“Vibrator stories sell.”
September 6, 2018 3:25 PM Subscribe
Victorian-Era Orgasms and the Crisis of Peer Review: A favorite anecdote about the origins of the vibrator is probably a myth.
“Some people have said, ‘Oh, you’re attacking [Maines].’ But my life would have been so much easier if her work had been accurate,” Lieberman said. “I did not want to critique her, I do not want to attack her, I have no problem with her. I just want to build on someone else’s work, and when that work is incorrect, it creates problems for scholars in the field of history of sexuality.”posted by clew at 3:35 PM on September 6, 2018 [9 favorites]
“It’s a real problem if you’re a grad student writing a dissertation, and in what seems to be the widely accepted work in your field, you can’t find any justification for,” Schatzberg said.
"“Manual massage of female genitals,” they write, “was never a routine medical treatment for hysteria.”"
Well, another bit of history that seems entirely fabricated for the tastes of contemporary folks. This is a good thing, however, since the horrible implications of the popular story are scary. It seems likely some doctors did use their positions to abuse/molest patients, as some do today, but good to know it wasn't, like, standard practice.
posted by GoblinHoney at 3:55 PM on September 6, 2018 [7 favorites]
Well, another bit of history that seems entirely fabricated for the tastes of contemporary folks. This is a good thing, however, since the horrible implications of the popular story are scary. It seems likely some doctors did use their positions to abuse/molest patients, as some do today, but good to know it wasn't, like, standard practice.
posted by GoblinHoney at 3:55 PM on September 6, 2018 [7 favorites]
As fun as it was to imagine, I was always kind of skeptical about this. I have a hard time imagining Victorian-era men, doctors included, giving even a single thought about women’s pleasure, or whether women could have orgasms at all.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:18 PM on September 6, 2018 [9 favorites]
posted by Thorzdad at 4:18 PM on September 6, 2018 [9 favorites]
'scuse me. Could the link be updated to one that doesn't use AMP?
https://www.theatlantic.com/article/569446/ works.
posted by Quackles at 4:32 PM on September 6, 2018 [2 favorites]
https://www.theatlantic.com/article/569446/ works.
posted by Quackles at 4:32 PM on September 6, 2018 [2 favorites]
Did you hear about the evidence of Victorian male doctors giving clitoral massage? They couldn't find it.
posted by condour75 at 4:55 PM on September 6, 2018 [82 favorites]
posted by condour75 at 4:55 PM on September 6, 2018 [82 favorites]
[Removed amp]
good thing I brought my acoustic vibrator
posted by prize bull octorok at 5:05 PM on September 6, 2018 [50 favorites]
good thing I brought my acoustic vibrator
posted by prize bull octorok at 5:05 PM on September 6, 2018 [50 favorites]
I'm still reading the debunk article, but I do want to note that according to the authors, vaginal massage with vibrators was a widely used medical treatment for "feminine disorders." Some doctors also recommended applying electrical current to treat vaginal spasms.
posted by muddgirl at 6:03 PM on September 6, 2018 [2 favorites]
posted by muddgirl at 6:03 PM on September 6, 2018 [2 favorites]
Whoa, bummer, it was such a good story! I’ve been holding forth on this at cocktail parties ever since I read The Technology of Orgasm in a history of sexuality class in college (what a classic college class). Now I am deprived of my favorite historical factoid! I am tons of fun to be around at cocktail parties.
posted by aka burlap at 6:04 PM on September 6, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by aka burlap at 6:04 PM on September 6, 2018 [1 favorite]
I mean, you could switch to the fact that victorian doctors knew about clitorial orgasms and also put electrodes on women's vulvas to cure genital inflammation.
posted by muddgirl at 6:07 PM on September 6, 2018 [3 favorites]
posted by muddgirl at 6:07 PM on September 6, 2018 [3 favorites]
Now I am deprived of my favorite historical factoid!
