good Vibrations: The Complete Guide to Vibrators".
-- Elizabeth Sullivan
Women-Centered Sex Toy Store
