“Unlocking Pleasure: The Surprising Truth Behind the Great Vibrator Myth That Everyone Gets Wrong!”
Even more questionable is Maines’s claim that Victorian doctors viewed clitoral massage as non-sexual and thus unproblematic. By the 16th Century, when marriage and regular intercourse were commonly prescribed to release built-up “female seed”, physicians such as Pieter van Foreest and Gioanni Matteo da Grado vigorously opposed any substitute procedure such as the manual manipulation of the genitals by either the patient or a doctor. Such manipulation was seen as explicitly sexual, and only recommended as a last resort – and even then, it was only ever performed by female midwives, not male doctors. Thus, the claim that Victorian doctors 300 years later would be unaware of the sexual nature of clitoral massage is patently absurd. In The Technology of Orgasm, Maines herself even states that:
“Theodore Thomas, for example, wrote in 1891 that the purpose of the clitoris was ‘to furnish to the female the nervous erethrism which is necessary to a perfect performance and completion of the sexual act’ and went on to observe that orgasm could be produced by clitoral stimulation ‘outside of intercourse’”
Indeed, that vibrators could be used for sexual stimulation was well-understood by contemporary doctors like the amusingly-named American gynaecologist James Craven Wood, who wrote in 1917:
“The greatest objection to vibration thus applied is that in overly sensitive patients it is liable to cause sexual excitement… [but if] the vibratode is kept well back from the clitoris, there is but little danger of causing such excitement.”
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