(taken from Herman Henschel Koprowsky's "Encyclopedia of Imagined Objects")
The 1980s was a hotbed of daring, innovative and unprecedented design standards, and this was no more apparent than in Mattel’s paradigm shattering Fuckpillow, a part of the global toy manufacturers – very – short-lived range of specifically male1 adult-oriented (which is to say: erotically focused) amenity products, Mattel Gents (in fact it was the only product ever released in the range). Founded in 1945 by Harold “Matt” Matson and Elliot “El” Handler, by the 1980s Mattel had grown to be the world’s largest toy company, and rode the wave of the Masters of the Universe franchise throughout the decade with a phenomenal level of success instigated in no small part by shrewd marketing and reasonably effective action figures. Yet it was an underlying sense of moral vigour that the board of executives saw as fundamental to their commercial success, a sense demonstrated by the often clumsily delivered moral segment2 that served as an epilogue to each episode of their flagship animated series He Man and the Masters of the Universe, which ran for from 1983 to 1985 and was developed in response to the line of readily available action figures, making it perhaps the longest (130 episodes at approx 23 min. running time per episode) advertisement in the history of the medium.
The success of the programme grew with public awareness of the AIDS virus, a link all too often unnoticed by the majority of analysts, and although by then a mostly silent, honorary figure within Mattel’s organisational structure, Elliot “Hot Wheels” Handler was one the early pioneers of AIDS awareness and AIDS-focused charity work, due in no small part to his furtive and usually commercially transacted homosexuality and long-term addiction to unspecified – many think prescription, although significant secretly assembled (by corporate lawyers, mostly) evidence would point to an elaborate opiate distribution channel embedded within Mattel’s logistical network – drugs, the undeniable impact on which, and on countless high profile friends and associates of Handler, was distinctly grave and had a profound effect of Handler’s outlook and priorities which in turn filtered through into much of Mattel’s 80s work and output. With immeasurable wealth and power (within the toy making field) and fuelled by moral duty Handler devoted himself and a team of Mattel payrolled vision development operatives into the creation of a functional response to the AIDS crisis that had befallen so many of his loved ones, a small contribution to the fight against that most terrifying of viruses in the medium of cutting edge toy and novelty design, the only way he had ever known, design positioned right at the very forefront of a new generation of self-aware and intensely sexualized adult practitioners who took the success and safety of their erogenous pleasure firmly within their own two hands.
Like so much of the best design of the era – the intensively rebranded Sodastream3 and the associated uncompromisingly singular command of its mighty strapline to “get busy with the fizzy” (the functioning Sodastream itself a staple design product within lower middle class kitchens, its yellowed plastic casing and slightly stained drinks containers and the prohibitive limitations and mostly crushing expense of its CO2 cylinders somehow forming a foundational touchstone of nostalgic memorial for an entire generation, symbolic as it has now become of some kind of golden age of liberating, pragmatic, everyday design ideology, despite the inconvenience, [gastronomic] disappointment and ultimate pointlessness of the product itself; Sodastream is proud to be its own greatest advocate and the most vehement defender of its own environmental policies, such as the reduction in the negative environmental impact of contemporary packaging resultant from the use of home carbonation systems, as well as the somewhat paltry donation of £1000 to a school in Devon, UK, to assist in the cleaning of a beach [although Sodastream is less vocal about the controversy surrounding its use of land in the West Bank, which the company insists transcends the political issue and is simply the result of markets and demographics {to wit: both Palestinian and Jewish consumers are passionate about home carbonation and as such according to the results of US/Israeli administered consumer surveys the Sodastream and its associated syrupy possibilities provide a sense of unity to the fractious existence of the West Bank}]); the Cabbage Patch Kids (later and temporarily bought by Mattel circa 1994) series of dolls created by the highly paranoiac but fundamentally well-managed schizophrenic entrepreneur Xavier Roberts, who by the end of the 1970s had become so terrified by what he considered to be the very real likelihood of a worldwide nuclear catastrophe that, firstly, he famously kept himself and his offices “prepared for suicidal interventions at all times”, with “all staff to be informed of mandatory deployment of such interventions by prior vocal announcement”, although precisely what this entailed remains unconfirmed, and, secondly, that he designed the Cabbage Patch Kids as a way of desensitizing the public to what he believed to be the inevitable physical and mental deformities