Electric Instant Gratification



Electric Instant Gratification is the carrot to Electric Torture's stick. With just the flip of a switch, you too can become instantly ecstatic!

Often accidental, which overlaps with Too Kinky to Torture.

Truth in Television. Scientists developed an orgasm device for women by accident when the doctor inserted a spinal cord electrode he was using to relieve the woman's chronic pain into the wrong place and got an unexpected reaction. Although further tests showed that less than 2% of women would actually get that effect from it.

Subtrope of Getting Smilies Painted on Your Soul.

Anime & Manga

 * Excel from Excel Saga is Too Kinky To Electric Torture.
 * Ruby from Rosario to Vampire, when chained to Tsukune to help him train, seems to enjoy his failures to control his youkai power and is possibly a tad disappointed that he masters it so quickly.
 * In Panty and Stocking With Garterbelt, Stocking is obviously enjoying her electrocution in "One Angry Ghost".
 * Stocking seems to enjoy pain anyway, as the Beach Episode had her moaning in pleasure from being crushed in a giant octopus's tentacles.
 * In the second episode of Tenchi Muyo! Aeka attempts to torture Ryoko for information about her brother through electrocution. The results are less than satisfactory for Aeka but quite ..... pleasurable for Ryoko. Until Aeka jams the master key into her stomach.

Comics

 * In the Secret Six miniseries, it was revealed that the long-time Batman foe, the Mad Hatter, long known for his mind-control hats, had worked out a way to reverse the mind-control effect. This stimulated his pleasure centers and led to him becoming a "hat addict" (and even crazier than he was originally).
 * In the "Big Wheel" issue of Global Frequency, the rampaging Super Soldier driven Axe Crazy by his extensive cybernetic modifications mentions at one point that, on top of all the other traumatic alterations to his body, his genitals have been removed and replaced with a wire in his brain that simulates sexual pleasure when he kills people.
 * In The Filth, Max Thunderstone mentions that scientists have discovered enlightenment is analagous to an epileptic seizure in a certain area of the brain. Part of his plan to uplift humanity is to show people how to push their own "Buddha Button".
 * The Squadron Supreme Gadgeteer Genius Tom Thumb weaponized this into the Pacifier Pistols, which incapacitate with pleasure, so cops wouldn't need lethal weapons. How he's going to keep them from sitting around shooting themselves in the head all day is not addressed.
 * This is the special power of the titular character in the Hentai series Demi the Demoness. She can fire a bolt that makes the target orgasm so hard they explode.
 * Fuji from Stormwatch is an Energy Being who's kept in a containment suit so that he doesn't dissipate into nothingness. Due to the conditions of his suit and the constant buffeting of his nervous system by his own energy, he has an orgasm every five minutes. No wonder he's so happy.
 * Milo Manara's erotic graphic novel Click! is about a noblewoman fitted with a wireless version of this. She is followed by a voyeur who turns it on at inopportune moments, compelling her to stop whatever she's doing and have sex with anyone nearby.

Film
"And he kept pressing that button until he died!"
 * The orgasmatron from Woody Allen's film Sleeper.
 * A similar device was later used in Demolition Man.
 * Used by one of the girls at the camp in But I'm a Cheerleader; they were given electrical shockers to use when they had "impure thoughts", but Hilary soon found another use for them.
 * Barbarella is put into a machine that does this, and overloads it. Damn.
 * Orgazmo, an early project by Trey Parker, is about a young Mormon boy forced to act in a porno movie where he plays a superhero who wields one of these devices. Then he gets one in real life...
 * Brainstorm features a machine that records a complete sensory experience, and a young man wears it during sex. An older man gets hold of the recording and splices the orgasm into a loop. They find him still hooked up to it a day or two later, and he becomes violent when they switch it off.
 * In the 1994 film about Albert Einstein IQ, James Moreland is doing the experiment with the mouse. There are two switches the mouse can press: one that gives him food and one that gives him this trope. The mouse hasn't eaten in three days. Moreland asks Einstein how this could possibly be the case, and Albert simply gives him A Look.
 * Discussed in Love Potion No. 9 where a woman told about a male Chimpanzee hooked up to such a device.

