A Curious History of Sex

by Kate Lister

23 Michael Ryan, Prostitution in London, with a Comparative View of that of Paris and New York (London: H. Bailliere, 1839), p. 385.

  24 Ibid.

  25 Grailey Hewitt, The Diagnosis, Pathology and Treatment of Diseases of Women (Philadelphia: Lindsay and Blackiston, 1868), p. 403.

  26 John Harvey Kellogg, Plain Facts for Old and Young: Embracing the Natural History and Hygiene of Organic Life (Burlington: Segner, 1887), pp. 302–3.

  27 Sylvester Graham, A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity, Intended Also for the Serious Consideration of Parents and Guardians (Boston: Cornhill, 1838), p. 47.

  28 Brian C. Wilson, Dr John Harvey Kellogg and the Religion of Biologic Living (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2014).

  29 Thomas Douglas and others, ‘Coercion, Incarceration, and Chemical Castration: an Argument from Autonomy’, Journal of Bioethical Inquiry, 10.3 (2013), pp. 393–405 .

  30 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Confessions of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (London: Penguin, 1953), p. 303.

  31 Davenport and Hotten, Aphrodisiacs and Anti-aphrodisiacs, p. 131.

  SEX

  AND

  MACHINES

  Buzzkill

  Vibrators and the Victorians

  I am sure you have heard this one: Victorian doctors invented the vibrator to masturbate women to orgasm because they had been ‘finger-banging’ (1988) so many patients in an effort to cure their hysteria that frankly their arms ached. We love this story. I love this story. Hollywood loved this story so much that both The Road to Wellville (1994) and Hysteria (2011) are based on it. But sadly it really is just a story. Like trickle-down economics and Jamie Lee Curtis’s hermaphroditism, it’s an urban myth. But like all the best stories, there are flashes of truth in it. We love this story because it goes straight to the hysterical heart of the Victorian sexual hypocrisy that we enjoy rolling our eyes at: ‘Did you know Victorian doctors were wanking off their female patients, but considered exposed table legs to be sexually obscene? So glad we’re not like that now!’ (Except the table legs thing is also myth, but that’s another book for another day.)

  The root of the diddling doctors theory is Rachel Maines’s book The Technology of Orgasm (1999). Here Maines hypothesises that doctors masturbated women to orgasm for health reasons, and that the vibrator was nothing short of a ‘godsend’ for the physicians suffering from repetitive strain injury in their index fingers. More than this, Maines makes the case that this practice can be traced back to Classical times. However, it has to be said that her evidence for medical vulva massage in the Ancient World has been severely criticised, most notably by Professor Helen King, as well as Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg, who took apart such claims in the academic equivalent of a Vulcan death grip.1 It’s also important to remember that Maines herself refers to her argument as a hypothesis; and, to be fair, it’s a damn interesting one. In an online interview in 2010, Maines said:

  People just loved my hypothesis and that’s all it is really, it’s a hypothesis, that women were treated with massage for this disease, hysteria, which has supposedly existed since the time of Hippocrates, 450 BC, and that the vibrator was invented to treat this disease. Well, people just thought this was such a cool idea that people believe it, that it’s like a fact. And I’m like, ‘It’s a hypothesis! It’s a hypothesis!’ But it doesn’t matter, you know? People like it so much they don’t want to hear any doubts about it.2

  So, let’s unpack this hypothesis a little further. Make no mistake, Victorian doctors were obsessed with sex and health, and there were many highly questionable medical theories flying around, from the anti-onanism crew who believed that masturbation was terminal, to Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso’s theories that sex workers had no sensation in their clitorises, as they had been rendered ‘insensible’ through ‘overuse’.3 But the theory that doctors invented vibrators to cure hysteria is doubtful for several reasons.