of children born in the wake of nuclear war, whose over-broad faces, sunken eyes and terminal overbites were, he suggested, specifically designed to celebrate and even love abnormality, in a way that few other toy manufacturers of the time would have considered (somewhat unsettlingly, Roberts included himself as an integral part of the Cabbage Patch Kids mythic genesis as a ten-year-old boy [and not a twenty-three-year-old art student] called Xavier Roberts who aims to have all of the deformed infants adopted, thereby evading slavery and finding a semblance of happiness amongst the highly materialistic families of the late 20th century US, a back story which in turn provided some alleviation to the collective guilt felt by the average [halfway civilised] American for the nation’s atrocious record in both civil rights and foreign policy interventions throughout the preceding century or more. Perhaps weirder still, Roberts converted an old clinic in Cleveland, Georgia, into Babyland General Hospital, essentially the ‘birthplace’ [i.e.: manufacturer] of the Cabbage Patch Kids that is elaborately set up as a birthing, nursing and adoption centre and where the sales and manufacturing staff are dressed in medical uniforms as though they were indeed nurses [‘Licensed Patch Nurses’, or LPNs] or midwives or similar to the marginally deformed infants, and which the public can and do visit to witness the remarkable spectacle – miracle even – not of birth but of sheer unchecked marketing at work. The hospital was rocked by controversy in 2003 when six LPNs were arrested and later imprisoned after reports of systemic abuse of the [artificial] children under the care of the adoption centre was leaked to the press, along with several illegally acquired videos which horrifically depicted said staff members in inappropriate acts of aggressive violence, with one particular image of a male Cabbage Patch Kid being thrown into the air and struck with a baseball bat while his rigid face remained stoic and somehow trusting being voted image of the year for the volumes it spoke about contemporary US culture. Roberts himself was disgraced by the allegations as staff past and present accused him of overseeing the abuse and even demanding it, with claims that he liked to “slap nurses” and would frequently “indecently” assault the children himself. Traumatised staff presented harrowing televised testimonies still in uniform to the din of taken photographs: “I’ll never forget what [Roberts] made me do. He angrily, really mad, he madly took his pants down and started pulling at this... huge genital4 and told me to – commanded that I beat on the kids. Pull off their heads and kiss the soft neck stumps while he chanted what he said were the ever descending numbers of my “fucking joke salary”. It was the job I’d always dreamed of. I knew it was wrong but I did what he said.’ Roberts has since publically distanced himself from Babyland General, which is still open to the public, a chilling memorial to the perverse cruelty of man) – Fuckpillow emerged in response to a growing social crisis. Essentially straddling three marketable categories as sex aid, safe sex device and must-have adult amenity product it was a conceived as a mass-appeal product that proudly wore both its socio-medical and contemporary hedonist principles on its sleeve.
The product comprised a standard bed pillow in dimensions of 20 x 26 inches (plans to roll out a King and Queen sized luxury Fuckpillow never reached prototype), in the lower centre of which was rooted a soft silicone-lined ‘cock chute’ (pumping station, docking cylinder) – the base diameter of which could be adjusted with a hand operated suction pump to suit personal size or preference – and which the male user would engage in intercourse (or more specifically heightened masturbation) with, in ways easily imaginable and not necessary to dwell upon here. The rear of the product was equipped with access to a small 250ml reservoir that nestled beneath the synthetic plastic fibres that comprised the filler, and that could be pre-filled with water based lubricant which would be released during use as per a functioning, self-lubricating, organic orifice, but with the added hygiene benefits of accessible easy-wipe technology. For Handler, a proscriptive response to the sexual crisis of the 1980s was unrealistic; instead he believed that if he could provide a still pleasurable and affordable alternative to person-person sexual exchanges, perhaps even one that (out of convenience alone, for nights in &c.) only replaced twenty per cent of such exchanges with a Fuckpillow alternative, the amount of unsafe and high risk sexual acts being conducted would be drastically reduced, thereby similarly – although he did not claim to understand the science or the chance of infection per exposure source he guessed that by the very law of averages it would be safe to assume – cutting the exposure to and likelihood of transmitting the AIDS virus. In effect he wanted to create a valid alternative to intercourse not as permanent replacement but as sometime alternative5 with the proven health benefits that he felt were synonymous with the Mattel stamp of quality, a wealthy man compelled to social responsibility by the unorthodox nature of his own sexual preferences.
