Hello Kitty Sex Toy: My Little Bedtime Friend

My name is Janet and I'm a Hello Kitty addict. I regularly visit the local Sanrio store and spend upwards of 30 minutes and just as many dollars in there. I own stuffed Hello Kitties, a Hello Kitty shower curtain, a Hello Kitty miniature hoop, and Hello Kitty kitchenware, among countless other items. I yearn for the Hello Kitty toaster and snowboard. (Did I mention I'm almost 30 years old?)

It should come as no surprise, then, that I also own the infamous Hello Kitty vibrator. It's exactly what one would expect it to be: small (5.5"), pink and topped off by a little Hello Kitty cradling a little waving teddy bear betwixt her legs. It's a pretty disturbing feature, that waving teddy bear. Intended to be inviting, it gives the vibrator a little more personality than a sex toy needs.

Quality, comfort, and price... that's nice.As with all Hello Kitty products, the vibrator is demure and harmless, definitely not as intimidating or complicated as The Rabbit. Switched on, it lets off a revved-up purr and vibrates ever so gently, almost so as not to disturb.

...which is not to say it won't get you off. With patience and tender, loving care, Hello Kitty will bring sunshine, happiness and wave after wave of pleasure to your life. But this is a toy better left to beginners or Hello Kitty collectors. After playing with the big boys, Hello Kitty will feel like the Muzak of vibrators.

I'd like to point out that I consider the Hello Kitty vibrator "for clitoral stimulation only." The thought of sticking Hello Kitty into my moist, tight... er... the inner recesses of my self makes me uncomfortable, literally and figuratively. She's not exactly streamlined, and I could never subject Hello Kitty to such an unspeakable act. Maybe when Sanrio comes out with a vibrating dildo.

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. In a short time, the last of the Kitty vibes will be gone, and then what will the world do for wacky comic -- and sexual -- relief