“Unlocking Pleasure: The Surprising Truth Behind the Great Vibrator Myth That Everyone Gets Wrong!”
Furthermore, of the sources Maines cites in support of this claim, only one explicitly recommended using electrotherapeutic devices on the vulva, a 1909 book by female physician May Cushman Rice. However, Rice was not referring to treating hysteria, but rather to the use of high-frequency electrodes to treat vulvitis, inflammation of the vulva. A few pages later, she suggested treating vaginismus (vaginal muscular spasms) by applying internal vaginal electrodes. Again, Rice never mentioned hysteria or hinted at anything that could be interpreted as sexual stimulation. As with the other sources we discuss, Rice’s work lends no support to Maines’ core claims.”
If, as Maines claims, Victorian doctors saw vaginal penetration as a prerequisite for sexual activity, then such attachments would not have been so widely and openly used. That they were, however, strongly suggests that this claim is false – and to learn more about the late 19th/early 20th century fad of electrotherapy and the weird and wonderful devices used to administer this treatment, please check out the video on the subject over on Our Own Devices, the personal channel of this video’s author, Gilles Messier.
In the end, Lieberman and Schatzberg’s paper completely demolishes every major argument made in The Technology of Orgasm. Not only did clitoral massage for the treatment of hysteria not have an extensive history stretching back to antiquity, but it was rarely – if at all – practiced even in the Victorian era. And while vibrators were widely used in Victorian medicine, they were not invented to increase the efficiency of clitoral massage, being used instead to treat other gynaecological ailments. Thus, the amusing and scandalous story of the vibrator’s creation is just that: a story, pieced together from carefully cherry-picked and conveniently misinterpreted sources. It is, in other words, seemingly a work of academic fraud. More on what Maines herself has to say about this in a bit.
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