I found myself having, not exactly an argument recently, but a highly opinionated conversation with someone who did not believe my assertion that once upon a time there were official Hello Kitty vibrators. With the aid of the Wayback Machine, I found this article, and thought the world at large might enjoy it too...
Here's the text of the article:
The history of the Hello Kitty vibrator
By Peter Payne
October 4, 2004
Sanrio is one of the top character licensors in the world, having more or less created the business model of doing business by creating something that doesn't really exist and licensing its use to other companies. Sanrio produces nothing -- all their characters, like the Little Twin Star, Minna no Ta-bo, Bad Batz-Maru, exist as legal entities and nothing more. Their most successful character, Hello Kitty, or Kitty-chan as she's known in Japan, is now now thirty years old.
One of the many companies that license Sanrio's characters for their products was a Japanese company called Genyo Co. Ltd. Genyo made a wide variety of products, from bento boxes to children's toys to chopsticks, many with the Hello Kitty character on them. They scored big in the late 1990's with an off-the-wall hit, a series of Hello Kitty toys which featured a different Kitty figure from each of Japan's 47 prefectures, each representing something the prefecture was famous for. (The figure from Gunma Prefecture, where we live, represented a wooden kokeshi doll.)
In 1997, Genyo designed a product that would live in infamy: the Hello Kitty vibrating shoulder massager, which really is a shoulder massager (trust us -- it says so on the package). Sanrio approved this design without batting an eye, and the product enjoyed modest sales in toy shops and in family restaurants like Denny's and Coco's. It wasn't until 1999 or so that people began to catch on to the fact that the Hello Kitty massager had other potential uses, and with amazing speed, they started popping up in adult videos in Japan. The next thing anyone knew, they had changed into a cult adult item, sold in vending machines in love hotels -- after all, what self-respecting man wouldn't buy his girl a Hello Kitty vibrator when she asked him for one?
The emergence of the Hello Kitty vibrator as a cult adult item caused friction between Sanrio and Genyo, and Sanrio ordered the company to stop making the units. Genyo refused, since it had paid a lot of money to license Kitty for their products. There seemed nothing Sanrio could do, since they had approved the item for sale (see the official Sanrio sticker on the boxes). The answer came when the Japanese tax authorities raided Genyo on suspicion of tax evasion. It seems that some creative accounting was going on between the president of the company, a Mr. Nakamura, his vice president, and the owner of the factory in China where the units were made. All three were arrested, and Sanrio had the excuse needed to yank Genyo's license. They seized the molds used to make the vibrators and destroyed them.
And so, the sad, weird chapter of the Hello Kitty vibrator is at an end. The last of the Kitty vibes are gone, so now what will the world do for wacky comic -- and sexual -- relief?
#reading this post treating it like every other tumblr post#hello kitty vibrators yes of course that is the kind of thing you read about on tumblr#no surprises there#until i realise who op is#and have to laugh and laugh and laugh#i love neil gaiman#a true tumblrina if ever there was one
Read a journal article for a uni report a few years ago that mentioned the vibrator but also said that sanrio will not sell hello kitty branded alcohol
itâs a mound of flesh, right? and it keeps forming eyes capable of looking at you. and the longer you look at it, the more openings appear. and at first the openings are full of what looks like legs, which move aside to reveal a flower, which unfurls to reveal a fleshy orifice studded with teeth moving towards you with great power and longing.
and itâs like, the central tragedy is that none of these men know each other on a level intimate enough to see through the imitation. when keith david turns and asks them how theyâre supposed to tell if heâs an imitation or not, none of them can honestly say that they know him well enough to test how deeply it runs; he may as well be a stranger to him. when baby slut kurt russell mentions that the long johns could be anybodyâs, it means that he isnât able to tell whose they are by taking a good long whiff of the crotch and armpits. the secret weapon that could have successfully circumvented the thing was the time these men should have spent intimately exploring each otherâs bodies. I have a job interview tomorrow. I need to get this out of my system now.
having by now gotten the job for which I was interviewing, I think where I was going with this was that, the constantly moving shifting expanding de-categorizing of the Thing is its own horror vehicle by virtue of the fact that every other body in that film very much wants to be its own discrete category, unknowable and untouchable to the other bodies around it. and the more you look at the Thing, the more there is of it; the more openings it has, the more eyes it will form for which to see you, the more limbs it will form for which to touch and know you. and these men do not want to touch and see and know each other. they do not want the joyous erotic sound of each other's stevie wonder albums to enter their ears. they do not want the joint that touches their lips to touch the lips of another man. the first and only horror of the Thing is its drive to touch and know and queer the coherent category that is the human body. I will be washing dishes in the back of a bakery while blasting mongolian throat singing if anyone has any further questions.
a massive cloud of paper airplanes descending upon a 747 and when they disperse all thatâs left is a massive airliner skeleton picked perfectly clean of all flesh
tiktok is such an awful app, it's almost designed to feed you misinformation and expose you to insane discourse. unlike beloved tumblr, the app that feeds me misinformation and exposes me to insane discourse
idk whats funnier: that tumblr got people to spend multiples of $7.99 to add fake verification checkmarks to their blog to ""make fun of"" twitter's latest fuckup, or that these checkmarks literally do not show up for mobile users and thats why i had no idea this amazing feat of opportunistic capitalism was even happening until just now
nobody bitch about the tumblr checkmark this is the funniest shit staff has pulled in months and its absolutely contributing to the landlord-firing-gunshots-at-passing-cars vibe of the past week
now that everyone from twitter has joined tumblr overnight, it's time to lay a couple ground rules:
1. it's not called a "retweet", it's called a "reblog", but if you're REALLY cool, you refer to it as a "rebagel"
2. if someone has fewer followers than you, it is totally fair to call them "irrelevant", but it is actually more stinging to call them "irrelephant"
3. if you see someone irl that you think might have a tumblr, you're supposed to say "i like your shoe laces". the correct response, which any true tumblrite would know by heart, is "thanks, i stole them from the president"
4. there is a particular phenomenon that happens after 12am EST called "nightblogging", and everything after this point is the fault of the australians
i got these knockoff boots online and instead of the brand name on the tag they have the name of an apparently nonexistent martin scorsese movie??? what the fuck
