The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, The Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction

note; I list this article under practice because this amazing history reveals how conditioned human minds are by culture in approaching sexuality. The same is true of Taoist sexual practices – your Yi/intention and belief will have a powerful effect on the result. Also why its so important to focus on “recirculate sexual energy” rather than “stop ejaculation”.
And I can recommend the film, the Road to Wellville, very funny and historically quite accurate. – Michael

THE ASTONISHING HISTORY OF VIBRATORS
By Michael Castleman
TeeBeeDee
May 18, 2007

http://www.tbd.com/content/article/basic_article.article:::love_life_history
_vibrators

Mention vibrators, and most people think of women’s sexual pleasure. But
that was the furthest thing from the minds of the male doctors who invented
them more than a century ago. They were more interested in a labor-saving
device to spare their own hands the fatigue caused by treating “female
hysteria.” This condition involved a number of vague, chronic complaints in
adult women, including: anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness,
erotic fantasies, and moisture inside the vagina. Female hysteria was
actually women’s sexual frustration. The history of vibrators is a strange
tale that provides insights into both the history of sex toys, and cultural
notions about women’s sexuality.

Until the 20th century, American and European men believed that women were
incapable of sexual desire and pleasure. Women of that era basically
concurred. They were socialized to believe that “ladies” had no sex drive,
and were merely passive receptacles for men’s unbridled lust, which they had
to endure to hang on to their husbands and have children. Not surprisingly,
these beliefs led to a great deal of sexual frustration on the part of
women.

Over the centuries, doctors prescribed various remedies for hysteria (named
for the Greek for “uterus”). In the 13th century, physicians advised women
to use dildos. In the 16th century, they told married hysterics to encourage
the lust of their husbands. Unfortunately, that probably didn’t help too
many wives, because modern sexuality research clearly shows that most women
rarely experience orgasm from intercourse, but need direct clitoral
stimulation. For hysteria unrelieved by husbandly lust, and for widows, and
single and unhappily married women, doctors advised horseback riding, which,
in some cases, provided enough clitoral stimulation to trigger orgasm.

But many women found little relief from horseback riding, and by the 17th
century, dildos were less of an option because the arbiters of decency had
succeeded in demonizing masturbation as “self-abuse.” Fortunately, an
acceptable, reliable treatment emerged: having a doctor or midwife “massage
the genitalia with one finger inside, using oil of lilies or crocus” as a
lubricant. With enough genital massage, hysterical women could experience
sudden, dramatic relief through “paroxysm,” which virtually no medical
authority called orgasm, because, of course, everyone knew that women did
not have sexual feelings, so they could not possibly experience sexual
climax.

By the 19th century, physician-assisted paroxysm was firmly entrenched in
Europe and the U.S. It was a godsend for many doctors. At that time, the
public viewed physicians with tremendous distrust. Most doctors had little
or no scientific training, and they had few treatments that worked. But
thanks to genital massage, hysteria was a condition doctors could treat with
great success. This produced large numbers of grateful women, who returned
faithfully and regularly, eager to pay for additional treatment.

But treating hysteria also had a downside for doctors‹ tired fingers from
all that massage. Nineteenth-century medical journals lamented that many
hysterics taxed their doctors’ stamina. Physicians complained of having
trouble maintaining therapeutic massage long enough to produce the desired
result. (For a look at 19th century treatment of female hysteria, see the
film, The Road to Wellville.)

Necessity being the mother of invention, physicians began experimenting with
mechanical substitutes for their hands. They tried a number of genital
massage contraptions, among them water-driven devices (the forerunners of
today’s shower massagers), and steam-driven pumping dildos. But these
machines were cumbersome, messy, often unreliable, and sometimes dangerous.

In the late 19th century, electricity became available for home use and the
first electric appliances were invented: the sewing machine, the electric
fan, and the toaster. These were followed soon after, around 1880, by the
electromechanical vibrator, patented by an enterprising British physician,
Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville. The electric vibrator was invented more than
a decade before the vacuum cleaner and the electric iron.

Electric vibrators were an immediate hit. They produced paroxysm quickly,
safely, reliably, and inexpensively‹and as often as women might desire it.
By the dawn of the 20th century, doctors had lost their monopoly on
vibrators and hysteria treatment as women began buying the devices
themselves. Advertisements appearing in such magazines as “Women’s Home
Companion,” “Needlecraft,” and the Amazon.com of that era, the “Sears &
Roebuck Catalogue” (“…such a delightful companion….all the pleasures of
youth…will throb within you….”).

Electricity gave women vibrators, but ironically, within a few decades,
electricity almost took the devices away from them. With the invention of
motion pictures, vibrators started turning up in pornography and gained an
unsavory reputation. By the 1920s, they had become socially unacceptable.
Vibrator ads disappeared from the consumer media. From the late 1920s and
well into the 1970s, they were difficult to find.

But some inventions are so useful that they survive despite attempts at
suppression. Today, an estimated 25 percent of women own vibrators, and 10
percent of American couples use them in partner sex. Just think, we owe the
world’s most popular sex toy to physicians’ fatigued fingers.

For more on the history of vibrators, read “The Technology of Orgasm:
‘Hysteria,’ The Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction,” by Rachel Maines
(Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999).