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

Rachel P. Maines. The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. 181 pp. $22.00 cloth.

Rachel P. Maines believes that Western women have been bamboozled about sex for centuries--by their husbands, physicians (mostly men), and medical advisers (usually men). Their own historical reluctance to challenge the male power structure, she argues, has compounded the problem. Tricked into thinking that conventional sexual intercourse is the only appropriate avenue for orgasmic satisfaction, women have had an "androcentric standard" of sexuality thrust upon them from all fronts. The result was the creation of a disease--hysteria--which in Maines's view was simply the result of a normal woman finding herself unable to achieve an orgasm through vaginal intercourse. Since a "disease" requires treatment, she declares, physicians and others agreed that it was ethically permissible for doctors and midwives to produce orgasm through clitoral stimulation. Such, in essence, is the argument of this book. Although Maines begins with a disclaimer, "I do not mean that all women diagnosed as hysterical were cases of sexual (or rather orgasmic) deprivation," in fact the book is premised on precisely that assessment (8).

Beginning with a discussion of the views of male medical authorities from ancient sages such as Galen and Hippocrates to now forgotten nineteenth-century luminaries including S. Wier Mitchell and culminating with Freud, Maines contends that an androcentric model of sexuality not only produced a host of diseases but also, by providing a cure for those diseases through what she views as "medical masturbation," furnished a steady source of income for medical practitioners. However, since physicians found it personally repugnant to manipulate a woman to orgasm, they either delegated the task whenever possible to assistants or midwives, or, as technological solutions became available, proposed alternatives to the human hand such as pulsating jets of water and, by the late nineteenth century, vibrators powered by steam or electricity.

Chapter 4, which contains a section on spas and water-cure establishments and another on what in the nineteenth century was called "electrotherapeutics," presents most of the specific evidence for Maines's argument. Shrewdly noting that women were among the most enthusiastic patrons of hydropathy, she emphasizes the sexual dimensions of the water cure. Hydropathy was part of the medical reform movement of the mid-nineteenth century and built on a long legacy of belief in the curative powers of health spas and of mineral waters. (Readers of nineteenth-century novels will think of the invalids who took the waters of the city of Bath in the novels of Jane Austen.) The water cure (another term for hydropathy) involved warm and cold baths, "wraps" in wet sheeting, and a simple diet that included fresh fruits and vegetables as well as the drinking of substantial quantities of cold water. At its peak, it claimed thousands of adherents among middle-class American women who, as practitioners as well as patients, were the mainstay of the medical reform movement.¹ Readers of this book will find little of this larger context. Maines's version of the water cure is that it consisted largely of "treatments" (pulsating jets of water directed at the female genitals) designed to produce orgasms in women.

Any reader without independent knowledge of the philosophy of hydropathy, or of the broad range of therapies included in it, would conclude from reading this book that the overwhelming majority of women who frequented water cure establishments were believed to be suffering from, in Maines's words, "orgasmic deprivation" disguised as hysteria. In reality, nineteenth-century women suffered from a range of health complaints, many of them physiological rather than culturally constructed. For example, even limiting the list of ailments to reproductive disorders alone, women suffered from complications of childbirth, dietary deficiencies that...