What do we know about vibrator users? Not that much, but it's a start

About.com's sexuality guide Cory Silverberg has compiled results from the handful of studies done on vibrator usage since 1970, seeking to learn more about who buys and uses the dang things.

What little information we have is probably skewed by the organizations doing the studies, which are generally the companies that sell vibrators.

There is only one survey published in a peer reviewed journal and not funded by a company that has an interest in selling sex toys, and that survey mostly looked at how women use vibrators, not who the women are using them (and they didn’t look at men at all).

The general profile of a vibrator user seems to be a white woman in her 20s or 30s who is in a relationship, and that almost half of the women in the U.S. own at least one.

The age makes sense, as it's when you're in your 20s that you live away from your parents and perhaps alone for the first time. This is also the time when you can really branch out sexually as the rush of adolescence finally begins to subside and you enter a less frenetic stage.

It makes me wonder whether today's kids and teenagers will grow up and accept vibrators as just one more device that everyone has, right up there with an MP3 player, a video game handheld and a cell phone, considering how sex toys have come out of the closet in a big way – as has sex – in the past 10 years.