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.

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.

Photo by Flickr user bcmacsac1. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Coy Pink of No need to be coy says

I’ve always been slightly annoyed about a certain segment of sex toys out there.
Image from Babeland.com. Click for
(non-affiliate) product info.Animal-themed sex toys, to be precise.  What genius decided that women need or want their sex toys to be modeled after animals?  Do the powers-that-be think if a sex toy is shaped like a bunny or a dolphin it will be more appealing to women?  Do they think it’s easier for a shy lady to purchase a dildo with a face on it rather than one that is more life-like?  Even if that is true, how insulting is that?  All of us silly, giggling girls couldn’t POSSIBLY purchase a realistic looking vibrator, NOOOO...  it must be cute looking! </sarcasm>  I, for one, am not a fan of any toy that resembles an animal.  Apparently, I’m not alone…

She said it here.

Oh, and meanwhile TBK of The Beautiful Kind has remarks along the same lines in her review of a different sex toy. (Emphasis mine.)

I’ve never had anything like this up there before, just normal size dicks and smaller butt plugs. It measures in at 6.5 inches in length, which you wouldn’t think is too bad, but it’s bulky, and I was intimidated. It’s like a tapeworm for Paul Bunyan!

AND it even has a FACE – someone in Germany has a sense of humor…this is a product of Fun Factory, an innovative European sex toy company. I am GROOVING on their funky toy line, let me tell you.

Read her review here.

My cached version of photo from TBK’s post.Here’s how I think vibrators and similar devices got those cutesy animal looks and faces. I remember reading years ago, from something by, I think, Susie Bright, that animal shapes and/or those unnerving little smiley faces were originally intended to get around laws against “marital aids” in the country they were first manufactured and/or first became popular.

Back when vibrators first started getting popular in America there were basically two kinds, smooth candle-shaped and “Swedish” ones that strapped to your hand. They worked… ok but they really were adapted from tools for old-fashioned body massage.

Oh yeah, and the candle-style ones were available mainly through mall-based “Spencer Gift” type novelty toy stores which, I’m guessing, meant they had to be indirect about their intended use.

Anyway, when the new ones, specifically the highly-iconic Rabbit, from Japan showed up in the early progressive toy stores (the then-independent Good Vibrations had them very early on) it was a revelation for a lot of people. Sure, Japanese modesty standards are very strong but also very different from our so, for instance, they weren’t particularly shy to design tools specifically for actual masturbation… but they still put bunny ears and little smileys on them.

And naturally when those non-toy “toys” took off here other manufacturers imitated the designs, bunny-ears or dolphin heads and all, without, I think, wondering why. Once manufacturers stopped imitating and started doing their own thing we started getting really specific toys like the Rock Chick (not for everyone but very effective for some people) or the NJoy and Lelo design lines of vibrators and insertables that are beautiful, very functional, well-crafted and… neither toy nor “realistic imitation” of any kind of anatomy whether it’s animal, vegetable, genital, or… toddler toys.**

Anyway, that’s where I think the little animal effects on a lot of toys came from.

—-

A not-irrelevant nerd note: along the same lines of rote imitation of features like bunny ears on popular products, you know how a lot of old “hot rod” race cars were always really jacked up in the back? I grew up in old bootlegger country — the original “Thunder Road” of ballad and movie fame went through both the town I was born in and the one where I grew up! More than one old-timer car mechanic told me they were jacked up not to improve performance but so that they’d look normal when driven with sometimes hundreds of gallons of illegal booze in the back. And yeah, on days off when the drivers would unload and race them those cars won… but it was the size of engines and skill of the drivers, not the height of the (unloaded) trunks that mattered. Nevertheless, 50 years later the misperception about functionality lingers… as does, evidently, the impulse to keep putting cartoon eyes on Coy’s and TBK’s sex toys “marital aids” sex and/or masturbation tools.

[** I added that last clause to make it more clear that “cute” and “anatomically correct” aren’t the only alternatives. —fl]

Screenshot via Feministing, hosted by PhotoBucket.

I first noticed the Right Wing’s decision to demonize Hillary Clinton some time in very late 1991 or early 1992. Although it must surely have begun warming up before then I associate it with the moment of their collective ZOMG-end-of-the-world flip-out over her post-election name change from “Hillary Clinton” to the scary-fezemeninist “Hillary Rodham Clinton”

And as I fretted last month they’ve wasted no time trying to smear Michelle Obama just as they would have Elizabeth Edwards, or Jill Tracey Jacobs (Joe Biden, not sure if she’s taken his last name), or Barbara Flavin (Bill Richardson, ditto), Elizabeth Kucinich or even long-shot Rita Gravel.

As I’ve said, um, a lot since at least 1992, if you want to be a twit attack someone for her gender, or race, or orientation, or whatever instead of something substantive. The right wing, intellectually as well as morally bankrupt since ketchup as a vegetable, have nothing but twit.

This has worked because, evidently, until at least 2004 the center and left have had nothing but doofus. Not so much any more.

Jessica Valenti of Feministing says

Fox’s Senior Vice President of Programming Bill Shine told the Politico that the producer responsible for labeling Michelle Obama “Obama’s baby mama” in a segment “exercised poor judgment.” Uh, yeah, I’d say so. (So much for a heartfelt apology.)

Via the newly-launched Michelle Obama Watch, created by What About Our Daughters. (Add it to your blogrolls, and get involved in keeping tabs on the media!)

I copied her entire post from here.

I’ve added the site to my blogroll. Even if you’re not a fan of the Obamas, if you’d rather they were engaged on a policy rather than personal level you might consider doing likewise. (Twittery, by the way, is not limited to ‘wingers — the left is starting to become disgracefully twittish about John McCain’s age and I’d hate for that to interfere with his enormous lapses and gaps in substance.)

[Oh yeah, and “baby momma?” Seriously? What’s worse is a lot of people are arguing “but they’re married,” and “but she’s educated,” and… and… and… yeah, and they’re playing into the FOX News frame. Instead “baby momma” is only, and entirely, and inextricably a) racist and b) sexist. No other “talking points” are necessary whether you’re talking about… well… anybody! —fl]