The Technology of Orgasm: Hysteria, the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction

Abstract

With its provocative title, Rachel Maines's book has several stories to tell. One centers on the social framing of women's sexuality and controversies surrounding the nature and treatment of hystereoneurasthenic disorders. Another, of particular interest to historians of technology, concerns the development of the electromechanical vibrator in the 1880s, a device used by physicians to help women reach orgasm and by women themselves to achieve sexual stimulation and satisfaction. As Maines argues, hysteria--a term derived from the Greek term for "that which proceeds from the uterus" and which included such symptoms as fainting, irritability, anxiety, depression, headaches, and insomnia--was categorized from ancient to modern times as a disease and a pathology, even though the "symptoms" themselves [End Page 600] were often but signs of women's sexual tension and lack of achieving orgasm, that is, "consistent with the normal functioning" of female sexuality. Maines's chief argument is that throughout much of Western history the "androcentric model" of sexuality was largely responsible for defining these concepts of female sexual pathology and for shaping the development of the instruments designed to cope with them (pp. 2, 112).

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