“Unlocking Pleasure: The Surprising Truth Behind the Great Vibrator Myth That Everyone Gets Wrong!”
And Lieberman and Schatzberg are far from alone in their criticism. Previously, classical historian Helen King of the Open University London questioned the claim that pelvic massage was a long-established treatment for hysteria, arguing that Maines had cherry-picked and misinterpreted many of her sources:
“Maines wants a line of history going all the way back to the time of Hippocrates, so she was determined to find doctors massaging their female patients to orgasm in the earliest written sources…but a Roman satire, describing ‘anointers’ at the baths who masturbate a woman to orgasm, is very different from saying doctors really did this. It’s a satire – it’s supposed to be outrageous… [Maines also does this by] reading a description about what happens when the womb is rubbed during intercourse and making that into a passage about masturbation by a doctor.”
Similarly, many sources which purportedly demonstrate the ubiquity of pelvic massage in the 18th and 19th centuries actually describe very different therapies:
“…medical sources that describe pelvic and gynecological massage in detail show that the practice was not sexual, did not involve the clitoris, and did not produce an orgasm. The term “pelvic massage” usually meant uterine massage, a treatment frequently used for conditions such as dysmenorrhea or uterine prolapse….Furthermore, none of her English-language sources even mentions production of “paroxysms” by massage or anything else that could remotely suggest an orgasm. This lack of evidence by itself undermines the core of her claim.”
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