In writing my recent post about kegels, I was reminded of the movie Hysteria (2011). This shocking movie shows the invention of the vibrator by Dr. Mortimer J. Granville in Victorian-era England. According to the film (and similar retellings of the tale in plays and television shows), a male doctor invented the vibrator because his hand was tired from giving hysterical women orgasms all day as treatment to their illness. Women lined up at the physician’s office to be masturbated, although the treatment certainly wasn’t seen as sexual. In this tale, men are responsible for establishing in medicine and societal norms (although it was still taboo and controversial at the time) that female orgasms are possible, powerful and positive.
I was going to introduce this history as another example of men co-opting knowledge of vagina-having bodies as invention or discovery. It turns out, however, that this story is false. It makes sense, really, that this story wouldn’t be true. Men would never publicly exclaim the power of the vagina-haver’s sexuality! If they did, however, it would make perfect sense that men would claim this power was something only they could access through professional training. Still, men have always feared the power of vagina-havers’ sexuality, so in actuality, when the vibrator was invented, doctors expressed great caution against using the tool near the clitoris (Lieberman, 2020).
The real story is that the vibrator was invented by a Dr. Granville to treat everything except the need for orgasm. Original vibrator advertisements claimed to treat insomnia, epilepsy, deafness and more (Henriques, 2018). Hallie Lieberman, sex historian, argues there is no way doctors were unknowingly giving women orgasms to cure hysteria; there was an understanding of the clitoris and orgasms in the Victorian era, and doctors were afraid of them. The only proclaimed sexual use for vibrators was to cure impotence for men, as shown in Dr. Granville’s book (Lieberman, 2020).
People with vaginas started using vibrators as sexual devices on their own. Doctors discouraged using the vibrator to cause sexual excitement for women, and obscenity laws prohibited the description of sexual items in ads. Lieberman (2020) cites the 1970s as the first time vibrators were openly acknowledged as instruments for vaginal sexual pleasure.
The myth of the vibrator’s sexual origin came from a 1999 book by Rachel Maines, which was quite popular and award-winning until it recently became slammed by criticisms from scholars such as Lieberman. Researchers have found Maines’ sources to not contain any information supporting Maines’ claims. Some sources literally contained contradicting information (Henriques, 2018). Basically, Maines was a bad researcher with a sexy hypothesis, and the idea caught on.
But really, what is so sexy about this myth? Lieberman believes it is actually harmful. The myth perpetuates the idea that vagina-havers are sexually ignorant about their own bodies and can only discover/achieve orgasm through the knowledge and skills of cis-men (Lieberman, 2020). Any person with a vagina who has ever touched their own body and been touched by a cis-man knows that’s absolutely ridiculous. But we have continued to support this myth of the hysteria-curing vibrator in media and social history. We have to start taking responsibility for our knowledge of our bodies and our pleasure. Men did not invent the female orgasm or the use of vibrators to stimulate them any more than they invented the movement we now call the kegel.
As I learn more about my body and what is healing for me, I am also working on not feeling guilty for how I have ignored my responsibility to learn about my own body in the past. In college I would joke that I “may have been doing anal this whole time, because I don’t know the difference between my vagina and my asshole.” It got good laughs, and part of my healing process has been to ignore that area of my body for years, but it’s hard to ignore the ways I was continuing to feel powerless. I could have at any point learned about my own anatomy or the reproductive system, and yet I chose to remain ignorant. While maintaining distance from the parts of me I felt disconnected to, I was also reinforcing my own perceived lack of control.
Knowledge is certainly power when it comes to making choices for your own health, pleasure and safety. I am privileged to have access to a wealth of information that can improve my life. I can’t keep ignoring it. I needed to wait until I was ready to take responsibility for my own knowledge of my own body, but I’m ready now, and I promise myself I won’t stop just because it is horribly, deeply, terribly uncomfy.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20181107-the-history-of-the-vibrator
