Hallie Lieberman
Author of
Buzz: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy (Pegasus, 2017)
Hallie Lieberman is a sex historian and journalist. She has written articles about sex and sexuality for the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, BuzzFeed News, The Nation, Wired, Slate, Vice, and many other outlets. When she’s not writing about sex, she’s writing about breakfast cereal and comedy.
Twitter / Facebook / Instagram / TikTok / HallieLieberman.com
BookS BY Hallie
Gigolos (Beacon Press, 2026)
What kind of woman would hire a gigolo? It’s a question that has gripped Hallie Lieberman since taking a trip to Berlin in 2017, where sex work is not only legal but ubiquitous. Although brothels and massage parlors sat on the same streets as noodle houses and bubble tea cafes, Hallie noticed that a majority of these establishments solely advertised to straight men. The message was clear: Women only sell sex; they never pay for it themselves. Unconvinced, Hallie would spend the next five years seeking out the stories of male sex workers and the women who hired them. Her quest would take her across time and space––from clandestine tea rooms in 1920s New York to male strip shows in Las Vegas to Australian suburbs. Along the way, she’d encounter countless women who paid for sex, legally or illegally, for a wide variety of reasons: to guarantee an orgasm, to ensure a sexual partner who respected consent, to save a sexless marriage, or to access sexual touch previously barred by disability. Ranging from heartwarming to hot to hum-drum, their experiences not only challenged rigid societal assumptions around the dynamics of sex work but also posed bigger questions about gender, class, race, and power. Spanning six parts, GIGOLOS creates an absorbing tapestry of cultural history, reportage, and pop culture critique to tell the story of the men who sell sex and the women who buy it.
BUZZ: A Stimulating History of the Sex Toy (Pegasus, 2017)
In the vein of Mary Roach’s Bonk, a brilliant microhistory of the sex toy that ultimately tells the story of our changing sexual mores and evolving cultural values. Once only whispered about in clandestine corners, vibrators have become just another accessory for the suburban soccer mom. But how did these once-taboo toys become so socially acceptable? The journey of the devices to the cultural mainstream is a surprisingly stimulating one.
In Buzz, Hallie Lieberman traces the tale from lubricant in Ancient Greece to the very first condom in 1560 to advertisements touting devices as medical equipment in 19th-century magazines. She looks in particular from the period of major change from the 1950s through the present, when sex toys evolved from symbols of female emancipation to tools in the fight against HIV/AIDS to consumerist marital aids to today’s mainstays of pop culture. The story is populated with a cast of vivid and fascinating characters including Dell Williams, founder of the first feminist sex toy store; Betty Dodson, whose workshops helped 1960s women discover vibrators; and Gosnell Duncan, a paraplegic engineer who invented the silicone dildo. And these personal dramas are all set against a backdrop of changing American attitudes toward sexuality, feminism, LGBTQ issues, and more.
Both educational and titillating, Buzz will make readers think quite differently about those secret items hiding in bedside drawers across the nation.