Not at all! Now it's actually a factoid!
posted by haileris23 at 7:49 PM on September 6, 2018 [13 favorites]
Not at all! Now it's actually a factoid!
posted by haileris23 at 7:49 PM on September 6, 2018 [13 favorites]
Ha, that's amazing! Hooray, factoid restored! Plus now I've learned TWO things today.
posted by aka burlap at 7:51 PM on September 6, 2018 [5 favorites]
posted by aka burlap at 7:51 PM on September 6, 2018 [5 favorites]
Speaking of muddgirls comment, I'm going to just drop a bunch of weird links about things doctors WERE doing to women's vagina's to treat them of hysteria and any number of other things:
"Anyone who has employed course wire bi-polar faradism in the vagina can not have failed to notice how the electrode is grasped up by the sphincter of the electrode is grasped up by the sphincter of the vulva and drawn up by the levator ani."
treatment in the vagina by a high frequency current through a vacuum tube
Hot or cold water injections "It would seem as if, in addition to the heat of the water, the jet acts as a stimulus to excite the blood vessels to contraction".
There were also discussions in medical journals in the 19th century by women about the discontinuation of certain douches because they were causing orgasms- and protesting the use of vaginal massage by doctors on young women and girls. People new what orgasms were and debated frequently in the journals whether the doctors offering some of these "treatments" were merely abusing patients even in the 19th century.
I think about women who might have gone to the doctors because they felt fatigued or dealing with stress and then had to deal with all the things doctors were doing to their vaginas. To me the horror of just imagining this makes me wonder how much of the symptoms the "doctors" caused themselves in women who had had any contact at all with doctors and these sorts of "treatments". What have they done to our foremothers.
posted by xarnop at 8:15 PM on September 6, 2018 [13 favorites]
"Anyone who has employed course wire bi-polar faradism in the vagina can not have failed to notice how the electrode is grasped up by the sphincter of the electrode is grasped up by the sphincter of the vulva and drawn up by the levator ani."
treatment in the vagina by a high frequency current through a vacuum tube
Hot or cold water injections "It would seem as if, in addition to the heat of the water, the jet acts as a stimulus to excite the blood vessels to contraction".
There were also discussions in medical journals in the 19th century by women about the discontinuation of certain douches because they were causing orgasms- and protesting the use of vaginal massage by doctors on young women and girls. People new what orgasms were and debated frequently in the journals whether the doctors offering some of these "treatments" were merely abusing patients even in the 19th century.
I think about women who might have gone to the doctors because they felt fatigued or dealing with stress and then had to deal with all the things doctors were doing to their vaginas. To me the horror of just imagining this makes me wonder how much of the symptoms the "doctors" caused themselves in women who had had any contact at all with doctors and these sorts of "treatments". What have they done to our foremothers.
posted by xarnop at 8:15 PM on September 6, 2018 [13 favorites]
Having cold water injected into my vagina would certainly make me act pretty hysterical.
posted by Basil Stag Hare at 8:40 PM on September 6, 2018 [7 favorites]
posted by Basil Stag Hare at 8:40 PM on September 6, 2018 [7 favorites]
Following the article's link at "wrote a lengthy scholarly rebuttal of Maines’s use of Greek and Latin sources in 2011." led me to Helen King's "Galen and the widow: towards a history of therapeutic masturbation in ancient gynaecology" (Abstract, PDF of the whole article).
It is fantastic, and I really enjoyed the level of detail. One section starts "So, to summarise the emerging stemma here, Maines’ reliance on Veith’s use of Cesbron’s abridgement of Daremberg’s French translation"...
posted by readinghippo at 8:53 PM on September 6, 2018 [6 favorites]
It is fantastic, and I really enjoyed the level of detail. One section starts "So, to summarise the emerging stemma here, Maines’ reliance on Veith’s use of Cesbron’s abridgement of Daremberg’s French translation"...
posted by readinghippo at 8:53 PM on September 6, 2018 [6 favorites]
"Having cold water injected into my vagina would certainly make me act pretty hysterical."
