Maintenance Phase - Vibrators

Episode Date: November 30, 2021

It's a sexual health episode! This week, Mike and Aubrey dive into the hotly debated medical history of vibrators and ask: who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Note: A previous version of this episode included language that referred to “the female downstairs,” implying both that gender is linked to genitals (it isn’t) and that vibrators were used primarily by cis women (they weren’t). We love our trans listeners and we don’t want to do anything that makes them feel excluded, so we’ve removed the sections where that language appeared. We'll be discussing this and our approach to handling feedback in more detail soon. Thanks to everyone who wrote in to let us know! — MikeSupport us:Hear bonus episodes on PatreonDonate on PayPalGet Maintenance Phase T-shirts, stickers and moreLinks!The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel MainesBuzz by Hallie LiebermanSignior DildoHysteria! trailerVibrators had a long history as medical quackery before feminists rebranded them as sex toysA Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of OrgasmHow Gosnell Duncan Changed the Sex Toy Game ForeverVictorian Doctors Didn't Treat Women With Orgasms, Say Historians (Almost) Everything You Know About the Invention of the Vibrator Is WrongSupport the show

Hello and welcome to Maintenance Phase, the podcast that comes in discrete packaging, so your neighbors don't find out. You really nailed it. I'm Michael Hobbs. I'm Aubrey Gordon. If you would like to support the show, you can do that at patreon.com slash maintenance phase. This month's bonus episode by popular request of nonprofit employees is Mike and I talking about

our experience as working at nonprofits. So if you couldn't get enough of that, Mary Ann Williams in episode, get ready. Non-profit drama. Yeah, so much drama. We're doing it. And today this is about, so we're going to talk about the history of vibrators

and particularly like a heavily debated part of that history, which is who invented them and what were they used for. Oh. Yeah, we're going to get into the ins and outs of primary sources and why they may not always be the end-all be all. You cannot say ins and outs in an episode about vibrators. We can't go down coldest acts like that.

Tighten it up, Aubrey. Come on. I mean, some of these were designed to do that to tighten it up. Just fucking talk. So the first thing to note is that sex toys have been around since truly forever. So we have this whole narrative around the difference between humans and animals is that humans know how to make and use tools, and actually dildos were one of those early tools. No way.

Uh-huh. So the earliest dildo that we know of was discovered in a cave in Germany and dates back to the ice age. Germans typical. And tonight with their work. So it's made out of silt stone, and it's believed to be about 28,000 years old. This has been happening for a long, long, long time. And sort of our cultural responses to Dildos have changed quite a bit.

There are images from Egypt and Japan going way the hell back that appear to be really like celebratory public sort of moments with Dildos like people like wearing dildos. So there are some images of Egyptian women way back wearing would appear to be essentially like strap on as a sort of devotional to Osiris the God Osiris famous Pager one moment that I wanted to lift up is that in the 17th century, poet named John Wilmot, who is the Earl of Rochester, wrote a poem about the popularity of Dildos. It has 23 stanzas. Oh my gosh. So I'm gonna send you one stanza, it's four lines.

Oh, I'm so glad I get to read it. Poetry corner. I mean, that's Poetry Corner. Wait, does this kind of rhymes? It's, I think it's intended to rhyme, but also he ends every stanza with the word dildo. So his rhymes get like slantier and slantier as the poem goes on, right? Where you're like, oh, you're running out of, oh, words, got it. All right, I'm probably going to mangle the pentameter, but let's see how I do.

He says, the pattern of virtue, her grace of Cleveland has swallowed more pricks than the ocean has sand, but by rubbing and scrubbing, so why does it grow? It is fit for just nothing, but senior dildo. Okay, it ended strong. You really nailed the rhythm of that. I don't think I did.

I did. The other sort of like little moment that I wanted to lift up, there is a story that seems absolutely utterly bananas to me that credits Cleopatra with the invention of the first vibrator. Okay, that's no. Right, right? No. Would you like to know the technology that is purportedly was part of that invention? Oh yeah, tell me. She kept agitated bees in a hollow gourd. What?

