"Dell Williams, who in 1974, after being humiliated by a department-store clerk when she tried to buy a vibrator, was moved to start Eve�s Garden..."

"... the New York boutique widely described as the nation�s first sex shop catering specifically to women, died on Wednesday at her home in Manhattan. She was 92."

In the early �70s, Ms. Williams took a workshop from the sex educator Betty Dodson, an advocate of women�s masturbation. So that women might experiment in private, Ms. Dodson recommended the Hitachi Magic Wand, a cylindrical vibrator nominally sold for aching muscles.

Off Ms. Williams went to Macy�s to buy a Magic Wand. There, she wrote afterward, she found herself face to face with a �pimply 20-something� male sales clerk.

�What do you want it for?� he asked in a carrying voice.

�I left Macy�s that day,� she wrote, �clutching my precious, anonymous brown shopping bag and thinking: Someone really ought to open up a store where a woman can buy one of these things without some kid asking her what she�s going to do with it.�

It's interesting that she needed to say that the man had acne, considering the folk belief that masturbation causes acne. Was Williams subtly insinuating that the sales clerk was seeking the camaraderie of a fellow masturbator? Or did she feel a compulsion to humiliate him after he (accidentally?) humiliated her?

I went looking for a good link for the proposition that masturbation causes acne � which has got to be one of the all-time great correlation-causation misperceptions. I'll go with this page from "Acne For Dummies."

I also ran across � why have I never noticed this before? � Mark Twain's "Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism" (a speech given in 1879 at The Stomach Club, a group of American writers and painters in Paris):

The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: a disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke and tell indelicate stories � and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures. The results of the habit are: loss of memory, loss of virility, loss of cheerfulness and loss of progeny.

Of all the various kinds of sexual intercourse, this has the least to recommend it. As an amusement, it is too fleeting; as an occupation, it is too wearing; as a public exhibition, there is no money in it....

And yet, there was money in it... for Dell Williams.