Summary: The history of female hysteria and virbrators reveals much about the nature of science today, and the great challenge facing it. Read this fascinating story – and the astonishing rest of the story that follows.
The Technology of Orgasm:
“Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction
By Rachel P. Maines.
Johns Hopkins University Press (1999).
“From the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s, massaging female patients to orgasm was a staple of medical practice among Western physicians in the treatment of “hysteria,” an ailment once considered both common and chronic in women. Doctors loathed this time-consuming procedure and for centuries relied on midwives. Later, they substituted the efficiency of mechanical devices, including the electric vibrator, invented in the 1880s.
“In The Technology of Orgasm, Rachel Maines offers readers a stimulating, surprising, and often humorous account of hysteria and its treatment throughout the ages, focusing on the development, use, and fall into disrepute of the vibrator as a legitimate medical device.”
— From the publisher.
See the fun first chapter: “The Job Nobody Wanted” — massaging women’s gentials to organsm.
“Thorough, original, and surprising.”
— Sarah Boxer in the New York Times.
“Feminist scholarship exactly as it should be: a work that not only illuminates an astonishing bit of herstory, but does so with a neat balance of anger, wit and humor… A wonderful book.”
— Carol Lynn Mithers in L.A. Weekly.
“Exhaustively researched… decidedly offbeat.”
— Natalie Angier in the New York Times.
Wikipedia tells this fascinating story!
“She began researching and writing articles on the history of vibrators, the first one for the newsletter of the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life. The article caused her to lose her post as associate professor at Clarkson University in 1986. According to Maines, the university was convinced that the nature of her research would drive away benefactors and alumni donors.
“Three years later she submitted a more detailed article, “Socially Camouflaged Technologies: The Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator“, to Society and Technology {June 1989, ungated here}, the magazine of the IEEE Society on Social Implications of Technology. Initially, the IEEE thought the article was a joke perpetrated by the magazine’s editors and that there was no such person as Rachel Maines. However, after checking all the internal citations and Maines’s own background, the IEEE finally allowed the article to be published in the June 1989 edition of the magazine.
“Her book …won the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Award and was the inspiration for Sarah Ruhl‘s 2009 play In the Next Room and Tanya Wexler‘s 2011 film Hysteria. The book also formed the basis for Passion & Power, a 2007 documentary by Emiko Omori and Wendy Slick.”
Rachel P. Maines has PhD. in Applied History and Social Science. When the book was published, she worked at Cornell’s School of Hotel Administration as a Library Technical Processing Assistant. Since 2005, she has worked at Cornell as a Visiting Scholar (and since 2009, as a Visiting Scientist). See her website.
Trailer for Hysteria!
See Hysteria
The rest of the story
What a great story! Doctors using vibrators to stimulate women to organisms – to “cure” a weird disease. Unfortunately, not everybody was impressed with Maine’s research. Best of all, Maines work was a feminist triumph. Rebuttal of her work by real feminists shows her to be a patriarchal collaborator.
The first skeptical review I’ve found was Helen King’s “Galen and the widow: towards a history of therapeutic masturbation in ancient gynaecology” in Eugesta (a journal on Gender Studies in Antiquity), 2011.
“This paper offers a close reading of the ancient Greek and Roman texts which Rachel Maines …used as evidence for therapeutic masturbation in the ancient world, and thus presented as precursors for the vibrator. Examining the evidence …challenges her claims for the normality of massage to orgasm in Western medicine. While Maines herself has subsequently insisted that she proposed a ‘hypothesis’ rather than a ‘fact’, in the popular reception of her book this distinction has been almost entirely overlooked, leading to an obscuring of female agency – both as patients, and as healers.”
Even more pointed in its criticism is “Hysteria” by Sarah Jaffray at The Welcome Collection (a London museum about health), Aug 2015.
“All of these are simplifications, perhaps even pure misogyny. …So, where exactly did the myth of vibrators come from if the most famous hysterical doctor of the 19th century did not use them to treat patients? The source of this myth is Rachel Maines and her 1999 work The Technology of Orgasm (which seems to be the only source of this information). It is true that with the evolution and availability of electricity, vibrators were used by doctors to treat patients for all sorts of ailments. Electronic massage was used, but it is highly unlikely it was used {by doctors] to stimulate orgasm …”
Those were glancing salvoes. Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg of the Georgia Institute of Technology blast apart the core of Maine’s work: “A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm” in the Journal of Positive Sexuality, August 2018.
“The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel Maines is one of the most widely cited works on the history of sex and technology. Maines argues that Victorian physicians routinely used electromechanical vibrators to stimulate female patients to orgasm as a treatment for hysteria. She claims that physicians did not perceive the practice as sexual because it did not involve vaginal penetration. The vibrator was, according to Maines, a labor-saving technology to replace the well-established medical practice of clitoral massage for hysteria. This argument has been repeated almost verbatim in dozens of scholarly works, popular books and articles, a Broadway play, and a feature-length film.
“Although a few scholars have challenged parts of the book, no one has contested her central argument in the peer-reviewed literature. In this article, we carefully assess the sources cited in the book. We found no evidence in these sources that physicians ever used electromechanical vibrators to induce orgasms in female patients as a medical treatment. The success of Technology of Orgasm serves as a cautionary tale for how easily falsehoods can become embedded in the humanities.”
The replication crisis
The replication crisis in science is potentially one of the big events of our time. Like many such, it is almost invisible. Like David Hume’s discovery in the 18th century that cause must precede its effect.
The foundation of modern institutional science is rotten, so that only the oldest and strongest of the sciences remain fully functional. Some of the worst affected are in the physical sciences, such as much biomedical research. Time will tell which others get added to that list (I vote for climate science). Many of the social sciences are deeply infected.
But scientists are fighting back. That’s the significance of the kerfuffle described above. Even the papers most ideologically pleasing to the Leftist academia are being questioned – occasionally. It is a great sign. All we can do is applaud, so let’s do that. And watch.
For More Information
Please like us on Facebook, follow us on Twitter. For more information see all posts about experts (our reliance on and trust of them), especially these…
- Our confidence in science is crumbling. Why? How can we fix this?
- A key to understanding the news: the unexpected rules in our age of wonders.
- Important: The replication crisis in science has just begun. It will be big.
Useful books about sex.
Sex in History
The War on Sex