It goes on from there;
The vaginal fluid applicator:
By combining a hot or cold douche with mechanical vibration a "still greater effect is obtained". Manual massage of the pelvic organs by Brandt has received attention, but "the finer details of the treatment are impossible without the special applicators."
Sometimes I just read this stuff and imagine being a super hero who goes back in time and... ..and teaches lessons to these guys. Totally peacefully of course. Piano lessons.
…..
posted by xarnop at 8:58 PM on September 6, 2018 [3 favorites]
It goes on from there;
The vaginal fluid applicator:
By combining a hot or cold douche with mechanical vibration a "still greater effect is obtained". Manual massage of the pelvic organs by Brandt has received attention, but "the finer details of the treatment are impossible without the special applicators."
Sometimes I just read this stuff and imagine being a super hero who goes back in time and... ..and teaches lessons to these guys. Totally peacefully of course. Piano lessons.
…..
posted by xarnop at 8:58 PM on September 6, 2018 [3 favorites]
But how much of that was actually practiced, as opposed to just a weird section of some book? Isnt this just trying to salvage Maine's fraudulent contention so we can keep pointing fingers at the Victorians? As opposed to looking at how politicized and vulnerable to "just so" stories the field is?
It's ironic: the Victorians were notorioous for misinterpreting and mutilating history and cultural observations to fit their prejudices and create a tale of progress,and now we're doing the same thing to the Victorians.
posted by happyroach at 11:32 PM on September 6, 2018 [6 favorites]
It's ironic: the Victorians were notorioous for misinterpreting and mutilating history and cultural observations to fit their prejudices and create a tale of progress,and now we're doing the same thing to the Victorians.
posted by happyroach at 11:32 PM on September 6, 2018 [6 favorites]
Sorry if this is a derail, but did the original authors of the skeptical paper never contact Maines? Is that normal in academia?
It seems like their paper could have only been improved by the quotes she gave to The Atlantic.
posted by smelendez at 1:14 AM on September 7, 2018 [1 favorite]
It seems like their paper could have only been improved by the quotes she gave to The Atlantic.
posted by smelendez at 1:14 AM on September 7, 2018 [1 favorite]
Sorry if this is a derail, but did the original authors of the skeptical paper never contact Maines? Is that normal in academia?
I would not typically expect her to be contacted for comment in the way that a journalist would contact the subject of an article, the purpose of the paper being to advance an argument, rather than to produce a "balanced" account of the different sides of the debate.
posted by howfar at 6:38 AM on September 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
I would not typically expect her to be contacted for comment in the way that a journalist would contact the subject of an article, the purpose of the paper being to advance an argument, rather than to produce a "balanced" account of the different sides of the debate.
posted by howfar at 6:38 AM on September 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
I think about women who might have gone to the doctors because they felt fatigued or dealing with stress and then had to deal with all the things doctors were doing to their vaginas.
Yeah, it's certainly lucky that in today's enlightened society nobody is attempting to exploit tired, suffering women by selling them foreign objects to put in their vaginas. Gwyneth.
posted by The Bellman at 6:39 AM on September 7, 2018 [4 favorites]
Yeah, it's certainly lucky that in today's enlightened society nobody is attempting to exploit tired, suffering women by selling them foreign objects to put in their vaginas. Gwyneth.
