“Unlocking Pleasure: The Surprising Truth Behind the Great Vibrator Myth That Everyone Gets Wrong!”
Yet despite reviewers praising the book for opening up an entirely new area of historical inquiry, in the years following The Technology of Orgasm’s publication, few researchers made any attempt to replicate or expand upon Maine’s research. That is, until 2018, when Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg, historians from the Georgia Institute of Technology, decided to examine the sources cited in Maine’s book. As Lieberman later stated:
“From what I knew of the history of sexuality, it sounded unlikely that doctors would be [regularly performing pelvic massages]. When I checked the sources, that was when I first really thought, okay, there’s something up with this.”
What Lieberman and Schatzberg discovered was shocking. As they bluntly state in their 2018 paper A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm, published in the Journal of Positive Sexuality:
“…we could find no evidence that physicians ever used electromechanical vibrators to induce orgasms in female patients as a medical treatment. We examined every source that Maines cites in support of her core claim. None of these sources actually do so…Maines provides remarkably few citations in support of them, instead padding her argument with a mass of tangential citations that obscure the lack of support for the core argument. But none of the sources she cites even suggest what she is arguing, at least not to a reader who is not already convinced that these practices occurred.”
But before we dive into Lieberman and Schatzberg’s thorough debunking of Maines’s conclusions, it is worth noting that one fundamental pillar of her argument is largely accurate. For thousands of years, physicians did indeed recognize an affliction called female hysteria. However, the definition and purported causes of this disorder have varied widely over the centuries. The term itself derives from the Greek hystera, meaning “uterus” or “womb”, and was originally associated with the ancient concept of the “wandering womb”. This is exactly what it sounds like: the belief that the uterus can randomly wander around a woman’s body, putting pressure on various internal organs and causing all manner of health problems. This concept dates to at least the 5th century B.C.E., first appearing in the writings of Ancient Greek physicians Hippocrates of Kos and Artaeus of Cappadocia. However, at this time the term hysteria was not yet used, nor was the “wandering womb” theory universally accepted. Indeed, 3rd Century C.E. Roman physician Claudius Galen attributed the condition to the buildup of so-called “female seed”, which grew sour and poisonous unless regularly expelled via sexual intercourse. Unwed women and widows were thought particularly vulnerable. Early treatments for female hysteria included – naturally – marriage, as well as burning sweet or foul-smelling herbs to draw or push the uterus back to its natural position once again proving that humans are stupid.
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