“Unlocking Pleasure: The Surprising Truth Behind the Great Vibrator Myth That Everyone Gets Wrong!”
“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.”
But Lieberman, Schatzberg, and other critics have rebutted this excuse, citing the definitive language used in The Technology of Orgasm as evidence that Maines intended her conclusions to be more than just an “interesting hypothesis.”
But so what, you might ask? After all, popular history is full of distorted, mythologized, or downright false facts? Well, unfortunately, our interpretation of social and cultural history can have a profound impact on our everyday lives, even hundreds of years after the fact. For example, the Technology of Orgasm was directly cited in two recent legal cases challenging the constitutionality of state laws banning the sale of sex toys: State of Louisiana vs. Christine D. Brenan in 2000 and Williams v. Prior in 2002. In the former case, Maines’s purported historical evidence convinced the court that:
“…the state’s obscene-devices statute fails rational-basis review under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution…[and that] the legislature cannot make a device automatically obscene merely through the use of labels.”
While in the latter, the judge ruled that:
“That evidence has convinced this court that there exists a substantial history, legal tradition, and contemporary practice of deliberate state non-interference in the private, consensual, sexual relationships of married persons and unmarried adults.”
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