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In short, the tale has become a commonplace one in how people think about Victorian sex. And according to a
contentious new paper, it may also be almost totally false.
There is absolutely no evidence that Victorian doctors used vibrators to stimulate orgasm in women as a medical technique, asserts the paper, written by two historians at Georgia Tech. “Manual massage of female genitals,” they write, “was never a routine medical treatment for hysteria.”
“There’s no evidence for it,” says Hallie Lieberman, an author of both the new paper and
Buzz, a popular history of sex toys. “It’s inaccurate.”
The scientific paper is obsolete.
It’s not hard to see how the idea spread. The entire story of Victorian vibrators originates from the work of one scholar:
Rachel Maines, a historian and a former visiting scientist at Cornell University. Her 1999 book,
The Technology of Orgasm—described at the time as a “secret history of female sexual arousal”—argued that clitoral massage was used as a medical technique for centuries, from the time of Hippocrates to the modern day.
But that’s just not true, according to Lieberman and
Eric Schatzberg, the chair of the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech. There is scant evidence that orgasms were widely understood as a cure for female hysteria, and there’s even less evidence that Victorians used vibrators to induce orgasm as a medical technique, they say. “Maines fails to cite a single source that openly describes use of the vibrator to massage the clitoral area,” their paper says. “None of her English-language sources even mentions production of ‘paroxysms’ by massage or anything else that could remotely suggest an orgasm.”
Instead, they argue, Maines conceals this lack of support by relying on a “wink and nod” approach to primary sourcing and by “padding her argument with a mass of tangential citations.”
In an interview, Maines said that she has heard variations of the paper’s criticism before—and that her argument in The Technology of Orgasm was really only a “hypothesis,” anyway. “I never claimed to have evidence that this was really the case,” she said. “What I said was that this was an interesting hypothesis, and as [Lieberman] points out—correctly, I think—people fell all over it. It was ripe to be turned into mythology somehow. I didn’t intend it that way, but boy, people sure took it, ran with it.”
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www.theatlantic.com
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