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.