As you probably know, the Supreme Court recently left Alabama
s (and at least two other state’s) laws against the sale (but, at least so far, not possession) of sex toys. Michelle Tsai of Slate.com has details and hints, I think, at a possible way out (emphasis mine):

Earlier this week, the Supreme Court declined to hear a nine-year-old case challenging Alabama’s ban on the sale of sex toys. The state law prohibits the distribution of “any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for anything of pecuniary value.” The law, though, does make exceptions for “a bona fide medical, scientific, educational, legislative, judicial, or law enforcement purpose.” What medical purposes do sex toys serve?

She said it here.

Now the mistake I think Tsai makes is that she tries to address this backwards law, and the Supreme Court’s backwards choice to leave it standing, with forward-looking answers: contemporary medical uses for sex toys include toning pelvic muscles pre- and postpartum, increasing blood circulation, rehabilitating nerve endings after, say, prostate surgery.

But like I say, those are 20th and 21st-Century medical solutions in the face of legally-mandated 19th Century social convention.

My feeling is that the most appropriate solution to the “non-medical stimulation of the genitals for anything of pecuniary value” (that even sounds 19th-Century, doesn’t it?) is to propose the standard 19th-Century medical treatment for what was once the most commonly treated medical condition, viz (isn’t “viz” a great 19th-Century-sounding word?) “female hysteria.”

Now yes, yes, as sources as diverse as Rachel P. Maines’s The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) to Elizabeth Abbott’s A History of Celibacy to Eherenreich and English’s For Her Own Good: Two Centuries of the Experts Advice to Women, the medical condition of “female hysteria” was based on the beyond-daft “no-sex” class notion that women, though passionless and disinterested in sex, nevertheless needed regular (often monthly, sometimes daily), vigorous massage of their genitals in order to keep hysteria at bay.

Such massage was required only to induce “hysterical paroxysms” in women and certainly wasn’t sexual at since at no point were cocks involved in the proceedings. (And after all how could anything be sexual if no cocks were involved?!?) In fact, as Maines documents fairly clearly, the doctors who sometimes spent most of their days inducing such “paroxysms,” a target=”_blank” href=“http://www.realadultsex.com/archives/2007/05/the_nosex_class_the_job_nobody_wanted.html”>pecuniary value no less, were even further detached from their work than the most jaded street prostitutes of contemporary folklore.

In fact American doctors, especially, were so put out with all the handjobs they had to dispense that they invented… mechanical vibrators to do the work for them! (I don’t have a copy of Maines’ book but I’m almost positive some of the earliest patents for vibrators were issued to physicians from Georgia, Texas, and, I’m pretty sure, Alabama. You’d want to verify that before you quoted me, but I’m pretty sure I’m right about at least two of those three states.)

So! Finally, yes, yes, by the very early 1900s the diagnosis, and treatment, of “female hysteria” started heading down the drain and by the 1950s it was almost unheard of. But! The laws promoted by the State of Alabama and unrevisited by the Supreme Court hark back (“hark back” is yet another 19th-Century turn of phrase, eh?) to the days when enterprising 19th-Century southern physicians were busily inventing vibrating medical devices to relieve their patients of hysteria and other “feminine complaints.”

The law, the failure to repeal it, and the attitudes behind them are bitter, bitter lemons but, it seems to me, a fairly sweet… or at least highly ironic… lemonade might be squeezed from it.

If it can be established that the original devices were designed or manufactured in the south, with its desperate attachment to history and glory, then so much the better.