The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (28 page)

100
. Oughourlian,
Puppet of Desire
, 149.

101
. Gay,
Education of the Senses
, 197.

CHAPTER 3 “MY GOD, WHAT DOES SHE WANT?”

1
. Donald Symons,
The Evolution of Human Sexuality
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 85.

2
. William H. Masters,
Human Sexual Response
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1966).

3
. Symons,
Evolution of Human Sexuality
, 87. He cites Alfred Charles Kinsey,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
(Philadelphia: Saunders, 1953); see 163 and 189.

4
. Carol Tavris and Carole Wade,
The Longest War: Sex Differences in Perspective
, 2d ed. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 92–93.

5
. This question is not original to me. See Shere Hite,
The Hite Report on Male Sexuality
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1981), 680.

6
. Paul Robinson,
The Modernization of Sex: Havelock Ellis, Alfred Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson
(New York: Harper and Row, 1976), 137.

7
. The social and legal implications of this view have been explored in detail by Susan Brownmiller,
Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975).

8
. The Ptolemaic system is illustrated and described in Otto Neugebauer,
The Exact Sciences in Antiquity
, 2d ed. (1957; reprint New York: Dover, 1969), 191–206; Giorgio de Santillana,
The Origins of Scientific Thought
(New York: Mentor Books, 1961), 251–53; and many other works on Greek science and mathematics.

9
. Examples are numerous. For American medical authors, see Nancy Sahli,
Women and Sexuality in America: A Bibliography
(Boston: G. K. Hall, 1984).

10
. Thomas Laqueur,
Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), 34–35.

11
. Mirko D. Grmek, “The Harm in Broad Beans: Legend and Reality,” in
Diseases in the Ancient Greek World
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 210.

12
. Laqueur,
Making Sex
, 49–51.

13
. Franz Josef Gall,
Anatomie et physiologie du système nerveux en général
(Paris: F. Schoell, 1810–19), 3:91. For an example of a modern medical text on this subject, see Edwin B. Steel and James H. Price,
Human Sex and Sexuality
, 2d ed. (New York: Dover, 1988), 244. A fictional, but documented, comment appears in Gay Courter’s novel
The Midwife’s Advice
(New York: Signet, 1994), 100, 301, 376–77, and author’s note, 713–16, on European folk and modern medical research on the observed correlation, in some populations, between female orgasm and the conception of male children.

14
. Danielle Jacquart and Claude Thomasset,
Sexuality and Medicine in the Middle Ages
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 67.

15
. Helen Rodnite Lemay, “Human Sexuality in Twelfth- through Fifteenth-Century Scientific Writings,” in
Sexual Practices and the Medieval Church
, ed. Vern L. Bullough and James Brundage (Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1982), 204.

16
. Audrey Eccles,
Obstetrics and Gynaecology in Tudor and Stuart England
(London: Croom Helm, 1982), 28–30, 68.

17
. Ambroise Paré,
Workes of That Famous … Chirugion
…, trans. Thomas Johnson (London: R. Cotes and Young, 1634), 945–46.

18
. Abraham Zacuto,
Praxis Medica Admiranda
(London: Ioannem-Antonium Huguetan 1637), 260: “Horribilis affectio est, & odiosa: nam concubitum, & conceptionem impedit.”

19
. Franz Josef Gall,
Sur les fonctions du cerveau
(Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1825), 3:235.

20
. Nathaniel Highmore,
De Passione Hysterica et Affectione Hypochondriaca
(Oxford: A. Lichfield-R. Davis, 1660), 5–6, 41–45, 71.

21
. William Cullen,
First Lines of the Practice of Physic
(Edinburgh: Bell, Bradfute, 1791), 3:46–47, 4:105.

22
. Laqueur,
Making Sex
, 218.

23
. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg and Charles Rosenberg, “The Female Animal: Medical and Biological Views of Woman and Her Role in Nineteenth-Century America,”
Journal of American History
60 (1973): 348–49.

24
. C. Bigelow,
Sexual Pathology: A Practical and Popular Review of the Principal Diseases of the Reproductive Organs
(Chicago: Ottaway and Colbert, 1875), 36, 78, 109.

25
. William Goodell,
Lessons in Gynecology
, 3d ed. (Philadelphia: Davis, 1890), 541, 565–70.

26
. Edward Bliss Foote,
Dr. Foote’s Home Cyclopedia of Popular Medical, Social and Sexual Science
(New York: Murray Hill, 1901), 550, 1133, 1150. Foote considered this exchange to be of vital importance to health and believed that men and women improved each other’s health simply by standing close together fully dressed. He also asserted, “as a man’s rights man!” the right of men to be treated by physicians of the opposite sex, and thus endorsed the active recruitment of women doctors.

27
. Richard von Krafft-Ebing,
Psychopathia Sexualis: A Medico-forensic Study
(1896; New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1965), 33, 55, 248.

28
. John S. Haller and Robin Haller,
The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973), 99.

29
. G. Kolischer, “Sexual Frigidity in Women,”
American Journal of Obstetrics
52, no. 3 (1905): 414–16.

30
. Gilles de la Tourette,
Traite clinique et thérapeutique de l’hystérie paroxistique
(Paris: Plon, 1895), 1:461.

31
. Theodore Gaillaird Thomas, A
Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Women
, 6th ed. (Philadelphia: Lea Brothers, 1891), 124–25.

32
. Smith Baker, “The Neuropsychical Element in Conjugal Aversion,”
Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
19, no. 9 (1892): 669–81.

