The "no-sex" class: the (oldest) profession nobody wanted

[This is another post in a series articulating my conviction that men perceive women as the "no-sex" class, a restatement of the feminist theory of patriarchy. --fl]

Rachel P. Maines begins the first chapter of The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) with two points that I think really bring home the patriarchal perception of women as the "no-sex" class. First, that for 2000 years of written history doctors and midwives were paid to give women regular orgasms. Second, rather than think of such straight and lesbian prostitution on horny women as some kind of frat-boy's "hott" dream job nobody wanted to do it. (You should really read the excerpt, below, but if you find it heavy slogging I'll add a quick summary after the quote.)

THE JOB NOBODY WANTED

In 1653 Pieter van Foreest, called Alemarianus Petrus Forestus, published a medical compendium titled Observationem et Curationem Medicinalium ac Chirurgicarum Opera Omnia, with a chapter on the diseases of women. For the affliction commonly called hysteria (literally, "womb disease") and known in his volume as praefocatio matricis or "suffocation of the mother," the physician advised as follows:

When these symptoms indicate, we think it necessary to ask a midwife to assist, so that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside, using oil of lilies, musk root, crocus, or [something] similar. And in this way the afflicted woman can be aroused to the paroxysm. This kind of stimulation with the finger is recommended by Galen and Avicenna, among others, most especially for widows, those who live chaste lives, and female religious, as Gradus [Ferrari da Gradi] proposes; it is less often recommended for very young women, public women, or married women, for whom it is a better remedy to engage in intercourse with their spouses.

As Forestus suggests here, in the Western medical tradition genital massage to orgasm by a physician or midwife was a standard treatment for hysteria, an ailment considered common and chronic in women. Descriptions of this treatment appear in the Hippocratic corpus, the works of Celsus in the first century A.D., those of Aretaeus, Soranus, and Galen in the second century, that of Äetius and Moschion in the sixth century, the anonymous eighth- or ninth-century work Liber de Muliebria, the writings of Rhazes and Avicenna in the following century, of Ferrari da Gradi in the fifteenth century, of Paracelsus and Paré in the sixteenth, of Burton, Claudini, Harvey, Highmore, Rodrigues de Castro, Zacuto, and Horst in the seventeenth, of Mandeville, Boerhaave, and Cullen in the eighteenth, and in the works of numerous nineteenth-century authors including Pinel, Gall, Tripier, and Briquet. Given the ubiquity of these descriptions in the medical literature, it is surprising that the character and purpose of these massage treatments for hysteria and related disorders have received little attention from historians.

The authors listed above, and others in the history of Western medicine, describe a medical treatment for a complaint that is no longer defined as a disease but that from at the least the fourth century B.C. until the American Psychiatric Association dropped the term in 1952, was known mainly as hysteria. This purported disease and its sister ailments displayed a symptomatology consistent with the normal functioning of female sexuality, for which relief, not surprisingly, was obtained through orgasm, either through intercourse in the marriage bed or by means of massage on the physician's table. I shall place this disease paradigm in the context of androcentric definitions of sexuality, which explain both why such treatments were socially and ethically permissible for doctors and why women required them. Androcentric views of sexuality, and their implications for women and for the physicians who treated them, shaped the development not only of the concept of female sexual pathologies but also of the instruments designed to cope with them.

Excerpt from NYT-Online. Read the rest of chapter one here.

Summary: From antiquity healthcare providers recognized that women had... some kind of female complaint... that could be treated but not cured with regular massage of their genitals. You could stop, and the treatment was complete, when the patient underwent a "hysterical paroxysm." Hysterical paroxysm is another word for "orgasm. Doctors from antiquity through at least the end of the 19th Century spent *a lot* of time inducing these paroxysms in their female patients. They found it so time consuming, Rachel P. Maines tells us, that they often outsourced the task to midwives and nurses. They found it so onerous, she points out, that they invented vibrators (the first one was steam powered!) to automate the process.

I... I... while... while... I can't *begin* to say how totally alien a world that must have been, it was *certainly* a world in which the dominant paradigm *couldn't conceive* of the possibility that women might be independently sexual entities.

Now don't get me wrong. Numerous sources, including Elizabeth Abbott, author of A History of Celibacy, make it clear that until just a few hundred years ago women were considered irrepressibly amoral when it came to sex, but from the Old Testament all the way through till Freud** turned the world of sex on its head the narrative was always in terms of women wanting not sex itself but *children.*

Now. I'm willing to guess that the average woman reading this is thinking either "duh, Einstein" or "ask any woman." But that's the whole flipping problem: back around the time Greeks decided the sun was carried across the sky on Apollo's chariot men got this notion that women were members of the "no-sex" class and we've been sagely nodding our heads ever since. (Which makes it the longest circus act in history considering how hard it is to nod with our heads up our asses.) Women, plugged firmly into the "no-sex" class at men's insistence, couldn't *possibly* have anything productive to say about the matter. How could they, Herr Docktor? How could they, Sir?

So. A couple of ramifications spring to mind. The biggest being that while in todays terms doctors were hired for two thousand years to perform exactly the same manual stimulation as "Central American gal" escorts and countless "exotic massage" parlor employees, it wasn't considered prostitution. The only possible way to explain that rather enormous anomaly is that prostitution involves horniness and the pursuit of orgasms and women, being members of the "no-sex" class, don't have *orgasms!* -- goodness no! -- they have "hysterical paroxysms! And, being members of the "no-sex" class they don't get *horny,* oh my, my good fellow, they merely suffer from afflictions of the womb. No horniness, no orgasms, therefore no prostitution, Q.E.D.

For the moment, anyway, I shall leave it as an exercise for the reader to come up with other, even more ludicrous, consequence of the pervasive male belief that women are the "no-sex" class than physicians spending much of their day having manual heterosexual sex, with multiple partners, *at the request* of their multiple partner's fathers, husbands, and relatives, *with the approval* of their peers, *while recruiting* midwives for "girl on girl action," and even inventing vibrators so they could satisfy even more sex partners simultaneously... while *failing to realize they were doing it.*

Tell me my theory about men and the "no-sex" class has neither merit nor utility.

**It occurred to me as I was writing this post that, rather than demonstrating oblivious cluelessness, Freud's infamous question "what do women want?" was actually demonstrating radically self-aware cluelessness. It was radical because the question had largely been settled to men's satisfaction since the Bronze Age: what women wanted was children, period, end of story.