Literature

 * This was done in the radio version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, as a reward for a student learning about the Shoe Event Horizon.
 * Sort-of done by Ford to a security robot in Mostly Harmless. He captured the robot and disabled the chip that controls access to its "happy module", so the robot was happy doing anything at all. Including intervening between Ford and a missile.
 * Semirhage in The Wheel of Time finds that stimulating the pleasure centers of a subject's brain works better than stimulating the pain centers for torture.
 * But it bores her.
 * Larry Niven's Known Space books, such as Ringworld and the Gil the Arm stories, feature the droud, which trickles current through a wire implanted in the pleasure center of the brain, and the tasp, which does this from a distance, and is seen to be an extremely dangerous weapon (since the victim can get addicted).
 * A similar device is central to the Spider Robinson story God Is an Iron, later expanded into the novel Mindkiller.
 * Norman Spinrad wrote a story where there are booths that does this in a New York subway station, 200 years in the future. There are skeletons in them--they stayed in them so long they starved to death.
 * Experiments with rats prove that this is Truth in Television.
 * The rat experiments were featured in the movie IQ, as mentioned above.
 * Bernard Werber's novel The Ultimate Secret turns out to revolve around it.
 * Used by Taylor the Crazy Yeerk in the Animorphs. Presumably it was put into an otherwise-standard Electric Torture rig just 'cause they could, but it turned out to be useful for breaking Tobias (whose hawk-form mind was impressively resistant to torture by dint of not knowing it could end it) through sheer Mood Whiplash.
 * A milder form of it was used in a book where the yeerks were trying to use sharks as aquatic soldiers. Through the use of electronic chips in the sharks' brains, they replicated the sensation of having just caught prey to encourage them.
 * Used in the works of Cordwainer Smith as a recreational device and painkiller.
 * In Terminal Man, Harry Benson receives a brain implant to control his psychomotor epilepsy, which caused him to severely beat two people during seizures. During the course of the book, however, concerns come up that Benson might be psychotic, and before too long his subconscious mind learns how to induce seizures in order to trigger the "pleasure" shock originally meant to halt them. Things go badly from there.
 * Used in a truly horrific fashion in the novel Neuropath. The book's villain, who aims to prove that free will is an illusion created to cover up the mass of cognitive processes that take us through the day, abducts a porn star and uses direct nerve stimulation to put her in the throes of pleasure.
 * The fury-crafted collars from the Codex Alera also qualify as this; when the victim does what the controller wants them to they get pleasured. If they refuse, things get bad.
 * In Daniel Keys Moran's The Last Dancer, David Castanaveras (brother to Denise, and a fairly powerful telepath) is addicted to "electric ecstasy", by which he is (at least semi-)controlled by Sedon. Sedon later uses Electric Torture on Dvan, who is somehow able to ignore it and obey the commands of Denise.
 * Used with thematic significance in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, where one character describes the example of the starving rats, then mentions that when a laboratory wanted to do human testing, with it being well known that it could turn the subjects into drooling automatons who live for nothing but the next fix, they were overwhelmed with volunteers. The character considers that to say something very frightening about humans.
 * The Euphio Question, one of the short stories in Kurt Vonnegut's Welcome To The Monkey House, was about a group of people who had a machine that instantly saturated people in its proximity with an overwhelming sense of euphoria. The problem was that this caused everyone to be mellow, calm, and relaxed to the point of inactivity, making the machine very hard to turn off. The even worse problem is the short-sighted fellow who intends to mass-produce the devices... and who is ignorant of the likely outcome (whether willfully or not isn't clear, though he doesn't seem to actually want to destroy humanity).
 * Philip Jose Farmer calls this device a "fornixator" in his amazing Riders Of The Purple Wage. They drill a small hole in your skull and you have a box with a needle. It delivers a series of tiny electrical jolts to the fornix area of your brain. The pleasure of this activity is supposed to be even better than sex, or anything else.

