The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction by Rachel P. Maines (Johns Hopkins Press, 1999) 181 pp. $22.00 US

Did you know...

That vibrators were developed in response to the medical profession's desire for a faster, technological, "therapeutic" means of bringing women suffering from "hysteria" to "paroxysm"?

Rachel Maines' pioneering research into the development of these electrical therapies uncovers this important chapter in the history of women, medicine and sexuality. Maines traces the provenance of hysteria theory from its earliest recording in Antiquity through to the mid-twentieth century, a provenance which secured the patholization of, not only the female body and intellect, but of female sexuality and desire. This is set within a context of androcentric western sexuality which stipulates the primacy of penal penetration as the defining act of sexual satisfaction. Without it, there is no sexual act. (Sound familiar?)

Maines' study is centred around the quintessential feminine disease - hysteria - not only fascinating in its manifestation but crucial to the history of women and health care. Early therapies involved manual pelvic stimulation, often performed by midwives upon the recommendation of medical men. In the nineteenth century, hysteria emerged as "the" disease of record for women and brought forth controversial and cruel therapies advocated by the male dominated medical establishment, perhaps the best known of which is the rest cure, advocated by Silas Weir Mitchell and the subject of Charlotte Perkins Gilman's The Yellow Wallpaper. Heroic measures involving the vaginal insertion of leeches and the removal of ovaries suggest cure possibilities currently in vogue. Pelvic stimulation therefore, emerges as an attractive, alternative therapy. However, with the demise of midwifery in the late nineteenth century, medical men where left to take the task in hand, and many did not want it. Electrical stimulation, it was discovered, could cut therapy time from 1 hour to 10 minutes and large floor model machines such as the Chatanooga Vibrator were created for and clearly marketed to the medical profession. Within decades this technology expanded to spa operators and by the turn-of-the-century was being offered directly to women through the pages of women's needlework magazines. The vibrator's appearance in a 1920s erotic film coincides with its fall from grace, only to resurface in the 1960s as a sex toy, rehabilitated by the sexual revolution.

One question dogged my understanding throughout this reading: How could the medical establishment not know, not name, their acts? Maines provides an answer by highlighting the rigidity of a masculine model of sexual satisfaction centred upon penetration and the primacy of the penis. However, by minimizing the pro-active position taken by women suffering from "hysteria", Maines lets go a valuable opportunity to counter the prevalence of penetration. I envision hundreds of "hysterics" undergoing a stimulation cure, some in the comfort of their own homes, others at doctors' offices or spa retreats, receiving stimulation to "crisis." As Maines slyly suggests, perhaps many doctors were ignorant of the effect because their wives had never experienced an orgasm. Could anything be more emblematic of nineteenth century western understanding of female sexuality than that the men involved were distasteful of the task and ignorant of its significance?

M.S.