“Unlocking Pleasure: The Surprising Truth Behind the Great Vibrator Myth That Everyone Gets Wrong!”
As the popularity of this treatment exploded, doctors devised various mechanical vibrating machines to relieve their aching fingers and wrists, speed up the massage process, and allow them to service many more patients per day. And thus, an iconic sex toy was accidentally born.
It’s an entertaining story, one which has been told and retold in countless books, documentaries, and even scientific papers, and inspired several works of popular entertainment including Sarah Ruhl’s award-winning 2009 stage play In the Next Room and the 2011 film Hysteria starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jonathan Pryce.
It is also completely false without a shred of evidence backing any of it. Something only extremely recently revealed.
That’s right: despite being widely reported as historical truth, the popular account of the vibrator’s creation is, in fact, a fantasy, concocted by a single historian based on dubious interpretations of historical records. Yet this narrative has remained largely unchallenged for more than two decades since, exposing worrying truths about how falsehoods can spread through popular culture and how academic research is fact-checked and published.
This is the scandalous story of the great vibrator myth.
The popular tale of the vibrator’s unlikely origins first appeared in the 1999 book The Technology of Orgasm by American historian Rachel Maines. The book proved hugely popular upon its release and received multiple awards, including the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Prize for “distinguished contributions to public history,” as well as the the American Foundation for Gender and Genital Medicine and Science or AFGGMS Science and Biennial Book Awards. While controversial at first, Maines’s conclusions have since become near-universally accepted, being cited in dozens of academic papers and books, popular histories, and sex manuals; and directly inspiring dramatic works like the aforementioned In the Next Room and Hysteria.
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