What Is a Veedee Vibrator and a Chattanooga? Explaining the 19th Century Sex Toys in ‘Monster: The Lizze Borden Story’

The new season of Ryan Murphy’s grim show Monster has landed on Netflix—and, as expected, it’s as salacious as it is gruesome. Having already dramatized the horrific stories of murderers Jeffrey Dahmer, Lyle and Erik Menendez, and Ed Gein, Murphy has turned his attention to his first female “monster”: Lizzie Borden.This is the oldest story Murphy and his co-creator Ian Brennan have told so far, with Borden’s alleged crimes—the axe murder of her father and stepmother—taking place in 1892. Bizarrely, you probably heard about her case when you were a kid, thanks to the (pretty catchy) skipping-rope rhyme: “Lizzie Borden took an axe / and gave her mother forty whacks / When she saw what she had done / she gave her father forty-one.”As with all seasons of Monster, Murphy and Brennan take a fair amount of creative license with their protagonists’ stories, often blending various theories and rumors as key plot points. Monster: The Lizzie Borden Story is no different. This time, the series uses a theory put forward by crime author Evan Hunter in his 1984 novel Lizzie as a jumping-off point, which posits that Lizzie committed the murders after being caught in a tryst with the family’s live-in maid Bridget Sullivan.And so, as has become another of Monster’s trademarks, there is a fair amount of sex in the new season. And this time, there’s even 19th-century sex toys, too: specifically, a Veedee vibrator and a Chattanooga. What the hell are these contraptions? I hear you cry. Well, let us explain…What is a Veedee vibrator?Bridget introduces Lizzie to the Veedee vibrator in episode 1, as a tool that could help her with severe period pains. Bridget learned about the device after her former mistress, also suffering with “heavy menses,” was prescribed “hysterical paroxysm” or “little death” to treat them—i.e. an orgasm.In the show, the Veedee is a wooden tool that looks like a pepper grinder, and it has a handle that makes the end vibrate when you turn it. As Bridget instructs Lizzie: “You hold it up on your cunny and you turn this. You crank it like you beat eggs.” Sexy!The Veedee vibratory massager was, indeed, a real thing. An instruction manual from a 1903 Veedee says the device was for “curative vibration, vibratory massage, nerve stimulation, and blood circulating.” According to the Science Museum Group, during the late 1800s, it was believed that massage could act as a salve for basically any affliction, with the Veedee claiming it could help with headaches, colds, digestive complaints, and flatulence. The 1903 manual also suggests it could be used as a beauty tool—specifically, to treat double chins (which “can absolutely ruin the good looks of an otherwise pretty woman”), baldness, and wrinkles.The Veedee, then, wasn’t specifically created as a sexual vibrator (though massage was allegedly touted as a treatment for female “hysteria”)—a bit like the Hitachi wand, the discovery of its sexual prowess seems to have simply been a happy accident!What is a Chattanooga?In episode 2, Bridget introduces Lizzie to another sex toy: the insanely named Chattanooga. This time, Bridget has diagnosed Lizzie with an imperforate hymen—i.e. when the hymen completely covers the vaginal opening. (As per my research via Dr. Google, this doesn’t really make sense in the story because it prevents menstrual blood from leaving the body—but let’s ignore that for now.) Disturbingly, Bridget diagnoses this by telling Lizzie: “It’s covering everything. Your kitty’s strong.” An awful sentence, thank you Ryan Murphy.To try to open Lizzie’s hymen without a doctor or a husband, Bridget orders a Chattanooga—a “medical massager” allegedly used by doctors. In the show, we see a newspaper ad for the device, which doesn’t specify what it’s for but says it “gives heavy vibration.” The ad continues: “The Chattanooga embodies the latest scientific knowledge in the mechanical treatment of disease. It places within reach of every physician, and of every enlightened household, an agency for the restoration of health, vigor, and comfort.”It’s a crazy-looking contraption, but is essentially a sex machine. Think: dildo on a stick that, when you turn the handle, thrusts forwards and backwards. Oh, and it’s steam-powered.NetflixSo, is this one real? It’s not clear, as it’s hard to find concrete info online. A New York Times article from 1999 suggests that a Chattanooga (described as having an “aggressive multi-cantilevered design...evocative of the Tower of London”) did exist and cost $200 plus freight charges in 1904. Another article, published on a site called Starts at 60 in 2022, describes the Chattanooga as “a two-meter-tall, steam-powered appliance that took two men to shovel the coal to keep it operating,” which sounds too nuts to be true.It seems the device in Monster is a direct copy of an unverified photo doing the rounds online that purports to show a device called “The Manipulator,” invented by a real American doctor and inventor called George Taylor, who did write the first book that recommended massage for gynecological problems (in 1871). But a lot of the stories about early vibrators being invented or used for female “hysteria” are likely myths. The Chattanooga in Monster, then, is probably based partly on actual 19th-century vibrators and partly on fictions about them.What significance do sex toys have in Monster?The sex toys don’t really play a major role in Monster, and neither of them ever seem to be used. But some true crime sleuths have suggested that the real Lizzie Borden couldn’t have killed her parents because she was masturbating in the barn at the time—with or without sex toys. In reality, Lizzie did apparently tell people that she wasn’t in the house at the time of the murders because she went into the barn for “20 minutes or possibly half an hour.”What she was doing in there, we’ll never know—but she probably wasn’t getting off with a two-meter-tall, steam-powered vibrator and the two men assigned to help her operate it. What do I know though?!