Live Action Television

 * Garak from Deep Space Nine. Being a multi-talented spy, he was given a device in his brain that releases good-time feeling juice in order to counteract torture. Turns out life with the Federation sucked so hard, he turned it on and left it on. Addiction swiftly followed.
 * Referenced in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, where Xander informs Willow that since they're fiddling with a 'Blaster', that randomly hitting buttons is not high on his agenda. He then adds that if it were called the 'Orgasminator', that would, in fact, be his desired approach.
 * The story about the accidental women's orgasm device is in Mad Men, where the men who built a vibrating "relaxeciser" can't understand why all the women seem to love it. Then Peggy tries it...and she understands perfectly. She's assigned to develop an ad campaign for it; one of her first. This being The Sixties, it relies a lot on subtle Double Entendre.
 * In the ST:TNG episode "The Game", Riker unknowingly brings aboard a game that rewards the user for advancing in the game. The entire crew, except Wesley and his girlfriend (who have not played) and Data (who was deactivated), quickly become addicted and willing to turn over the Enterprise to the bad guy of the week.

Tabletop Games

 * In GURPS devices that do this can be used to aid in interrogation just as effectively as Electric Torture.
 * Some BTL chips in the Shadowrun game can have this effect, as using one floods the chip-addict's brain with a specific emotion at a far higher intensity than real life could ever afford.
 * Some of the nastier Horrors in Earthdawn, the Shadowrun-prequal fantasy game, have a psychic Instant Gratification power that they use (alternately with Electric Torture) to coerce total obedience in their humanoid Mooks and Moles.

Video Games

 * In Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, Guybrush notes the Marquis de Singe's simian lab assistant Jacques seems to enjoy the electrocution device used to motivate him to move about the lab a little too much.
 * In Mass Effect 2 there is a reference to a "neural stimulator" built into a quarian's suit. Something that "any responsible adult should have." Followed by, "Here, let me turn it on right now...excuse me, human, private conversation!" Tali also mentions neural stimulators during her romance (she'd rather have the real thing, thanks).
 * No doubt she would. However, a review of her finances shows her having purchased ever more expensive stimulator variants in the mean time.

Web Comics

 * A ditzy henchman in 21st Century Fox craved a VR variant called the O-Pod. An assassin, knowing the intensity of ten to be addictive, cranked it Up to Eleven Hundred. Thousand. "You shoulda seen his face when I turned it off!"

Western Animation
"Shriek: I believe you've earned some time with...The Fork."
 * Batman Beyond. Shriek has invented a tuning fork that uses soundwaves to stimulate the pleasure centers of the mind. Cue the disgusting groans from the mook.

Green Lantern: First Flight: Sinestro uses a pink orb of some kind as an "incentive" to get Labella to talk. She doesn't mind at first, but
 * Followed swiftly by Shriek removing the helmet of his suit, because the suit is the only thing that allows him to hear, and otherwise he's deaf without it. (Don't feel too bad for him, he did it to himself.)
 * Leela in the Futurama movie Bender's Game has to wear a collar that shocks her when she gets violent. However, once she gets used to it and begins to associate it with the pleasure of violence, the electric shock just gives her an even bigger incentive to use violence...
 * In "Hell is Other Robots", we find strong electric currents have a powerful hallucinogenic effect on robots, which leads to Bender developing a habit of "jacking on".

Real Life

 * Lab rats have been hooked up to electrodes that stimulate what is colloquially referred to as the "reward center" of their brains. When placed in a cage with two buttons, one that dispensed food and the other activating said electrodes. The rats typically starved to death if they didn't first die from exhaustion.
 * The effect on humans, however, seems to be significantly less dramatic.
 * Note one woman actually wore a hole in her finger from pressing the button so many times. The reason why they even had such an implant is that it was a medical device to treat epilepsy. The whole 'stimulating the pleasure area of the brain' part was a rare side effect in some people.
 * Vibrators, indirectly.
 * E-stim fetish.
 * Then there's Harry Potter and the Vibrating Broom. Girls and women gave the toy five stars and then some. Of course, when Mattel realized it had created something that caused that much pleasure and delight, it was promptly pulled from the market.