Debby Herbenick of My Sex Professor says

It looks like one of my favorite actresses, Maggie Gyllenhaal, is filming a movie titled Hysteria, about the invention of the electric vibrator to treat women for the medical-condition-of-the-time, hysteria. According to an article in the Guardian, the film will also star Hugh Dancy, Rupert Everett and Gemma Jones.

Source: My Sex Professors

Oh dear. While I think it’s a very good idea to discuss the original vibrators, and even better to dig into the incredibly alienated ideas that led to their development (clue: Rachel P. Maines names the first chapter of The Technology of Orgasm “The Job Nobody Wanted”) I’m not at all encouraged that it’s being developed as a comedy!

For at least 2,000 years (and possibly more) physicians didn’t believe women were sexual beings at all. Hungry for children, yes, and willing to do whatever it took to have them too as well. But they decided to call symptoms we’d pretty quickly recognize as ordinary sexual frustration into a malaise they called “hysteria.” Their prescription? Vigorous massage of the vulva to produce what they called “hysterical paroxysms“ and we’d call, um, orgasms.

Through at least the middle of the 19th Century up to two thirds of all physician’s income derived from these repeated treatments of otherwise perfectly healthy women! Doctors themselves generally considered the practice lucrative but dull and repetitive.

The first vibrators were invented to relieve doctors (coughsexworkerscough) of the tedium by automating it.

I mean, don’t get me wrong — the possibilities for humor are sky high! For instance one of the early medical vibrators was steam powered! That’s funny. And once electricity made its way into homes electric vibrators were introduced after electric fans, teakettles, and toasters but before vacuum cleaners and the electric iron! That’s droll. And as far as Monty Pythonesque possibilities go, the contrast of bored, pedantic Eric Idle or John Cleese types carping away while attending heavily breathing, enthusiastic patients is comedy gold.

But…

But…

The people who cooked up vibrators were dead serious!

And finally I’m pretty sure an awful lot of them were Americans as well rather than British. For instance one of the biggest manufacturers of medical vibrators in the 19th Century was a company called the Chattanooga Vibrator Instrument Company.

Anyway, while I look forward to the movie (looks like a good cast for starters) I hope it provokes a little discussion of the actual history of our very weird attitudes towards sex, particularly women’s sexuality, as well.