posted by The Bellman at 6:39 AM on September 7, 2018 [4 favorites]
Happyroach, I have spent days and years reading medical journals in the time since Maine's claims, and I found a great deal to be challenged. Many of her proposals were not only false or misleading but outright heinous. I found it to be nonsensical suggesting that women were uniquely aware (And even happy and empowered by!) the fact they were being given sexual treatments, but the men being silly victorian men were completely unsexual and uninfluenced by sexual appetite or power dynamics in their decisions to focus so heavily on putting anything they can think of in women's vaginas as "treatments". But electricity and injections and a whole host of awful sounding "treatments" done to women's private regions are standard practice in just about every gynecology text you find in the late 1800's if you read through them. And it's not just mentioned in the texts, if you read the medical journals doctors describe case after case of using these procedures. I would agree that finding more evidence of how widespread the practices were would be very important, but I find it interesting that you would assume that these practices were "a weird section in some book" when if you pull up medical texts electricity in gynecology is in EVERY ONE (at least of the first 7 I pulled up... I encourage anyone else to explore this as well) as are vaginal injections and all manner of unpleasant looking apparatuses. That's not even to get into descriptions of all manner of massaging and examinations that included using palpations and vibratory movements all over women's pelvic regions and using any signs of sexual response to diagnose women as ill, nymphomaniacs, masturbators etc and even performing clitoridectomy to solve these "problems".
Given the extent of sexual abuse throughout history and the male dominated nature of the profession, I fail to see any reason that we should assume that these practices are listed in all the texts as mere novelty, or that 19th century doctors were uniquely free of the ubiquity of sexual abuse and misogyny that surrounded them in the rest of the world. I see no reason to extend such a benefit of the doubt, but I most certainly agree that we ought to have more thorough investigations of this because what happened to our ancestral mothers, what has been laid in the foundations of the very medical profession still impacts us today and I believe we should have the truth of these stories be told. I hope that more will read about this and use the best methods available to help more accurate truths come to public light.
posted by xarnop at 6:44 AM on September 7, 2018 [8 favorites]
Given the extent of sexual abuse throughout history and the male dominated nature of the profession, I fail to see any reason that we should assume that these practices are listed in all the texts as mere novelty, or that 19th century doctors were uniquely free of the ubiquity of sexual abuse and misogyny that surrounded them in the rest of the world. I see no reason to extend such a benefit of the doubt, but I most certainly agree that we ought to have more thorough investigations of this because what happened to our ancestral mothers, what has been laid in the foundations of the very medical profession still impacts us today and I believe we should have the truth of these stories be told. I hope that more will read about this and use the best methods available to help more accurate truths come to public light.
posted by xarnop at 6:44 AM on September 7, 2018 [8 favorites]
So, one of the weird things about being an ex-Victorianist who wrote a dissertation related to gender and women’s studies is that it has ALWAYS been obvious this legend was completely made up. I used to do tons of reading about treatments for hysteria, and it included a lot of terrible things being done to women and their bodies (some of them currently classed as war crimes, not joking), but there was never a hint or a whisper that “vibrators to cause orgasm to cure hysteria” was one of them. Anywhere.
So when this idea became popular, it was always kind of puzzling to me, because I knew it was bunk— but at the same time, bunk about the Victorians is always so popular with modern people that it didn’t seem that different from other weird modern misconceptions about the era. You can’t spend your life telling people that all the funny little anecdotes about an era are trash, so it just sort of became something else dumb that got traction every couple of years, but made no sense at all.
It is weirdly a relief that someone else did the debunking! But at the same time, calling this part of the narrative of “the crisis of peer review” and linking it to failure to reproduce issues in the social sciences seems…blinkered.
I’d love to see the full peer reviewer reports, because in my experience, there is a deep chasm between “you should not attack this popular theory because I love it and believe it and how dare you” and the much more common “you should not build your academic career on attacking one book in particular because this puts you in a very precarious position and most journals don’t want to be the site of a potential feud”.
It doesn’t mean certain books don’t deserve to be debunked, or that peer review of a lot of books put out by academic presses isn’t absolutely a joke.
