The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (13 page)

Despite its obvious efficacy in relieving pelvic congestion, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the “mechanical and iniquitous excitations” of masturbation were thought to cause all manner of diseases and disorders in both sexes. Doctors thought they saw serious somatic symptoms of the practice: sunken eyes with black bags under them, pallor, general weakness, and a host of sexual manifestations that one physician, N. Cooke, described as necessarily culminating, eventually, in a massive,
spasmodic system failure, a sort of death by orgasm. Of female masturbation Cooke exclaims, “Alas, that such an expression is possible!” and goes on to cite the practice as the chief cause of nymphomania.
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Sewing machines, particularly the kind with two foot treadles operated alternately, were thought by many nineteenth-century physicians to be either the cause or the means of masturbation in women, a concern also expressed about the bicycle.
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According to Krafft-Ebing, the French writer A. Coffignon thought that the power of the sewing machine was such that heterosexual women could be turned into lesbians by “excessive work” on them.
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Thomas Low Nichols considered masturbation a major source of pregnancy complications.
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E. H. Smith, in the
Pacific Medical Journal
of 1903, was so concerned about the possibility of his colleagues’ failing to diagnose masturbatory diseases in their female patients that he published a guide to detecting masturbation by examination. A woman with one labium longer than the other, he asserted, had caused this “hypertrophy” by masturbating on that side. Since the relative sizes of the labia, like those of hands, feet, ears, and testicles, are usually determined by laterality, Smith must have discovered multitudes of female masturbators by this method. Passing a “mild faradic current” through the urethra was another method of determining whether women were more sexually sensitive than Smith thought was good for them.
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Nearly all female disorders could be attributed to masturbation or related sins, such as drinking alcohol, tea, or coffee, thinking about sex, or “tight corsets worn while reading French novels.”
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Mary Gove Nichols, a hydropathic physician, Grahamite, and “sexual radical,” thought that menorrhagia and dysmenorrhea could be caused either by masturbation or by “excessive indulgence of amativeness” with one’s spouse.
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Russell Thacher Trail, another water cure physician, concurred with both views.
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Trail thought intercourse was especially dangerous for women who constricted their organs with tight corsetry.
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These conservative views on coitus may have increased the popularity of hydropathic physicians with women, who represented the major market for their services.

George Beard, whom I have mentioned as the great popularizer of neurasthenia, believed that masturbation “is almost universal. It is indulged in by both sexes.” But excessive indulgence could have pathological
sequelae in some persons of weak constitution: “It is the masturbation acting on a nervous diathesis, it is the habit
plus
a nervous constitution that gives us the product—sexual neurasthenia.”
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Even while condemning female masturbation, some physicians were apparently comforted by the unsupported assumption that most women accomplished this forbidden act by some means approximating coitus. As early as the thirteenth century, Arnaldus of Villanova had recommended the use of a dildo to widows and nuns suffering from the dread symptoms of hysteria.
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Any object or device that traveled the path of the totemic penis into the vagina was, at the end of the nineteenth century, suspected of having an orgasmically stimulating effect. The widespread adoption of the speculum as a medical instrument was far more controversial than that of the vibrator a few years later.
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Elaborate tales were related of women and girls lusting after medical examination and climaxing on the examining table the minute the speculum was inserted. Robert Carter, a British physician and social critic, wrote of the speculum in 1853:

No one who has realized the amount of moral evil wrought in girls … whose prurient desires have been increased by Indian hemp [marijuana] and partially gratified by medical manipulations, can deny that remedy is worse than the disease [hysteria]. I have … seen young unmarried women, of the middle-class of society, reduced by the constant use of the speculum to the mental and moral condition of prostitutes; seeking to give themselves the same indulgence by the practice of solitary vice; and asking every medical practitioner … to institute an examination of the sexual organs.
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To modern women, for whom pelvic examinations are a routine ordeal (and perhaps for Carter’s female contemporaries), these assertions seem strange indeed. Opponents of the speculum also argued that its use required looking at the patient’s genitalia, a clearly indelicate situation. The earlier method of examination, called “the touch,” did not even require the patient to disrobe completely.
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Part of the attraction of the new technology, however, was that the physician could greatly reduce tactile contact with the patient. One of the inventors of the speculum, gynecologist James Marion Sims, asserted that a significant component
of his motivation for experimenting with the new technology was simple distaste: “If there was anything I hated,” he wrote in 1884, “it was investigating the organs of the female pelvis.”
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In any event, the medical profession adopted the speculum, apparently deciding that its advantages as a diagnostic tool outweighed its perceived (and probably imaginary) dangers as a masturbatory device. The belief that most women masturbated with penis substitutes (dildos) must have been very comforting, but only about 11 to 20 percent of modern women surveyed actually use such methods.
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In 1980 it was estimated that some form of masturbation was practiced by 97 percent of males and 78 percent of females; we do not, of course, have acceptable estimates for previous centuries.
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At the end of the nineteenth century the masturbation issue was open to considerable debate. Freud began to doubt in 1896 that masturbation caused neuroses, although he was still willing to believe it caused bed-wetting, leucorrhea, and some kinds of hysteria.
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Robert Taylor, writing in 1905, warned that horseback riding, use of sewing machines, and bicycle riding could all lead to female masturbation, but that “in general no great harm is done to the system by the habit.” An exception was vaginismus, which he thought could be caused by masturbating with a dildo or similar object. He attributes the prevalence of female masturbation among married women to the potential frustrations of intercourse: “In many cases the too rapid completion of the sexual act in the man leaves the woman unsatisfied, and she as a result produces the orgasm upon herself at the first opportunity.”
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“FRIGIDITY” AND ANORGASMIA

