THE TECHNOLOGY OF ORGASM: "HYSTERIA," THE VIBRATOR, AND WOMEN'S SEXUAL SATISFACTION

Natural Health, April, 1999 by Anna Watson

THE TECHNOLOGY OF ORGASM; "HYSTERIA," THE VIBRATOR, AND WOMEN'S SEXUAL SATISFACTION By Rachel P. Maines; The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999; $22.

The history of Western medicine is in many ways the history of women's alienation from their bodies. From menstruation to menopause, from pregnancy to childbirth, women's natural processes have for centuries been defined as problems that need medical solutions. Perhaps nowhere has this been more dramatically illustrated than in the pathologization of women's sexuality. In The Technology of Orgasm, Rachel Maines, Ph.D., a historian, provides us with an astonishing, amusing, and at times painful history of orgasm in women.

Unwilling to acknowledge that conventional sex did not result in orgasm for most women, doctors for millennia used genital massage to bring on "paroxysms" to relieve a "disease" called hysteria--a cluster of symptoms that included excitability, mood swings, insomnia, and restlessness. Near the end of the last century, doctors began to find manual manipulation too slow to be profitable and looked to technology for help in speeding things up. They turned to the vibrator. By the turn of the century a doctor could take his pick, from the most humble model driven by foot pedals to the top of the line Chattanooga Vibrator. In 1952, the American Psychiatric Association, recognizing that sexual frustration was not pathology, removed hysteria from its roster.

Maines' early work on this subject met with ridicule and disbelief from the medical and academic community. In fact, Clarkson University in New York cited the fact that she'd redirected her research interest from the technology of sewing machines to vibrator technology as a reason for not renewing her contract. Responding to an article by Maines in a scholarly journal, one doctor accused her of writing "more to titillate than to enlighten." However, in her painstakingly researched (for 122 pages of text there are 47 pages of notes) and thoroughly engaging book, Maines proves that both effects are possible.