Joani Blank
human sexuality author
Joani Blank (July 4, 1937 – August 6, 2016) was an American feminist sex educator, entrepreneur, and author in the field of sexuality. She is the founder of Good Vibrations and Down There Press. She used publishing, her sex store, and other endeavors to promote sex-positive feminism. Her papers are part of the Human Sexuality Collection at Cornell University Library.
Career
Blank founded Down There Press, a publisher of sex-positive-related books, in 1975. In 1977, she opened Good Vibrations, the second feminist sex toy business in the United States (the first having been Eve's Garden in New York City, which was founded by Dell Williams in 1974). The idea to create Good Vibrations stemmed from her work with sex therapist Lonnie Barbach, in which the pair worked with women who had difficulty reaching orgasm. Prior to her opening Good Vibrations, she was hired at the University of California, San Francisco to screen candidates who had difficulties achieving orgasm. This study influenced her business model for Good Vibrations. Lynn Comella wrote that Blank turned "her small vibrator shop into a sexual resource center for anyone who might wander in.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Mar 17, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q6205694. VIAF identifies the subject as 94301000. The Library of Congress control number is n80155367. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1937, 2016, 1975 and 1977.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joani Blank” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.