Photo by Flickr user figleaf (hey, that’s me.) Used under a Creative Commons license.

Dodai of Jezebel says

Something Once Regarded As Exotic Has Become Commonplace

“According to the first academic, peer-reviewed studies of vibrator use, it is nearly as common an appliance in American households as the drip coffee maker or toaster oven.”

She said it here.

By coincidence at almost the exact moment she posted her piece I was reviewing a photo I’d taken in the Electricity Hall at the Smithsonian’s Museum of American History during our recent family vacation in Washington, D.C. The photo was of a bunch of early American home appliances. Among them were now-100-year-old fans, toasters, waffle irons, and mixers from the turn of the 20th Century. But, oddly, no 100-year-old vibrators.

Which might not sound like much of an omission.

Except that, as Rachel Maines meticulously detailed in The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology), electric-motor driven vibrators were among the first mass-produced appliances sold in American homes.

The electrification of the home proceeded rapidly after the introduction of electric lights in 1878, and predictably, women were significant consumers of electric appliances. The first home appliance to be electrified was the sewing machine, in 1889, followed in the next ten years by the fan, the teakettle, the toaster, and the vibrator. The last preceded the electric vacuum cleaner by some nine years, the electric iron by ten, and the electric frying pan by more than a decade, possibly reflecting consumer priorities.

...

A one-liner in the June 1908 Review of Reviews ... cautions readers against “imprudence” and “excess in action” when using vibrators…

...

Women were advised [in advertising] that the “American [brand] Vibrator … can be used by yourself in the privacy of dressing room or boudoir, and furnishes every woman with the very essence of perpetual youth.”

Source: Pgs.100-103

Oh yeah, and

During the first two decades of [the 20th Century], the vibrator began to be marketed as a home appliance through advertising in such periodicals as … Modern Woman, Hearst’s McClure’s, Woman’s Home Companion, and Modern Pricilla. The device was marketed mainly to women as a health and relaxation aid, in ambiguous phrases such as “all the pleasures of yought… will throb within you.” When marketed to men, vibrators were recommeded as gifts for women that would benefit the male givers by restoring bright eyes and pink cheeks to their female consorts. ... An especially versatile vibrator line was illustrated in the Sears, Roebuck and Company Electrical Goods catalog for 1918. [An] advertisement headed “Aids That Every Woman Appreciates” shows a vibrator attachment for a home motor that also drove attachments for churning, mixing, beating, grinding, buffing, and operating a fan.”

Source: Pgs 19-20

In other words, contrary to Dodai’s sources as appliances go the electric toaster predated the vibrator but not the coffee maker.

The slip-up seems natural because just a few years later Freud came along and the 2500 year old practice of treating “hysteria” massaging the vulva to the point of “hysterical paroxysm” was replaced by… talk therapy to treat “frigidity” and “nymphomania,” leaving women between roughly 1925 and 1975 largely in the lurch.

So I finally bought a copy of Rachel Maines’ The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology).

I’d been unwilling to part with $45.00 US for the hardback version but the paperback is only $12. I’m sorry I waited. Maines is deeply radical. And insightful.

Now what most people seem to know about Maine’s book is that vibrators were invented by doctors who were tired of giving women handjobs as treatment for “feminine hysteria.” Which from roughly 400 B.C. to 1920 was what medical doctors had spent most of their days doing! And complaining about it! Amused articles frequently appear with lots of quaint photos, etchings, and Sears Catalogue ads for turn-of-the-20th-Century housewives too.

And I’ve mentioned her book before, here and here in the context of 2400 years of physicians as sexworkers.

But that’s pretty much all you hear.

Just as Whipple, Perry, Ladas’s original book The G Spot: And Other Discoveries About Human Sexuality was really only peripherally about “squirting,” Technology of Orgasm is only peripherally about vibrators.

In fact, though the two books start from very different places, in a big way they’re both addressing the same problem: penis-in-vagina intercourse until male ejaculation is… a pretty lousy definition of sex.

Maines calls is the “Androcentric Model of Sexuality” and defines it as

[T]hree essential steps: preparation for penetration (“foreplay”), penetration, and male orgasm. Sexual activity that does not involve at least the last two has not been popularly or medically (and for that matter legally) regarded as “the real thing.” The female is expected to reach orgasm during coitus, but if she does not the legitimacy of the act as “real sex” is not thereby diminished.

...

When marital sex was unsatisfying and masturbation discouraged or forbidden, female sexuality, I suggest, asserted itself through one of the few acceptable outlets: the symptoms of the hysteroneurasthenic disorders.

In other words whereas for masturbation women could have their clitorises burnt off with carbolic acid as Dr. Harvey (Corn Flakes) Kellogg recommended it was perfectly fine, routine-procedure, move-along-now to give women “hysterical paroxysms” as treatment for a “disease” first diagnosed no later than the year 400 B.C.!

This purported disease [hysteria —fl] 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.

...

The historically androcentric and pro-natal model of healthy, “normal” heterosexuality is penetration of the vagina by a penis to male orgasm. It has been clinically noted in many periods that this behavioral framework fails to consistently produce orgasm in more than half of the female population.”

This relegated the task of relieving the symptoms of female arousal to medical treatment, which defined female orgasm under clinical conditions as the crisis of an illness, the “hysterical paroxysm.”

Two thousand four hundred years we’ve had a paradigm of sex that thought horniness was a disease, that shortness of breath, a flushed bosom, a wet pussy, moist palms, plump lips, reddened cheeks, a distracted gaze… in other words all the signs of sexual arousal were symptoms of that disease, and that as those — literal! — hired hands plied their fingers and palms over women’s vulvas, between syrupy lips, inside their heated, clasping vaginas to roll they measured the moans, the sighs, the initial trembles and the ultimate convulsions as treatment!

And why? Because the alternative would require admitting that women, since they’re people and all, are sexual beings. And to admit that would be bad because…

...because

...because?

I dunno. That’s what’s bothering me.

For most of those years — if not all 2,400 years then certainly for the last 240, men have lamented fiercely that women aren’t interested in sex. That they prefer “love.” That even if women start out eager for sex their interest pretty quickly peters out.

A passable mechanical alternative?

Lemme tell ya, if I, and every other man I knew, had only a 15% chance of reliably having an orgasm during sex I might start sublimating it with mytho-romantic stories involving princes and living happily ever after. And it sure as hell wouldn’t be much of a substitute. And I gotta say I’m not dead positive it would take me all four weeks of that first “honey moon” to decide it wasn’t exactly what I’d been led to expect. And finally, if I wasn’t allowed to masturbate, or ask my partner for something else besides the old whatever-got-her-off-but-not-me I’d get a little hysterical too, ok?

More to the point, any requests from my partner for more sex would probably fall on deaf ears. Especially if doctors, weary of relieving my “hysteria” by hand still managed to provide a a passable mechanical alternative.

Living a lie is stupid.

Living a lie that the only sex that counts is “penis in vagina until male ejaculation” is particularly insulting. Insulting to women who’ve had to put up with it, even to go along with it. Insulting to men that our egos should be so fragile and small as to need such a lie to be gone along with!

And catastrophic when you consider the — literally! — man made belief in the scarcity of sex!

Anyway, “tee-hee” factors in the popular press notwithstanding, The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) is a damning indictment of all that. I’d call it critical documentation of the pathetic depth of the “no-sex” class paradigm. If you see it on the bookshelves check it out.