How a Super-Conservative Company Accidentally Created the World’s Top Sex Toy

It is one of the most celebrated scenes from the hit ’90s comedy Sex and the City.

Samantha Jones is in an electronics store, and approaches a gawky young salesman. Producing a gigantic electric object with a bulbous head that looks like an old-fashioned microphone, with HITACHI written down the side of it, she declares: “I’d like to return this.”

The salesman asks: “Is there something wrong with it?”

Samantha fixes him with a beady eye and says: “Yes. It failed to get me off.”

The salesman, flustered, looks around for help. None is coming.

Then he offers, “Perhaps you wore it out.”

That iconic scene, first aired in 1998, was in an episode called “The Drought” and it caused a drought of another kind as global inventory of the featured personal massager, the Hitachi Magic Wand, which first hit the shelves in Japan in April 1968, ran dry.

Supply chain issues aside, this should have been the moment the Magic Wand, the world’s biggest-selling sex toy of all time, leant into its destiny as a sex aid.

After all, it wasn’t the first time the Magic Wand had been celebrated for its ability to produce sensational orgasms.

Back in the 1970s, the device was championed by the legendary sex educator Betty Dodson, who included it in her era-defining book, Sex For One.

Dr Carol Queen, curator of San Francisco’s Antique Vibrator Museum, told The Daily Beast: “Betty Dodson began her career as a women’s orgasm advocate, and increasingly specified the Magic Wand as her recommended masturbation tool. Ever after, others who’d learned from and been inspired by Betty continued to recommend and praise it.”

Queen added: “In the first era of online influencers, the Magic Wand was the first vibrator with its own Twitter feed. Those were the days. People would have an especially great Magic Wand orgasm and announce it there. I don’t know who owned the account, except I’m sure that it wasn’t Hitachi, which was always a little overwhelmed by the sexual attention the vibe got.”

Indeed they were, and you can argue that the Sex and the City cameo set in process a chain of events that nearly doomed the Magic Wand altogether.

As the Magic Wand became a story in the mainstream media, with feature and lifestyle articles all over the world, Hitachi, a deeply conservative Japanese company, lost its ability to plausibly deny it was manufacturing a sex toy.

A rupture with its American distributors, who were enthusiastically leaning into the sex toy narrative, led to the product completely disappearing from U.S. shelves for several months in the year 2000 after panic-buying set in.

However a U.S. sex toy company, called Vibratex, which had previously brought the legendary “rabbit” vibrator to the market, managed to persuade the company to sell them a container load of unsold Magic Wand inventory. Vibratex had resold all the units before the ship even docked in America. After some persuasion, Hitachi agreed to allow Vibratex to become the U.S. distributors.

By 2012, however, it all, once again, became too much for the conservative suits at Hitachi, who told Vibratex they were ceasing production of the product altogether.

Vibratex managed to talk them out of it by saying they would put it out under the name “Magic Wand” with absolutely no reference to Hitachi in the packaging (even though it continues to be produced by Hitachi for Vibratex to this day.)

Vibratex’s CEO, Ken Herskovitz, told the Daily Beast: “There was probably a pretty high level of conservative thought within Hitachi and for a very long time, Hitachi had plausible deniability about the fact that they were producing the most popular sex toy on the market.”

But after Sex and the City and other media coverage, the cat was out of the bag. Many sex historians believe media coverage of the Magic Wand as a sex toy was instrumental in Hitachi’s decision to discontinue it.

Herskovitz says the reality is more nuanced: “I think it’s unfair to say the decision was entirely based on Hitachi’s conservatism. The reality is Hitachi was also selling everything from home appliances to power tools to excavators, and I’m guessing they were just not excited about having a sex toy in the portfolio. Something wasn’t working for them, but thankfully Vibratex was able to make a deal that worked for both sides.”

Under Vibratex, sales of the Magic Wand have grown from less than 100,000 per annum to an astonishing 500,000 per annum today, according to Herskovitz. He estimates global lifetime sales at between 4 and 5 million units over the course of the Magic Wand’s 56-year lifespan, which is widely believed to make it the best-selling sex toy of all time, by some margin.

Herskovitz told the Daily Beast that Vibratex does not currently market any other lines other than the Magic Wand. While the original plug-in version only had two settings —known informally as “f--- and holy f---” according to sex writer Kate Sloane who produced a documentary podcast about the Magic Wand, entitled Making Magic—under Vibratex’s stewardship the Magic Wand has diversified, and now boasts rechargeable versions with four power settings as well as mini and “micro” wands.

Bel Di Lorenzo, author of the best-selling sex book, The Gohddess Method, told the Daily Beast: “The Magic Wand is a perfect example of how society is evolving and what should change. It was marketed and sold as a massager, yet it ended up filling a gap in the market that women were desperately seeking to fill. It reflects a larger cultural shift beyond just sex positivity—it highlights the need for women to better understand their bodies and break down taboos.”

Sofie Roos, a sexologist, relationship therapist, and author who writes for the Swedish relationship magazine Passionerad, told the Daily Beast: “We take it for granted today that you can buy an affordable vibrator online and enjoy it to have a great sex life, but that was just not on the map for women 50 years ago. Sex toys only really reached people within the kink community. But the Magic Wand, because it was marketed as a massage tool, was sold openly at department stores and a woman could buy it without feeling ashamed.”

Ultimately she says it was the quality of the product that led buyers to become fans. “It was handy to use with a long grip, and the big head made it easy to reach and find the clitoris. The functions were basic, so you didn’t need to be technical to get going, and the Japanese quality made the Magic Wand feel unbreakable. It did just go on and on.”

Lisa Finn, a sex educator and ambassador for the store Babeland told the Daily Beast: “I remember speaking to a visitor a few years ago at the NYC Babeland shop who came in looking for a new Magic Wand because her original that she had purchased via catalogue in the ’80s had finally needed to be replaced, not because of the toy itself, but because her cat chewed the cord. If that’s not evidence of quality, I don’t know what is.”