33
. Havelock Ellis,
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
, vol. 1 (New York: Random House, 1940), 245–70.

34
. N. Cooke,
Satan in Society
(Cincinnati: C. F. Vent, 1871), 91–105, 112.

35
. Bigelow,
Sexual Pathology
, 33; Charles H. Hendricks, “The Sewing Machine Problem as Seen through the Pages of the
American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children
, 1868–1873,”
Obstetrics and Gynecology
26 (1965):
453–54, and “Influence of Sewing Machine on Female Health,”
New Orleans Medical and Surgical Journal
20 (November 1867): 359–60.

36
. Krafft-Ebing,
Psychopathia Sexualis
, 498; A. Coffignon,
Paris vivant: La corruption à Paris
(Paris: Librarie Illustrée, [1888?]).

37
. Thomas Low Nichols,
The Curse Removed: A Statement of Facts Respecting the Efficacy of Water-Cure in the Treatment of Uterine Disease and the Removal of the Pains and Perils of Pregnancy and Childbirth
(New York: Water-Cure Journal, 1850), 12.

38
. E. H. Smith, “Signs of Masturbation in the Female,”
Pacific Medical Journal
, February 1903, 76–83. See also Robert Taylor, A
Practical Treatise on Sexual Disorders of the Male and Female
, 3d ed. (New York: Lea Brothers, 1905), 418.

39
. R. Pearsall,
The Worm in the Bud: The World of Victorian Sexuality
(New York: Macmillan, 1969), 204.

40
. Mary Gove Nichols,
Experience in Water-Cure
(New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1850), 61–68. See also Jayme A. Sokolow,
Eros and Modernization: Sylvester Graham, Health Reform, and the Origins of Victorian Sexuality in America
(Rutherford, N. J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1983), 127.

41
. Russell Thacher Trail,
The Hydropathic Encyclopedia
(New York: Fowlers and Wells, 1852), 443–47, and Trail,
Nervous Debility; The Nature, Causes, Consequences, and Hygienic Treatment of Invalids, Suffering from Prematurely Exhausted Vitality
(New York: Davies and Kent, 1861), 15–16.

42
. Russell Thacher Trail,
The Health and Diseases of Women
(Battle Creek, Mich.: Health Reformer, 1873), 31.

43
. George M. Beard,
Sexual Neurasthenia [Nervous Exhaustion]
(New York: E. B. Treat, 1884), 120, 201–5.

44
. Ilsa Veith,
Hysteria: The History of a Disease
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 100–101.

45
. Ornella Moscucci,
The Science of Woman: Gynaecology and Gender in England, 1800–1929
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 112–27.

46
. Robert Brudenell Carter,
On the Pathology and Treatment of Hysteria
(London: John Churchill, 1853), 69.

47
. Virginia G. Drachman, “The Loomis Trial: Social Mores and Obstetrics in the Mid-Nineteenth Century,” in
Women and Health in America: Historical Readings
, ed. Judith Walzer Leavitt (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1984), 167–68. See also Wilhelm Griesinger,
Mental Pathology and Therapeutics
, trans. C. Lockhart Robinson and James Rutherford (London: New Sydenham Society, 1867), 202. For a contemporary medical description of the technique, see Thomas,
Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Women
, 78–79.

48
. James Marion Sims,
The Story of My Life
(New York: D. Appleton, 1884), 231.

49
. Dianne Grosskopf,
Sex and the Married Woman
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983), 121, found vaginal insertion as a primary masturbatory technique in 11 percent of her sample; Kinsey,
Sexual Behavior in the Human Female
, 189, found 20 percent.

50
. Donald E. Greydanus, “Masturbation: Historic Perspective,”
New York State Journal of Medicine
80, no. 12 (1980): 1893.

51
. Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson,
The Assault on Truth: Freud’s Suppression of the Seduction Theory
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1987), 84–91, and Madelon Sprengnether, “Enforcing Oedipus,” in
In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism
, ed. Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 265.

52
. Taylor,
Practical Treatise
, 404, 410–13.

53
. Jan Goldstein,
Console and Classify: The French Psychiatric Profession in the Nineteenth Century
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 374.

54
. Decimus Junius Juvenal,
The Satires of Juvenal
, trans. Rolfe Humphries (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 67–68, 81.

55
. D’Emilio and Freedman comment on this in the context of Puritanism. John D’Emilio and Estelle Freedman,
Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America
(New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 28.

56
. Adam Raciborski,
De la puberté chez la femme
(Paris: J. B. Baillière, 1844), 486.

57
. Carl W. Degler, At
Odds: Women and the Family in America from the Revolution to the Present
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1980), 255.

58
. William Alexander Hammond,
Sexual Impotence in the Male and Female
(Detroit: G. S. Davis, 1887), 300.

59
. Hermann Fehling,
Lehrbuch der Frauenkrankheiten
(Stuttgart: Enke, 1893). The translation is by Havelock Ellis, who quotes him on p. 195 of “The Sexual Impulse in Women,” in
Studies in the Psychology of Sex
.

60
. Ellis, “Sexual Impulse in Women,” 191.

61
. They are also consistent with Ann Landers’s findings of 72 percent with a sample size of about 100,000 readers in 1985, and with those of Linda Wolfe, with a figure of 71 percent among 106,000 women. See Wolfe,
The Cosmo Report
(New York: Arbor House, 1981), 129.