The Crezendo is a miraculous product, albeit in different ways to different people. For men, its power to conjure up female sexual pleasure from nowhere vaguely resembles sorcery. For women, it’s miraculous that somebody finally got around to inventing it.

The device is a vibrating condom ring, a little less than an inch in diameter, which attaches to a standard condom at the base of the penis and unleashes an intense quiver upon both partners.

Vacuum-sealed in soft rubber for cleanliness and sensitivity, it’s powered by an internal micro-battery that lasts for 20 minutes. (This, by the way, strikes me as demanding a bit too much precision. Which is worse: Being interrupted midcourse by this lagging appendage, or shamefacedly trying to pillow-talk over five, 10, or — Lord help you — 15 minutes of extra buzzing?)

It’s a brilliant little device, but like most pioneering strokes of genius, this one has encountered resistance from society’s more traditional quarters.

Their sale is prohibited in the eight U.S. states (which mercifully do not include Washington) that have banned the trade in devices designed to stimulate genitals. When India’s state condom manufacturer introduced the Crezendo last summer, the Hindu nationalist politician Kailash Vijayvargiya led a noisy campaign to have it banned, insisting that far from being a condom upgrade, it’s “more of a sex toy, which is antithetical to Indian traditions and morality.” Most of the debate, therefore, has turned on this point: Is it a sex toy or not?

Well, yes, it is. To begin with, and I beg your pardon, it isn’t like chocolate sauce or a ping-pong paddle (normal household objects that can be annexed for amorous purposes by creative minds). We can admit without a wink or a nudge that it was designed to be used during sex.

More specifically, it was designed to enhance the pleasure of the experience for a female partner. The vibrations, according to many enthusiastic testimonials, provide a great deal more external stimulation than most women are used to; the actual gizmo excites the clitoris. The appropriately corny sloganeering confirms it: “The only time she will love friction in your relationship,” and “The only time she won’t complain you are late.”

Ads for the device boast that it can be used “without a condom” or — I’ll humbly confess that I found this vexing for a moment — “without a partner.” We’re plainly dealing with a sex toy.

But admittedly, this is where the debate starts to get hard (or sticky, or rocky — insert your own innuendo here). The line between pleasure enhancement and strict pregnancy-and-disease-prevention is a difficult one to find. If we’re going to count accessories like these as sex toys because their primary function is to scale the “crescendo,” then how do we classify, say, ribbed condoms? Spermicidal jellies that produce a warming sensation? And what about lubricants, which enhance pleasure but don’t prevent disease or pregnancy?

The problem is that the distinction we’re examining, between prevention-centered utility and pleasure-seeking gratuity in safe sex, is irrelevant to the broader issues that the debate brings up. Vibrating condom rings exist along a spectrum that includes coitus interruptus at one extreme and velvety cat o’ nine tails at the other. It’s the spectrum that enables us to have sex for pleasure with a minimal risk of contracting an illness or, even more importantly, conceiving a human life that we’re unequipped to care for. And it’s no small point that since women are more thoroughly burdened with the care of children, it’s this spectrum that allows women some degree of sexual freedom.

We’re better off conceding the point and asking what difference it makes. Yes, they are sex toys — and what of it? When Vijayvargiya and the guardians of cultural purity here in the United States call out vibrating rings as an affront to “traditions and morality,” they should be made to tell us exactly what traditions and which strains of morality we should be holding.

I think I know what their answer would sound like.

What strikes so many culture warriors as obscene about these things is that for women, the vibrating condom rings make sexual liberation more enjoyable, making sex more frequently enjoyed. So long as a woman’s sexual pleasure remains such a fearsome apparition to so much of mankind, a special brand of prurient (yet weirdly saturnine) bureaucrat will remain (shall we say?) the master of her domain.

It’s not a new insight: We fear what we don’t know. The puritanical impulse is one part disgust and two parts curiosity, with a dash of envy occasionally tossed in. Against the outcry of those who are intent upon being offended, the most effective tool is a sharp roll of the eyes and a dry admonishment to grow up, and perhaps a free sample to, um, drive the point home.