With a product as genuinely exciting as Fuckpillow, which so easily defied all public expectation of the company, shattering their ordinary demographic and garnering a foothold in a by no means new but certainly newly lucrative and, due to changing social perceptions of tolerable sexuality and adult erotic leisure, increasingly acceptable market, the key to its commercial success would lie in marketing. The late 1980s was a landscape permanently altered by home video, and by the ready availability of pornographic material. Far from being the taboo it had once been, Handler observed that unsimulated sex had moved some way to becoming the norm, something that both male and female enjoyed alike, and that young people would even watch together without shame or prejudice, and he firmly believed that Fuckpillow needed to make use of modern attitudes towards the sex act to successfully advertise it to the masses, constructing a campaign that was as bold and exciting as the product itself, TV adverts that would themselves be the main event, not the inconsequential dramas they punctuated. Initial attempts at marketing the product were marred by a kind of terminal unsexiness unsuited to it: early strapline “fuck a Fuckpillow, fellas” was dismissed as being like an earnestly good-willed suggestion from a fully clothed surrogate grandfather, while similarly “it’s safe, it’s clean, it’s fun!” made it sound, as Handler noted, “like a cocking baby bath”, the polar opposite both of the innovative contemporary sex aid the company were trying to sell and of the very three things it in fact claimed to be.
Mattel soon acknowledged that the most effective marketing for a product of its kind would be urgent and demonstrative and with an approach that flew in the face of their long-acquired conventional wisdom pertaining to the children’s market. Using a carefully assembled film crew – mostly Handler’s own close friends – and an (unseen [at least from the waist up]) adult film star for the key thrusting sequences, Mattel shot and edited a 60 second advertisement for Fuckpillow which featured at its core reasonably extended (i.e. beyond ten or fifteen seconds) scenes of unsimulated masturbation and/or solo coital motion for purposes they considered educational but which television executives considered gratuitous and with no higher moral or aesthetic value. Rich in the clichéd tropes of all adult oriented advertising, shot-for-shot it consisted of: [OST: pulsing synth emission6] (1) gently lit bedroom scene with thick down bedset oozing sensuality in the fold/curve interchange of its marshmallow peaks (2) Fuckpillow close up (3) visibly male hand slightly kneading Fuckpillow (4) carefully framed shot (heel to mid-upper thigh) of blue jeans falling, bare feet stepping out of the denim (5) hand kneading Fuckpillow, then repositioned (6) close-up of brandless prophylactic sheaths, plastic wrapper conspicuously unopened [OST: building synth work flecked with breathy but indistinct verbalisations] (7) rear shot of Fuckpillow usage, smoothly pumping white hairless buttocks that clench at the zenith (8) profile shot of Fuckpillow usage, extensive deep thrusts of erect penis into the pillow cavity (9) interior shot of Fuckpillow usage from within cavity, the somehow haunting sincerity of the moving meatus (10) rear shot (11) profile shot (12) interior shot (13) untouched prophylactic sheaths (14) empty jeans (15) increasingly frantic rear shot (16) increasingly frantic profile shot (17) increasingly frantic interior shot cuts to, as though ejaculated (18) on screen text, Fuckpillow, cuts to, (19) mainstream actor laying with head atop Fuckpillow, alongside the spent cock chute, cheeks slightly flushed, smile on face, cigarette ablaze, cuts to (20) Fuckpillow logo, Mattel logo, written strapline, “the adult amenity product of the – this – moment!”, v/o strapline, “fuck a Fuckpillow sometimes” (21) FIN. It was remarkable advertising for the time and was banned outright from television exhibition for what Handler had called its refreshing honesty, its touching exposure, but what executives of the major channels had called its graphic tastelessness. Even if they wanted to, they said, which they didn’t, they said, and even late at night, they said, they were not permitted to show unsimulated sexual acts – especially those involving the erect male penis – on television. Handler insisted that the advertisement, while clearly making use of unsimulated sexual gestures, did so with education in mind, with a staggeringly large social conscience, as a part of Mattel’s global attempt to help in the battle against the horrors of AIDS, but still not a single channel was prepared to broadcast, or even prepared to associate themselves with AIDS awareness, which in truth was more of a taboo than the inappropriate sexuality they were able to hide behind.