  British doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville (1833–1900) patented the first electric vibrator in the 1880s, not as a sexual device but as a massager to relieve the aches and pains of men, not women – he was quite clear on that. In his book Nerve-Vibration and Excitation as Agents in the Treatment of Functional Disorder and Organic Disease (1883), he wrote, ‘I have never yet percussed a female patient … I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid the treatment of women by percussion, simply because I do not wish to be hoodwinked, and help to mislead others, by the vagaries of the hysterical state.’4 Furthermore, one look at this contraption and I am sure we can all agree that this is not a device you would want anywhere near your clacker without adult supervision and a safe word. This was clearly not designed for internal use. It was designed to strike the body in a hammer-like motion, which was why Granville called it ‘percussing’.

  This is Granville’s vibrator and, as you can see, it does not look like a machine to be used internally. Illustration from Joseph Mortimer Granville, Nerve-Vibration and Excitation as Agents in the Treatment of Functional Disorder and Organic Disease, 1803.

  Other vibrating massagers soon followed on a wave of pseudo-scientific theories about electricity, which was touted as a cure-all panacea, along with rectal dilators and radium. Vibrating massage promised to alleviate all manner of mental and physical disorders (including the mysterious ‘hysteria’), but they were not designed for use on the genitals, and were not used by doctors to induce orgasm. Now, that does not mean that people did not figure out that these massage devices could be put to other, less hygienic uses. I like to define a ‘kink blink’ as the insanely short length of time between the introduction of new technology and its adaptation for sexual purposes. And as with the speculum, the nurse’s uniform and Viagra, the vibrator went from medical to mucky in a kink blink. One early pornographic film from the 1930s, The Masseur, shows the vibrator in action as two saucy masseurs vibrate it up and down the happy chap’s bottom. But, crucially, the vibrator is not used internally.

  ‘VeeDee’ Mechanical vibrator, London, England, 1900–15. The ‘Veedee’ vibratory massager claimed to cure colds, digestive complaints and flatulence through ‘curative vibration’.

  And if we are to believe that vibrators were common knowledge and widely used to induce orgasm, we have to account for the fact that there is not one mention of this in any known Victorian pornography (textual or visual). Not one. However, there are many references to dildos, as well as the occasional cucumber put to good use. Sex toys are not new. And, as these pictures show, the Victorians knew how to fashion a dildo. Unsurprisingly, the design has changed very little since cavemen first started carving ‘dongs’ (1890) out of stone. They tend to be, well, cock-shaped.

  Have a look around any modern-day sex shop and we can see that the cock shape for a sex toy is still very much in vogue. Victorian dildos were made from wood, leather and even ivory, and they were certainly a lot of fun, as this extract from The Pearl (1880) demonstrates: ‘As we are five to two you will find I have a stock of fine, soft, firmly made dildos to make up the deficiency in males, which alternated with the real article will enable us to thoroughly enjoy ourselves.’5

  Anonymous Victorian pornographic photograph showing ‘pegging’ (the woman penetrating the man with a strap-on).

  Anonymous Victorian pornography showing a woman being masturbated with a vegetable by her lover.

  Anonymous Victorian pornography showing that the Victorians knew precisely what a dildo was.

  Or this jolly song, titled ‘The Old Dildo’:

  She flew with the treasure into her room

  (Its size was the handle of a broom).

  Oh! What ecstatic moments she passed there,

  As she threw up her legs on the back of a chair.

  Through each vein in her body the fire lurked,

  Surely and quickly the engine worked;

  Face her, back her, stop her no! no!

  Faster and faster flew the old Dildoe.6

  Not only is there no
known mention of doctors and vibrators in Victorian pornography, there is also no mention of them in the work of the early and pioneering sexologists. Iwan Bloch, Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Freud meticulously catalogued every fetish, paraphilia and known expression of sexual behaviour, but not one of them mention doctors, vibrators and orgasm. Ellis and Bloch even describe some women deriving sexual pleasure from sewing machines and sealing wax, but still there is no mention of a vibrator.***** Fifty years later, in his seminal Behaviour in the Human Female (1953), Alfred Kinsey does not mention vibrators in his lengthy and comprehensive chapters on female masturbation, and you’d think if doctors were wanking women to wellness, it would have cropped up somewhere in these works.