And then the bees created the vibration inside the gourd. Wait, I couldn't even, so like normally when I do research for the show, I like tend to believe things until I fact check them. And this one, I was like, I couldn't even get through the sentence without being like, how do you get the bees in the gourd? Wouldn't it need to seal off the gourd

to keep the bees in there and then wouldn't they die? Also, wouldn't it just sound buzzy, but not actually be buzzy? Like what, I spent an anordinate amount of time trying to fact check this. This was one of the reasons we had this scheduled before. And I was like, I'm so sorry, I can't do this until we get this fact check. I can't proceed until I we had this scheduled before. And I was like, I'm so sorry, I can't do this until we get this fact.

Yes, I can't proceed until I know if this is true. Basically, it traces back, it appears to trace back to this 1992 book about historical sexual practices. It's called the encyclopedia of unusual sex practices. And it's mentioned in the section about endomethilia, which is sexual attraction to bugs. Okay. And I'm like, but that's also not what's happening here.

There's no primary source site. Like, it really appears to have just sort of appeared whole cloth in 1992. This reminds me of, there's some Kaka-Mami theories on Jack the Ripper that he was actually queen Victoria like in disguise. And it's like, no, that's just the only person like we know existed from that time.

Like, we don't know very much about that time period. It was like, vibrators were there and Cleopatra was there. We're just picking stuff out that we know. And then the last little nugget of sex toy history is from 1965. It's about the invention of the silicone dildo. 65 sounds late. We didn't have silicone dildos until then. Not silicone. No, we had rubber prior to that. So this person, Gosnell Duncan,

in adulthood became paralyzed just before he got married and was concerned that he wouldn't be able to sustain an erection. So he started looking into Dildos and he found out that most of them were like real shitty. They would melt if they got too hot. You couldn't wash them in hot water, so it's also not super hygienic, right?

Like it's just like bad news all around. And he decides to take matters into his own hands and he calls GE and gets a silicone contract and starts the process of the industrial design of the first silicone dildo. So if you have a silicone sex toy, you can thank this disabled activist for inventing it. It's weird that it was a guy who did it.

Totally, totally fascinating. And flies in the face of like, there is, this history is just riddled with dudes being uncomfortable and not wanting to talk about this, which is part of the reason why we have such shitty sources on so much of it. So it's like really lovely to have a dude who's like, no, I'm into it. Let's go. Ladies, I'm here to help. Yeah.

Do we have a sense of how women were using doldos for that time? I mean, I know how like women used to do those in general. I don't want to brag, but I do know what they're in general. I mean, I literally like, I know very little about this, but I feel like I have a general incline of like how they are carried out in the world. But were they like hiding them from their husbands?

Was this something that was super stigmatized and super secret? Or were there sex shops? So this is actually one of the points of major, major debate amongst historians. Oh. To what degree were these being used sexually? To what degree were they being marketed sexually? And to what degree were they just seen as medical tools?

When did they start vibrating? Actually, I'm gonna just situate this because that's like the next thing after a little bit of context. Okay. Essentially when they started vibrating is like the middle of the 19th century. Oh, how? What? Steam powered? Oh my god, where they fucking steam powered. There was a steam powered one. Get it away from downstairs. That's too much power. Too much power. They also have one that is a steam-powered one. Get it away from Madown Stairs. That's too much power. Too much power. They also have one that is a hand crank

that looks so much like one of your grandma's egg beaters. Do you know what I'm talking about? Do you know what I was gonna say? Yeah, those miserable egg beaters. It's so like every time I look at them, I just clench every muscle in my body, and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. But then who's turning, how does that work? Who's turning the hand crank? I just clench every muscle in my body, and I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, is, again, as we're talking about, the invention of the electric vibrator in particular.

Because that's when it stops being like, hot steam, egg beater. Right, it's basically the board game mouse trap for a major kid. There's like a little cage, has to fall down a ladder. So essentially the electric vibrator first appeared either in England or France in the 1870s.