Handler was devastated, enraged by the absurd conservatism of his country, and eventually reached an agreement with a couple of NY adult pornographic cinemas to screen the advertisement before some of their features7, which although they were not themselves inclined to do, as an ethical solo use sex aid designed by the world’s largest toy manufacturer and shrouded in subliminal reminders to the potential dangers of uninhibited sexual appetites was a distinct turn-off, they nonetheless consented due to in part to Handler’s sizeable cash offering per exhibition, and also as part of their ongoing commitment as sex traders to the homogenization and mainstream acceptability of the pornographic industry which they believed that Mattel’s involvement must surely signify. Yet despite – not because of – the unsimulated nature of Handler’s advertisement it was quickly pulled from even highly specialized cinema screens, booed by audiences as tame and unsexy, and accused of forcing issues-based realism and unwanted moralising into what were expected to be the most unadulterated sexual fantasies. Added to this was the fact that, like most pornography, the advertisement depersonalised the sex act to such an extent, in this case literally removing one of the consenting adult human parties from an ostensibly coital union, that it ceased to be arousing and became instead just moving flesh, thrusting meat, entirely devoid of appealing sexuality. By the time the strapline reached the screen viewers were walking out, demanding refunds with the urgency of impotence or of unfulfilled potential. While a nation of TV executives had shunned it because of full sex and AIDS connotations, the consumer had done the same solely because of the weakness of the advertising and its singlehanded failure to pinpoint a particular demographic and target itself to it.
As a campaign its failure hinged on the tepidity of the strapline; it was marred beyond salvage by poor syntactical decisions, decisions which destroy otherwise partly reasonable products. “The adult amenity product of the – this – moment!” made Fuckpillow sound trivial and fatally transient, every bit the fad that Mattel needed it to not be, a product without future, existing entirely with the throes of the kind of two-three minute sexual abandon that would justify an adult male in his fucking – which is to say solo coitus or heightened masturbation – of a patently insentient modified bed pillow with precisely zero return incentive aside from a reasonably efficient (if otherwise indiscreet) form of manual relief and a wipe-clean silicone cock chute for maximum hygiene in the circumstances. This syntactically expressed impermanence did not instil a sense of confidence in the product, did not market it as the next or only essential, lasting, viable alternative to some potentially-harmful-if-excessively-careless-or-promiscuous sexual encounters, a serious contender or game-changer in the way Handler’s Hot Wheels had been in the late 1960s8. The gap in the market that Handler had hoped to fill was non-existent; as a sex aid the comparative complexity of Fuckpillow was problematic, as for many seasoned onanists the primary appeal of the masturbatory act is that it can be performed with no extraneous tools and with hands alone, quickly, effectively and without the need for storage, whilst as a preventative measure for STIs Mattel soon found that as a general rule anyone with sufficient awareness or anxiety pertaining to the sexual health crises that burdened the decade would already use adequate protection in the form of prophylactic sheaths, thereby rendering Fuckpillow something of a curio at best and entirely superfluous at worst, the prophylactic sheath being a far more successful product by virtue of the fact that it enables – even presupposes – the performance of a mostly safe two person sexual encounter, widely regarded as significantly more pleasurable than the solo alternative. Furthermore, “fuck a Fuckpillow” sounded to many critics less like a jovial moral-erotic encouragement or enthused suggestion and more like uncomfortably aggressive coercion even insistence, the corporate rape of a confused, commercially sexualised and market driven adult amenity industry.