  But what about the Victorian medical texts themselves? Surely there must be some mention of doctors conducting ‘pelvic massage’ of female patients? Well, yes! Yes, there is, and lots of it. The medical craze for pelvic massage came from the work of Swedish obstetrician and gynaecologist Thure Brandt (1819–1895), who began treating women in 1861. The ‘Thure Brandt method’ of pelvic massage and ‘manipulating the womb’ proved very popular and was widely reported at the time. The New York Medical Journal (1876) was one of many journals that described the technique in some detail.

  Brandt claims that his method of treatment is useful in prolapses and protrusion of the uterus; prolapse of the vagina; hypertrophy and induration of the uterus; ulcerations; abnormal haemorrhage, depending on relaxation of the uterus; tendency to miscarriage; slight hypertrophy of the ovaries. The method is simple, consisting of three motions:

  1. Stroking the loins and sacral regions. In this, the patient assumes a position leaning forward, resting her hands against a wall or door.

  2. Pressure with the points of the fingers of both hands on both sides, over the loins and sacral region, as well as over the upper and anterior surfaces of the ischium. The pressure is combined with vibratory shaking. The patient assumes a dorsal, semi-reclining position, and the knees are bent to relax the abdominal muscles.

  3. Elevation of the uterus during the vibratory shaking. The position of the patient resembles the previous one. The operator endeavours to press the finger-points of both hands just over the horizontal ramus of the arch of the pubis of both sides down into the pelvis minor, and then to lift up the uterus. This attempt at elevation is also made during vibration.7

  As you can see, the technique is largely performed externally and with a noticeable lack of a vibrator or an orgasm.8 And if you were still unsure of how to perform this massage, the 1895 book by Dr A. Jentzer, Physiotherapy in Gynaecology and the Mechanical Treatment of Diseases of the Uterus and its Appendages by Thure Brandt, illustrates the procedure, and contains possibly the most disturbing images of gynaecological examination ever produced.

  Terrifying illustrations of pelvic massage from Die Heilgymnastik in der Gynaekologie by Dr Jentzer.

  Part of Brandt’s massage involved stretching out the spine, as seen here.

  Illustration showing the internal part of Brandt’s pelvic massage.

  Another illustration of the internal part of the pelvic massage.

  Much of Brandt’s massage involved shaking, or ‘vibrating’, the patient vigorously.

  Once you have moved past the fact that the doctor and patient strongly resemble escapees from Area 51, you will notice that the technique is about applying pressure to the pelvic area in a variety of odd positions. Here we do see that some of the massage was internal (he is a gynaecologist, after all), and involved inserting a finger and applying the other hand on top of the abdomen and pushing downwards. But at no point is an orgasm mentioned or a vibrator required.

  Brandt’s theories were celebrated and expanded on three years after his death by Dr Robert Ziegenspeck (1856–1918) in his Massage Treatment (Thure Brandt) in Diseases of Women: for Practitioners (1898). Ziegenspeck gives considerable detail about the internal part of the pelvic floor massage. The good doctor strongly emphasises that this ‘localised’ treatment requires plenty of ‘massage and stretching’ with one finger in the vagina and the spare hand pushing down on the abdomen. And if you were still unsure of what you were doing, Ziegenspeck supplied a handy seven-point guide:

  (1) The patient’s dress is not removed, not even thrown back, but merely opened around the waist. The corset likewise is loosened, so that no hook or band may interfere. The chemise is then pulled up so far that the hand can be placed upon the bare abdomen; the abdomen itself, however, is not uncovered.

  (2) The finger to be introduced into the vagina, from underneath the knee of the side corresponding to the hand employed, can also be advanced beneath the dress towards the vaginal orifice without the knees being separated.

  (3) Only one finger is introduced under all circumstances – preferably the forefinger, except in ventro-vaginal-rectal palpation, where the forefinger is inserted into the rectum and the thumb into the vagina.

  (4) The hand laid upon the abdomen feels its way towards the finger in the vagina, not with uniform pressure, but penetrating deeper and deeper by means of gentle circular massage movements.

  (5) The examiner, seated upon a chair at the end of a couch, takes the corner of the latter between his separated knees.

  (6) Only a low bench, couch, or so-called plinth is used and no examining chair or table.

