Читать книгу The Changing Face of Sex - Wayne P. Anderson PhD - Страница 15

What I find really mind twisting about this extremely negative attitude is that masturbation was used as a treatment for the common problem of female hysteria by physicians of the time. What in the world did they think they were doing?

In the last half of the 19th century many women suffered from “female hysteria,” a condition that involved a number of vague, but chronic complaints probably related to the society’s heavy repression of normal sexual desires.

Sleeplessness, nervousness, and irritability were the main symptoms and were found to be successfully treated by the physician massaging the woman’s clitoris.With the massage the woman would have a sudden seizure and sense of relief of the symptoms. Since women were not supposed to have sexual feelings, the doctors did not believe it was an orgasm.

Again it is hard to understand how doctors could be so strongly against masturbation but fail to recognize that was what they were doing. It also leaves the question that since it was such a simple treatment, why did doctors not train the husband to do it at home? Or even why did not the woman suggest to the husband that he could do the treatment? Go figure. For hysteria unrelieved by husbandly lust, and for widows, single and unhappily married women, doctors advised horseback riding, which in some cases provided enough clitoral stimulation to trigger orgasm.

An interesting aside is that performing the manipulation of the clitoris was often a stressful procedure for the physician and his fingers got tired, thus the invention of the electric vibrator as a labor saving treatment aid. Vibrators became an immediate hit. Their use produced the seizure quickly, and in the early 20th century women found they could treat themselves; ads appeared in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue offering a neat compact vibrator with three applicators that was useful and satisfactory for home service for $5.95.

As I write this there is an ad on television where the bride-to-be is very happy because she received three vibrators as shower presents. (For more on the history of vibrators, see Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ The Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, 1999).