Jill McDevitt explores why something as natural and necessary as sex is so taboo
SINCE antiquity, women have been diagnosed with a medical condition called hysteria, the symptoms of which include “heaviness of the genitals,” “depression,” and “a tendency to cause trouble,” among others. Treatment included “pelvic manipulations” either by water pressure or a doctor’s hands until the woman experienced a “paroxysm,” described in medical textbooks as “uncontrollable shaking.”
Today we know this “hysteria” to be sexual frustration, as a millennia of women were aroused and then left unsatisfied by traditional intercourse. The “pelvic manipulation” treatment referred to doctors rubbing their patients on just the right spot, and the “uncontrollable shaking”? That would be an orgasm.
Treating hysteria with water pressure was messy, and a pelvic massage was tedious and time consuming. In 1869, at the height of the Industrial Revolution, a physician named Dr George Taylor invented a machine that could help women reach “paroxysm.” Dr Taylor’s invention was called The Manipulator and was a wood-and-metal, steam-powered, coal-fired device that took up an entire room in his doctor’s office. The vibrator was born.
In 1902 the vibrator moved from the doctor’s office to the home with The Hamilton Beach Company’s patent of the first electric vibrator, making it the fifth home appliance to be electrified, even before the vacuum cleaner or refrigerator. Hamilton Beach is still in the small appliance business and is known today for their blenders and toasters. The history section of their website ignores their sex toy past and claims the company was started in 1904, two years after they patented the vibrator.
Once vibrators were available for retail sale, they were extremely popular despite the expense (over $300 in 2011 dollars). Like any consumer product, vibrator advertisements appeared in magazines and newspapers in the early 1900s. Sears Roebuck sold vibrators in their catalog in 1916 and advertised them as “aids that every woman appreciates.”
By 1917, there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes, but porn blew the cover off “hysteria” when masturbation with hysteria-treatment devices began showing up in stag films in the 1920s. Ads disappeared from magazines and newspapers and vibrators were taken off the market. But that doesn’t mean they weren’t being purchased – back massagers, backscratchers, hair brushes and even a vibrating vacuum cleaner attachment were popular until the sexual revolution of the 1960s.
Jill McDevitt holds a Masters degree in human sexuality and is currently completing her PhD, which will make her the only person in the country with three degrees in the field. She is the proprietor of Feminique Boutique on Church Street. Her book, Fighting the Crusade Against Sex: Being Sex-Positive in a Sex-Negative World, is due out in November.