But we talk a lot on here about how precarious academia is these days, especially for young professors, especially in the humanities, and in my experience professors and peer reviewers often end up giving advice based on what keeps you employed and employable. Picking a public and major fight with a big name when you are still a grad student is something that can sink a career. So I completely understand why people, including peer reviewers, advised caution, even if I wish the junk book had been exposed much sooner.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 7:04 AM on September 7, 2018 [16 favorites]
So when this idea became popular, it was always kind of puzzling to me, because I knew it was bunk— but at the same time, bunk about the Victorians is always so popular with modern people that it didn’t seem that different from other weird modern misconceptions about the era. You can’t spend your life telling people that all the funny little anecdotes about an era are trash, so it just sort of became something else dumb that got traction every couple of years, but made no sense at all.
It is weirdly a relief that someone else did the debunking! But at the same time, calling this part of the narrative of “the crisis of peer review” and linking it to failure to reproduce issues in the social sciences seems…blinkered.
I’d love to see the full peer reviewer reports, because in my experience, there is a deep chasm between “you should not attack this popular theory because I love it and believe it and how dare you” and the much more common “you should not build your academic career on attacking one book in particular because this puts you in a very precarious position and most journals don’t want to be the site of a potential feud”.
It doesn’t mean certain books don’t deserve to be debunked, or that peer review of a lot of books put out by academic presses isn’t absolutely a joke.
But we talk a lot on here about how precarious academia is these days, especially for young professors, especially in the humanities, and in my experience professors and peer reviewers often end up giving advice based on what keeps you employed and employable. Picking a public and major fight with a big name when you are still a grad student is something that can sink a career. So I completely understand why people, including peer reviewers, advised caution, even if I wish the junk book had been exposed much sooner.
posted by a fiendish thingy at 7:04 AM on September 7, 2018 [16 favorites]
even if I wish the junk book had been exposed much sooner.
Well, the junk was known to be junk some time ago, at least in some circles.
Witness Lesley Hall's web page on the issue, which she has been talking about as a historian for a couple of decades I believe.
posted by suelac at 8:25 AM on September 7, 2018 [6 favorites]
Well, the junk was known to be junk some time ago, at least in some circles.
Witness Lesley Hall's web page on the issue, which she has been talking about as a historian for a couple of decades I believe.
posted by suelac at 8:25 AM on September 7, 2018 [6 favorites]
suelac, what a delightful compendium.
posted by mwhybark at 10:25 AM on September 7, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by mwhybark at 10:25 AM on September 7, 2018 [1 favorite]
I think outside the pitfalls of popsci, talking about The Technology of Orgasm as a failure of peer review is important. According to google scholar, the book has been cited 93 times. I don't have any institutional access to a better database to get a more accurate impact score. Leiberman makes the case that Maines did not just put forth an incorrect hypothesis based on existing research - she misinterpreted and misrepresented primary texts to make claims that were unsupported, even sometimes used texts which said A to claim not-A. To me this is not about "fact checking" but a question of, did subject matter experts review the book?
I think that, given there was contemporary skepticism of her book among sex historians, there is an interesting question here of how popular understandings of science influence scientific understanding.
posted by muddgirl at 12:14 PM on September 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
I think that, given there was contemporary skepticism of her book among sex historians, there is an interesting question here of how popular understandings of science influence scientific understanding.
posted by muddgirl at 12:14 PM on September 7, 2018 [2 favorites]
(Also, Lieberman's article on the history of vibrator advertisements in the early 20th century appears to be open-access and is very interesting).
posted by muddgirl at 1:48 PM on September 7, 2018
posted by muddgirl at 1:48 PM on September 7, 2018
Thanks, Metafilter! I learned something today!
And oh my God this myth JUST WON'T DIE. There was a new comic just published in The Nib that rehashes this crap all over again (and cites Maines as a source too). UGH.
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 11:35 PM on September 11, 2018
And oh my God this myth JUST WON'T DIE. There was a new comic just published in The Nib that rehashes this crap all over again (and cites Maines as a source too). UGH.
posted by suburbanbeatnik at 11:35 PM on September 11, 2018
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