It is in the nineteenth century that we see the fullest flowering of the third and fourth approaches to reconciling perceptions of women’s sexuality with their observed behavior: believing either that women enjoyed intercourse sufficiently with or without the resolution now medically defined as orgasm, or that normal women experienced no sexual feelings at all. Both views assisted in the camouflage of orgasmic treatments, since in the first case no penetration (and therefore nothing sexual) was occurring during the treatment and in the second case sexual pleasure on the
part of the patient was theoretically impossible. Belief in female frigidity or in women’s total indifference to sexual stimuli was popular with both physicians and the public. One theory was that in the hysteric, frigidity and insatiability were combined in women who went from lover to lover seeking the gratification that a supposedly normal female would have experienced in coitus with her spouse. Madame Bovary was regarded as the epitome of this type, but the stereotypically insatiable female was hardly a newcomer (so to speak) to literature.
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Nineteen centuries before Flaubert, Juvenal, who aimed his longest satire at the opposite sex, had expressed the characteristic male fear and disgust at the ability of women to have intercourse repeatedly without reaching orgasm, and their ability to achieve orgasm with external stimulation alone. Writing ostensibly to dissuade a young friend from marrying, Juvenal described “an imperial whore” who goes out for a long and active night of paid sex, after which “she sadly departed/Last of them all to leave, still hot, with a woman’s erection,/Tired by her men, but unsatisfied still, her cheeks all discolored.” Later in the poem the imaginary wife of his friend is at the bathhouse, where massage is apparently the chief attraction: “then it is time for the man with the oil to give her rubdown. Don’t think that’s all he does—his fingers are certainly clever,/Knowing where they can go, and how they can work up a climax.”
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A decorous and loyal frigidity in one’s wife, in this model, seems to have been regarded as preferable to a passionate temperament beyond the husband’s power to satiate it.
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Physicians, popular culture, and even some feminists attempted in the nineteenth century to establish decorous anorgasmia as a normal, even desirable, feminine trait. In 1844 the French physician Adam Raciborski had asserted that “three-fourths of women merely endure the approaches of men.”
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Carl Degler reports that Charles Taylor wrote in 1882 that “women have ‘less sexual feeling than men’ and that some people even go so far as to claim that ‘as a rule women have practically nothing of what is understood as sexual passion.’ As many as three-quarters of married women, he had been told, took no pleasure in the sexual act.”
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The ideal of passionlessness appealed to many women of Taylor’s time, for whom intercourse without orgasm but with the danger of pregnancy and all its potential pains, complications, risks, and costs in time and health must have been a much less attractive prospect than to their relatively unencumbered male partners. William Hammond wrote in
1887 that “leaving prostitutes out of consideration, it is doubtful if in one-tenth of the instances of intercourse [women] experience the slightest pleasurable sensation from first to last.”
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Hermann Fehling asserted in 1893 that “it is an altogether false idea that a young woman has just as strong an impulse to the opposite sex as a young man … The appearance of the sexual side in the love of a young girl is pathological.” He goes on to say that “half of all women are not sexually excitable.”
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Havelock Ellis commented in 1910 that “by many, sexual anesthesia is considered natural in women, some even declaring that any other opinion would be degrading to women; even by those who do not hold to this opinion it is believed that there is an unnatural prevalence of sexual frigidity among civilized women.”
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In his “Sexual Impulse in Women,” he cites a number of medical authors who claim “frigidity” rates of between 66 and 75 percent for “civilized women,” numbers that are suggestively similar to Shere Hite’s late 1970s figures for women who do not regularly reach orgasm in coitus.
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Sophie Lazarsfeld in the mid-twentieth century said that “the proportion of frigid women, according to the scientific investigators, varies between 60 and 90 per cent.”
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Of this reportedly rampant female frigidity in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman point out that this view had attractions for some women, since it suggested “spiritual equality” with man and implied that “purity could be a useful tool with which women could gain leverage in sexual relations, for it provided them with grounds for refusing unwanted sex.”
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There must have been a good deal of this last, because the same authors comment on the results of Clelia Mosher’s survey of 1900–1920 that “half of these women expressed sexual desires and found sex agreeable, at least ‘at times,’ but more telling was the fact that even those who felt no desire participated in regular sexual relations.” D’Emilio and Freedman go on to say that “most [nineteenth-century] women who complained that their husbands neglected marital sexuality stressed their desire for children rather than their desire for physical pleasure.”
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The American physician Elizabeth Blackwell subscribed to this view.
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If only a minority of women had regular orgasmic experience in coitus, the majority’s lack of interest is understandable: Why bother?