Unable as it was to successfully straddle the dichotomy of the mass market it aspired to and the niche adult – although increasingly popular still, then, widely unmarketable – market it was specifically designed for, Fuckpillow was a resounding failure. While Handler had personally commissioned 250,000 units for the first production run a devastating quantity of units (i.e. vague evidence suggests less than 100) were sold within the US in the first quarter, and with no commercial support – with TV and cinema out the printed press wouldn’t touch it, wouldn’t even contemplate it conceptually – American sales came to a complete standstill soon after that9 and it was axed from the Mattel range, along with the whole Mattel Gents model. Vast stocks of Fuckpillow’s were destroyed in immense industrial furnaces like a heavy-handed symbolic cremation of the final shreds of goodness at the bruised heart of Reagan’s American Dream.
Dogged by visions of an American economy crushed by a virus he was powerless to halt, Elliot Handler died in 2011, the visionary brilliance of his design career left forever incomplete, with only those monolithic fragments of the Fuckpillow project – pencil drawings, tattered prototypes – still held within the vaults of the Mattel headquarters in El Segundo, California, acting as a final lasting testament to the courage and single-mindedness of design itself, a footnote to an otherwise monotonous career and erased from memory, wiped clean from the very cock chute of the twentieth century.10
1 A Mattel Ladies range had never progressed beyond the planning stages after the almost universal failure of Fuckpillow, despite extensive developmental plans being drawn up for at least one product called The Vox Pleasurer, an eight-inch silicone prosthesis of essentially phallic construction which along with the predictable array of vibrating and/or otherwise contorting motions was accompanied by a selection of twenty-four pre-recorded vocal messages of either romantically hackneyed, comforting, motivational or – both weirdly and inappropriately – sermonizing content that was fundamental to the Mattel brand’s sense of identity, triggered by agreed physiological responses within the allocated orifice (Mattel prided itself as a sexually conservative organisation, which is why The Vox Pleasurer could only operate at its functional intention [i.e. vocal] when used as part of a penetrative vaginal act and in no alternate corruption of it, specifically pertaining to the – for Mattel, a family company – horrifically superfluous sexualisation of the female anus, as it was the lubrication/mucus produced within the vaginal tract [Bartholin’s glands] that triggered the enhanced features that would make The Vox Pleasurer a market leader in the realm of innovative sexual safety synonymous with strictly individual pleasure) that tiny sensors within the tip of The Vox Pleasurer had been electronically programmed to identify. Compared to Fuckpillow the production costs alone were prohibitively high and only one prototype was ever constructed, now housed within the Mattel product museum at the company headquarters in El Segundo, California.↩
2 There are far too many morals to assess individually within the scope of this entry, although I have provided a more comprehensive analysis of the Mattel ethos as expressed through the character of Prince Adam of Eternia aka He-Man The Most Powerful Man in the Universe et al. within the appendices of this volume.↩
3 Whilst not technically a design of the 1980s (the original, prescient, almost dreamlike conceit of a home carbonation system having been originally conceived as early as 1903), it was this decade which saw the Sodastream’s striking return to prominence within the home beverage market, forever embedding it within the shared cultural heritage of the era.↩
4 The “footlong dong” of Xavier Roberts has become the stuff of legend amongst toy manufacturers, as mythical in its own way as the creation story of the Cabbage Patch Kids themselves, and Roberts’ own sometimes destructive sexuality was until 2003 tolerated if not entirely enjoyed, his significant member even affectionately and multiply dubbed: the subway, the sub, the ruler, the yardstick, the soda bottle, the hotdog, the quarter longsword, Big Ben, Empire State, brisket, Mount Cockmore, King Kong, Donkey Kong, Uncle Buck, the battleaxe, heavy artillery, heavy metal, fat boy (there is a decidedly militaristic twist to much of Roberts penile euphemism that is somewhat at odds with the gentle world he created for profit), Everest, machete, the child, etc., the joke it was acceptable to make even amongst children either stuffed or organic.↩