But at the time, vibrators are made available almost exclusively to doctors. They cost like $200 in the 1800s, which is so much money. So it's like an MRI machine or something. It's not something that people have in their homes. Uh huh, kind of, yeah, yeah, yeah. So to situate us in time and space,

this is sort of the time that we were talking about with the snake oil episode. This is sort of the time that we were talking about with the snake oil episode. This is pre-jerm theory. So doctors don't believe that germs are really a thing or nobody's really talking about it yet. Medicine isn't really regulated and centralized medical schools. There are like a couple,

but they haven't really taken root yet. All kinds of people are calling themselves doctors with all kinds of varying level of training, right? It's the group website. Yes, it's the Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop. Goop.. Okay. It just doesn't happen. Like you're not built for that. You're built to be a receptacle for that, but you're not actually built to experience pleasure. And if you are experiencing pleasure,

something is wrong. Nice. On top of all of that. So against that background, there is this medical diagnosis that you mentioned earlier called hysteria. Hysteria had been a diagnosis for hundreds of years that had been around for a long, long time.

The symptoms for hysteria included anxiety, sleeplessness, breathlessness, expressing anger or irritability, being too sexually reserved, also being too overtly sexual. The presence of vaginal lubrication. Oh my god. And one of the symptoms, no joke, was just called a tendency to cause trouble for others.

So it's basically like my wife annoys me disease. Yeah, this is a time when getting diagnosed with hysteria was like a really, really difficult, challenging thing. It could lead to all of like loss of your freedom, loss of, you know, your control over your own body, all kinds of stuff, forced medical treatments at the discretion of your husband, right? There are a few different explanations or sort of theories at this time about what caused hysteria.

The diagnosis of hysteria, one of the earlier sort of examples that we have of it is, um, Hippocrates believed in hysteria and thought that it was caused by a wandering uterus. We talked about this in Moonjuice. Yeah. The belief was that your uterus becomes detached and just starts floating around inside your body and making you crazy. You know, science. The theories around this time in the 19th century are that it might be a neurological disease, that it might be the result of a culture of licensuousness amongst women. So like moral

moral stuff, of course. Hortiness. And the last one, and this is where the vibrator comes in, there may be this belief that there is an imbalance of bodily vibrations. So there's this theory that your nervous system is powered by vibration. Sure. Those sort of imbalance in vibrations is what causes lots of illnesses including hysteria and that that could only be resolved by something called hysterical peroxism.

Okay. Which was a phenomenon that was a result of a treatment. The treatment was genital massage. Okay. Until the point of full body convulsions. Oh, what? So they were just like giving women orgasms and like calling it medicine. Is that what you're saying?

This is the story. And this is one of the things that's under like very intense debate amongst historians, is like, did this happen or did this not happen? So basically, the question is like, were people inducing orgasms in women to treat hysteria in the 1800s or not? Were doctors scheduling appointments at their offices for women to come in and get this treatment and achieve a hysterical paroxysm and then leave feeling better.

Okay. So we're gonna talk about two, well actually we're gonna talk about three different versions of this story. Two of them come from academics and one of them is sort of the like pop culture version of the story. The last thing to know before is sort of the like pop culture version of the story. The last thing to know before we sort of get into where these three different stories

kind of branch off from one another is that there's a central character here who is a physician. His name is Joseph Mortimer-Granville. He's from England. He's from Devonport. He is a prolific writer. He's written books about mental illness, about sleep, about memory, about gout. He covers really a lot of territory. He wrote a book about mental illness called Common Mind Troubles.

Joy. And he writes one pretty formative book called Nerve Vibration and Excitation. That's where he talks about vibrators and that's where he sort of advances this theory about, okay, your nervous system is powered by vibrations. Can other vibrations correct an imbalance in the vibrations of your nervous system? Yeah, so he's basically just making this up. The four humors, like all of the other paradigms of medicine,

he's a dude who's making up something but he doesn't realize that he just making this up. The four humors, like all of the other paradigms of medicine, he's a dude who's making up something, but he doesn't realize that he's making it up, and he thinks that it's a process of discovery rather than invention. Yeah, I mean, I think that's right, and I also think that's the headline about medicine as a whole at this point, is it's just a bunch of white dudes making shit up.

Yeah, right. Whichever whoever has the most convincing narrative, but not necessarily the most convincing science, of course. That's exactly right. So he's the first person who figures out how to use electricity to power a vibrator. And it's powered by a generator that is the size of a refrigerator.

See, I was thinking, I was imagining him climbing up on the roof and attaching like a lightning rod, like dark and back to the future. Now we wait. Okay, Benjamin Franklin is standing outside with kite and a key. So this is where the story really branches off into a few different versions.

