Sex and Science--The Return of the Repressed

Julia A. Ericksen, with Sally A. Steffen. Kiss and Tell: Surveying Sex in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1999. ix + 270 pp.; no bibliography. ISBN 0-674-50535-2 (cl).

Rachel P. Maines. The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999. xviii + 181 pp.; ill.; no bibliography. ISBN 0-8018-5941-7 (cl).

Irvin Cemil Schick. The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alterist Discourse. London: Verso, 1999. x + 315 pp.; ill. ISBN 1-85984-732-3 (cl).

Jennifer Terry. An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. xiv + 537 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-226-79366-4 (cl); ISBN 0-226-79367-2 (pb).

Scholars have been studying the history of sexuality for almost thirty years. We have covered a lot of ground, established our research as a legitimate field of inquiry, and successfully fended off critics who accused us of gutting the academy, at least for the moment. In that defense, we could have pointed to another, more exalted, history. Sexuality itself has been studied for much longer than our meager efforts indicate. Scientists have been training their disciplinary attention on it for ages and have been, as French philosopher and historian Michel Foucault first told us, important arbiters of our own sensibility. ¹

We historians have been aware of this scientific fascination, and elite authorities, such as Sigmund Freud, Havelock Ellis, and that important maverick, Alfred Kinsey, appeared often in our early efforts. But as we sought evidence of history from the bottom up, many historians lost interest in them. Anxious for juicier ground, we moved on to the heart and soul of progressive history, the actual people. There is nothing inherently wrong with this shift in interest and much to commend it, but in the process we never got a grasp on science's role in the construction of modern sexuality--or our role in enabling the authority of modern science.

Several works have recently emerged that attempt to correct this deficit, and this review looks at four such books with science and sexuality as their focus. Their authors attempt to chart new territory by surveying the surveyors of sexual experience. Not all such attempts are equal in ambition, scope, or success. Some provide minor, if engaging, tidbits, while others fundamentally alter the way we understand this past. I begin with those works that offer a more narrow perspective and focus more fully toward the end of the review on the transformative authority of the best book in this set, An American Obsession.

In The Technology of Orgasm, Rachel P. Maines, an energetic and often witty writer, traces the vibrator to its roots as a medical tool in the nineteenth century. Swiftly surveying medical discussions of hysteria dating back to ancient Greece (territory covered more effectively by many others ² ), Maines leads the reader to one common "treatment" for afflicted women from "antiquity through the Middle Ages, Renaissance, and Reformation and well into the modern era" (12)--manual medical massage of the female genitals to relieve hysteria symptoms. In the opening chapter, entitled "The Job Nobody Wanted" (an unlikely historical interpretation), Maines, citing a 1903 text on "A System of Instruction in X-Ray Methods and Medical Uses of Light, Hot Air, Vibration, and High Frequency Currents," claims "the main difficulty for physicians, however, were the skills required to properly locate the intensity of massage for each patient and the stamina to sustain the treatment long enough to produce results." ³ Hot air, indeed.

This medical crisis led to the invention of the vibrator--a technical innovation designed to assist physicians with this arduous task and save them from carpal tunnel syndrome. Maines skips merrily through developments in the vibrator's medical marketing while maintaining a somewhat elastic relationship to chronology. The reader is treated to various types...