5 As per the company’s official presentational literature to shareholders in 1987: “Fuckpillow aspires to be the world’s best penetrable surrogate vaginal/anal tubular tract, as well as the world’s safest and most authentic adult amenity product”. The minutes of Mattel board meetings of the time express the horrified silence of attendees in increasingly inventive ways, and in wildly complex sub-numerical categories, as though the violent and fragmentary dissatisfaction of the largely Republican, entirely Christian board of directors itself formed a vitally marketable component of Fuckpillow’s business strategy. Screenings of dailies of the early – and only – commercials (see above) put together for the product themselves ended in walkouts and nausea, those eminently vendible responses, and in grunted and accurate prophecy of failure, a campaign of indefatigable and graphic boldness unsuited to the absurd political Puritanism that characterized the era, closeting as it did sexual expression of any kind as the kind of generalised depravity against which a moral panic could and would be targeted, and hiding the severity of the AIDS virus behind a ignorant veil of homophobic propaganda.↩
6 See Debbie Does Dallas soundtrack by Gerald Sampler, who also composed the Fuckpillow theme. Although Sampler referred to it as his masterpiece and his musical legacy, it was at the time heard by less than 500 people.↩
7 Amongst the most popular films, 1985s New Wave Hookers (minus the illegal Traci Lords scene) was still on almost constant circulation in adult theatres, the combination of hardcore sex and new wave music (and the Pavlovian correlation between the two, the central conceit of the Dark Bros. most impressive film) striking a pertinent chord with audiences of the time and remaining a perennial favourite amongst self-proclaimed aficionados of the classic genre.↩
8 The winning combination of die cast toy cars designed to car manufacturer’s blueprints and the force of gravity was a staggering success that dominated the decades (from the perspective of – child-aimed – automotive replicas).↩
9 Although Fuckpillow did find a short lived market in Japan, where Mattel continued to trade the product for some months in an attempt to recoup at least some of the extensive production costs, selling around 15,000 units throughout 1988-89 largely on the back of an incredibly popular TV advertisement reconceived for a Japanese audience (in fact an early, uncredited work by now acclaimed director Takashi Miike), the soft shades and considered, evocative thrusting of the US version replaced by a pretty vulgar palette, jarring editing and an intense punk soundtrack. By then called Screwjack (which along with the manufacturer’s heritage as toy maker made the ambiguity pertaining to the product’s demographic even more ambiguous, sounding – as Screwjack does – either like a pro-wrestler or all the more like a toy of some grotesquely competitive physicality for the 9-13 male group), and entirely removed from Handler’s influence, Fuckpillow-cum-Screwjack’s trademark blend of sex aid and social responsibility sat comfortably within the Japanese society of the late 1980s, unmoved as it must have been by the problem of uncertain target audiences. Although now long removed from sale it continues to be remembered with a palpable sense of nostalgia and with an immense regard for the subtly of the design at work, taking as it has as light-hearted a place in the Japanese national consciousness as whaling, or hideously theatrical sexual violence.↩
10 Editor’s note: I was shocked to find this article heralding a return to the majesty of Handler’s design, albeit an obscenely sanitized reappraisal, and without even a reference to Fuckpillow or to the man behind its cock chute. The Boyfriend and Girlfriend, Fuckpillow’s in all but name (and in the extent of their erotic potential), twist every aspect of the Handler classic that predated them by more than two decades and veil them in novelty and the purported originality of lies, while Handler’s forgotten contribution to sexual safety and comfortable home-based eroticism exists only within Koprowsky’s careful pages. When foaming with the injustice of the no-longer-young I showed the article to Koprowsky he barked out laughter and paraphrased Lynchian dialogue in a way too obvious to express, and with a hand rested gently on my shoulder he told me the world would always catch up in the end [NF, 2012].↩