If folks come into this episode being like, I know this story, the version of the story that they probably know is a very pop culture version of the story. The version of the story is basically doctors invented vibrators to use on women to cure them of their hysteria. Doctors were using their hands to massage vulvas. Their hands were cramping up, so vibrators became a labor saving sort of device to keep

their hands from cruelling. Right, it's like a cotton gin. In some versions of this story, they take it further saying that like, women understood what was happening, but men didn't. So women were like seeking out treatment intentionally for sexual pleasure.

Oh no. You can see why this story takes off, right? Yeah, this has like nine to five style romcom written all over it. Totally. These women kind of taking advantage of these clueless dudes and getting these dope orgasms in their offices and like, ha ha ha, they think it's all over it. Totally. These women kind of taking advantage of these clueless dudes and getting these dope orgasms in their offices and like, ha, ha, ha, they think it's all about medicine. It's like extremely like salacious.

It's like kind of fun and wacky. Yeah. And it becomes fun and wacky enough that in 2011, a movie is made about Dr. Granville, the inventor of the vibrator, and it's called hysteria exclamation point. Oh good, hysteria at the downstairs. Yes.

Yeah, totally. This is, I think, probably the best and most concise version of the pop culture story that sort of passes around about this. So I'm gonna send you a link to a trailer. Ooh, I'm ready. What do you know of hysteria? Nothing but half the women in London are affected.

It's a plague of our time. I have just been offered a position by London's leading specialist in women's medicine. Oh, no. I must find some way to attend to these women properly. I believe the French. Should I quite a bit of luck using their tongue? Oh, no.

I want you to meet my daughter, Emily Dalgromport. Serpent, no. I've no doubt that one day she would make a fine doctor's wife. It's a very difficult case that one. Oh, wow! Must be difficult pleasuring half the women in the city. Pleasure has nothing to do with it. I can assure you. Well, I suppose that depends on whether you're ready Go! Oh, wow! Must be difficult pleasuring half the women in the city. Pleasure has nothing to do with it, I can assure you.

Well, I suppose that depends on whether you're ready for the table or on it. Isn't she a Chinese fighter? According to your diagnosis, his theory seems to cover everything from insomnia to teethache. When you degenerate, my god. Now, who should we try it on? Would you call that little thing? I was calling it the Fefferdaster. Think of something quick, so it's a girl, and that's what you asked for.

Women will no longer be denied our rightful place. It's odd! You are a confounding woman. And you are a good doctor doctor and you should remain one. Whether you seek it or not, Dr. Ranville. You are destined for fame. You didn't need a bigger appointments book. That looks really annoying, honestly.

The book's really annoying. I watched this whole movie and it was such an astonishing waste of my time. I just was like, it didn't really offer anything more than you get from this trailer in terms of the research end, right? Well, first of all, tell me how it struck you and then I'll tell you how it struck me. I mean, I think there's like a genre of entertainment and I can't, I can't be too mean about this because like on some level, I had an entire podcast that did this. There was like dedicated to basically laughing about how stupid people were in the past. LOL, like their medicine was so dumb and LOL,

they're, look how impressed by the technology they were. But actually, it's like really primitive technology. It just looks really smug. Yeah, which I always sort of chaff at that stuff because I always feel like, hey, we're really wrong about a lot of stuff now, so maybe let's all get off our high horses here. Even though we're kind of doing that in this episode, I don't know. I know there's a good way to not do this. Yeah, no, we're totally doing that in this episode.

We are also part of the problem. There's no question. I mean, I think the thing that I'm really interesting about this is like, it is a take on this sort of turn of the century medicine That is from the perspective of a 21st century white woman and Maggie Jill and Hall's character really appears to be sort of the audience Sergett being like hysteria is dumb and I don't think it's real and you guys are making it up. Which may or may not have been happening at the time, but the idea that that would happen in like a cute, fun way is like almost certainly not, right? It's not everything we know about treatment

of women at this time. Being like, I think hysteria's made up is a real quick way to get yourself diagnosed with hysteria. Terrier. It always makes me really uncomfortable when you're watching historical movies, and they go out of their way to have a character

