The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology) (Paperback)

In witty and humorous language, demonstrating that Maines has mastered post-modernism and even found a use for it, she lampoons men's refusal to recognize that for most women, insertion of a male penis into the vagina followed by a male orgasm is not necessarily a complete sexual experience. In droll tones, Maines discusses the long-held male claim, supported by what was called science, that if a woman did not achieve an orgasm from sexual penetration by a male, she was not "normal," although some 80% or more of women were thus "abnormal." And never mind that 80% of a population cannot, by definition, be abnormal.

Maines is a good historian, and she recounts the historical medicalization of female orgasm, terming its inducement "the job nobody wanted." For hundreds of years, physicians or midwives were paid to stimulate manually the clitoris of women suffering from "hysteria" and thereby to bring about a therapeutic paroxism. Since this was a time-consuming task, doctors turned to hydrotherapy and then to electric powered vibrators to shorten the time necessary to induce such relief on each patient. HMOs would be proud.

This is a book on a serious topic in western cultural history that could have been androphobic or, worse, terribly dull. Instead,it charms and educates with wit and erudition. I hated to see it end.

The dustjacket of Rachel P. Maines's new book, THE TECHNOLOGY OF ORGASM: "HYSTERIA", THE VIBRATOR & SEXUAL SATISFACTION, reads as follows:

-*-*- From the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s, massaging "hysterical" female patients to orgasm was a staple of medical practice among Western physicians. Hysteria...was thought to be the consequence of sexual deprivation. Doctors performed the "routine chore" of relieving hysterical patients' symptoms with manual genital massage until the woman reached orgasm, or as it was known under clinical conditions, the "hysterical paroxysm". The vibrator first emerged as an electromechanical medical instrument in direct response to demand from physicians who, far from enjoying the implementation of pelvic massage, sought every opportunity to substitute the services of midwives and, later, the efficiency of mechanical devices... Invented in the late 1880s by a British physician, the vibrator was popular with turn-of-the-century doctors as a quick, efficient cure for hysteria which neither fatigued the therapist nor demanded skills which were difficult to acquire... Hysterical women presented a large and lucratve clientele for doctors, and vibrators reduced, from about one hour to ten minutes, the time required for a physician to produce results, significantly increasing the number of patients he could treat in the course of a single workday. These women were ideal patients in that they never recovered nor died from their condition but continued to require regular medical "treatment". -*-*-

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That male doctors were freely encouraged to perform sexual acts upon female patients is startling when compared to today's more regulated climate, and it inspires these observations:

* The vibrator was not an amorous invention - no Cupid's dart - but a labour-saving clinical instrument to substitute for undesirable professional tedium the more desirable swellings of the wallet. Improved productivity is good for business.

* Doctors were well-rewarded, respectable gigolos, weary as whores of the endless daily parade of hungry genitals and their distressed owners. Today, they would go to jail.

* Activities that otherwise would be considered odd, transgressive, or exciting are permitted when they can be defined as, or safely packaged within, "medicine" or "science", controlled and validated by bourgeois professionals. This can be liberating as well as oppressive: clinical authority can licence the forbidden while defending the status quo, such as relations between the sexes. The clinic is where we pay strangers to intrude intimately into all our velvet cavities - wearing latex - bringing fresh meaning to the phrase, "the doctor is in". Quickly nurse, the proctoscope!

* The doctor-patient relationship oppressed both parties yet remains charged with voyeuristic eroticism for the reader, paradoxically and perversely enhanced by references to the austere boredom of the clinician. The erotic relationship is toned by the pornographic whiff produced through the opposing tensions of: dominance and submission; demand and supply; buying and selling; need and numbness; control and abandon; restraint and convulsion; energy and fatigue; humiliation and relief; shame and paroxysm; tender, desiring flesh, and the subtly-perverse coupling of mechanical insult and pleasure. The clinical drama delivers a secret misogyny to be savoured as a thrilling, guilty vice by both sexes - a stolen cream bun for the soul. Spanking cures this sort of thing.

* All of this occurred under conditions in which the only female orgasm recognised as "true" was the sometimes elusive one produced vaginally through intercourse with a male. The more independent and easily achieved clitoral orgasm was belittled as secondary and "immature" [see Freud]. This attitude supported male sexual necessity, authority, and privilege: only a cock can make a real woman of you - it's a magic wand. Today, women buy their own magic wands and connect them to the power station, harnessing those giant turbines and nuclear rods to their appetites.

* It is widely recognised that some mental conditions are treated by electric shock but less broadly advertised is that others were alleviated by electric cock.