  (7) The unemployed fingers are not flexed (examination with closed hand) but rest loosely extended in the groove between the nates (examination with open hand).9

  It’s very difficult to read through that little lot and not arrive at the conclusion that this is just fancy fingering, and it seems that this ‘treatment’ drew similar criticism in the nineteenth century. Ziegenspeck claims that the ‘massage has been unjustly reproached’ as causing ‘sexual irritation’ (read, ‘sexual stimulation’).10

  If we follow the rules given above sexual irritation will occur no oftener during massage than during any gynecological diagnosis. No doubt there are women of abnormal sexual excitability, who become excited by every gynecological examination, sometimes even without any such cause. Those malevolent persons, however, who time and again raise such an unwarranted objection against the method, certainly without fully understanding the same, on the one hand unjustly charge the numerous physicians using this method either with carelessness or unscrupulousness, it being an easy matter to find out whether a woman is sexually excited or not; while, on the other hand, they most grossly insult thousands of highly respectable women by maliciously insinuating that they undergo this treatment in spite of its power to cause sexual excitement, or, perhaps, even on that very account.

  Clearly, for Ziegenspeck at least, sexual stimulation during pelvic massage was to be avoided. Should any patient experience ‘sexual irritation’, he recommended ‘increasing the pressure a little, so that real pain is caused’.11

  The theories behind ‘pelvic massage’ and the techniques are frankly bizarre, and although I am cautious of judging this ‘treatment’ by modern standards, there is something undeniably sexual going on here. I know it, you know it, and clearly people at the time knew it. But there is no vibrator, there is no orgasm, there is no hysteria, and its practitioners emphatically deny this is medical masturbating. However, it seems that it is here, in the confusing practice of pelvic massage, that the myth that Victorian doctors collectively drained the national grid as they buzzed their patients into post-orgasmic delirium developed.

  The other persistent part of the medical vibrator story is that of ‘hysterical paroxysm’, which Maines understands as being ‘the female orgasm under clinical conditions’.12 But when we start to investigate the medical texts of the era, a hysterical paroxysm doesn’t sound like any orgasm I’ve ever had. Hysterical and Nervous Affections of Women. Read Before the Harveian Society describes a hysterical paroxysm as ‘an uncontrollable attack of alternate sobbing and laughter’.13 Andrew Whyte Barclay’s A Manual of Medical Diagnosis (1864) describes it as a ‘fit’ and ‘a simul
ation of epilepsy’.14 John Henry Walsh describes the hysterical paroxysm as beginning with uncontrollable giggling, and lasting ‘for at least an hour, and often for five or six’.15 William Potts Dewees claims that ‘It is very common for the stomach to eructate a great deal of “gas,” at the termination of an hysterical paroxysm, from which the patient finds much relief.’16 I’m sorry, but a farting, giggling fit that lasts an afternoon is not an orgasm. Whatever this is, it is described in terms very similar to a fit, or a nervous, uncontrollable episode. Medical theories of the time do link this strange phenomenon to a gynaecological cause. Walsh wrote that a ‘copious secretion of pale urine accompanies the disease’.17 George Bacon Wood wrote that hysterical paroxysm was ‘apt to be worse around the menstrual period’, and W. W. Bliss was certain that ‘hysterical paroxysms are usually an accompaniment of painful menstruation’.18 But this should not be surprising as the word ‘hysteria’ comes from Latin hystericus, meaning ‘of the womb’, and from the Greek hysterikos, meaning ‘suffering in the womb’.

  The mysterious medical phenomenon known as hysteria has attracted considerable research in modern scholarship, precisely because no one really knows what it is. The word covers a multitude of psychological and physical ailments and, until Freud’s work, was predominantly a woman’s malady. At the risk of oversimplification, hysteria meant the physical or behavioural manifestations of physiological distress in women. This could be aggression, fainting, nymphomania or a farting fit. The theory that the womb caused emotional instability can be traced back to Ancient Greece and the ‘wandering womb’ theory. Aretaeus, a physician contemporary with Galen in the second century AD, describes how the womb moves around the abdomen, causing madness: