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The Technology of Orgasm :
''Hysteria,'' the Vibrator,
and Women's Sexual Satisfaction
From the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s, women diagnosed with
hysteria thought to result from a lack of sexual intercourse
or gratification--were treated by massaging their genitals in order
to induce "paroxysm."
Male physicians, however, loathed this time-consuming procedure
and for centuries relied on midwives. Later, they substituted the
efficiency of mechanical devices, including the electric vibrator,
invented in the 1880s.
Eventually, these devices became available for purchase and home
use; one such "portable vibrator" is advertised in the 1918 Sears,
Roebuck catalog as an "aid that every woman appreciates."
The Technology of Orgasm is an impeccably researched history that
combines a discussion of hysteria in the Western medical tradition
with a detailed examination (including several illustrations) of
the devices used to "treat" the "condition." Rachel Maines offers
readers a stimulating, surprising, and often humorous account of
hysteria and its treatment throughout the ages, focusing on the
development, use, and fall into disrepute of the vibrator as a legitimate
medical device.
As historian Rachel P. Maines describes in her exhaustively researched
if decidedly offbeat work, ... the vibrator was developed to perfect
and automate a function that doctors had long performed for women:
the relief of physical, emotional and sexual tension through external
pelvic massage, culminating in orgasm.
Dr. Maines ... first stumbled on her piquant subject while researching
the history of needlework. Thumbing through a 1906 needlepoint magazine,
she found, to her astonishment, an advertisement for a vibrator.
--
(From Amazon.com )
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Satisfaction
: The Art of the Female Orgasm
by Kim
Cattrall, Mark Levinson
"Some people... assume that for me to play a sexually open character,
like Samantha Jones on HBO's Sex and the City, I must have had
fabulous sex most of my life. Well, the truth is that until
three years ago most of my sexual experiences were miserable,"
confesses Kim Cattrall, in Satisfaction: The Art of Female Orgasm
...
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