like give a big speech that indicates that they have the same values as like we have. Racism is wrong, you guys, and it's like 1807. And you're like, people didn't really say that back then. Like that's not. Totally totally. Like even the anti-racist people were like very racist

by like our standards. Yep, totally. This film, again, a number of these documentaries and sort of this prevailing narrative about the invention of vibrators is like, women knew what was up and we're seeking out sexual pleasure. Right. By getting diagnosed with this thing

that had no uniform treatment and some of the treatment options included being held in place and essentially being imprisoned in your own home or whatever, right? There's not really any acknowledgement of the risk that that would present. Also, I'm assuming a lot of the women at the time also would have bought into them. Yes! Just because that's how systems of oppression work. I also just want to name that like, those doctors were overwhelmingly serving

at the pleasure of the husbands of these women. Right. So like, listen, maybe it is ladies figured out that they could go to the doctor and have a vibrator applied and like experience sexual pleasure. Maybe it is also those husbands were hiring those doctors to perform coerced sex acts.

It's like Kim, there's people that are dying. There's actually some serious things happening behind this. Yes! Right, so like, hey, this was like kind of a horror show of a time for women's autonomy and couldn't vote or own things or be independent actors in it. Right, it just seems very strange to latch on to the sort of like sunny bright version of this story and not really grapple with any of the potential darkness.

Yeah, I know. Yeah, it seems like in real life it probably wasn't like wacky hijinks. It wasn't an opera singer hitting a high note while Rupert Everett shoves a vibrating feather duster. Yeah, right? If nobody's going to that film for the facts. They're going to that film because they couldn't get enough of the When Harry Met Sally Dynasty. Yes. So the question then becomes like, where does this story come from? Yeah. So in 2001, technology historian Rachel Mainz released a book called The Technology of orgasm, hysteria, the vibrator, and women's sexual satisfaction.

This is the first one that I can find that was a major history of vibrators in Europe and the US. Main story here, the sort of story that she advances, is sort of the source code for the more popular version, but you can sort of see where the embellishments come up, right, where you're like, oh, a doctor invented a vibrator, it was a medical treatment,

and then you can see that somebody made the leap at some point being like, wouldn't it be hilarious? But there's not really compelling historical evidence necessarily for that. So she is very clear that Granville was actually specifically not using vibrators as a treatment for hysteria. Oh. Main's argues that Granville didn't use this

as a treatment for hysteria, but that other doctors did. This is where we get the story about doctors using their hands for general massage, their hands cramping up, and vibrators becoming sort of like a labor-saving device. So this was happening. It's just the guy who invented the technology

wasn't the one using it on women, but other doctors were using it on women. That's means argument, yes. Yeah. She argues that the primary treatment for hysteria was genital massage to the point of quote unquote hysterical peroxism, and then she describes hysterical peroxism, and it's absolutely just like having an orgasm.

Just wheezing and screaming, yeah. Just from the outside, it's just like muscle convulsions and heavy breathing and sighing and you're like, okay, yeah, okay, got it. So she says this is like the main thing that they were doing for hysteria at the time. Yes, this was a primary treatment for hysteria was to bring about hysterical peroxism, which again, it's really hard not to read the texts about this and just replace like, oh orgasm for hysterical peroxism, right? And then her third argument around vibrators is that vibrators were primarily understood as sexual in nature, but they were marketed using this thing she calls social camouflage, which is essentially

like euphemisms and sort of like a list of alternative purposes for a vibrator that are specifically not sexual. That were sort of designed to let a primarily sexual tool escape kind of social scrutiny. All right, so you have to sell them as something else. It's like selling fucking poppers as room deodorizers. Yeah. For any other game in the chat. No.

Yeah, so mains releases this book in 2001 and it makes a huge splash. We get this movie within about 10 years in that same span we get to play by a playwright called Sarah Rool, who's incredible, who writes this beautiful play based on this premise. There's a lot going on here, right? And it gets sort of latched on to in the public imagination. So you read the main book, right? I read it in college. I read it again this month.

Is it fun to read? I mean, it's a history of technology written by a historian of technology. Yeah, okay. Like it's written like, then the development was this. Right, right. When you're like, no, but come on, also the developments were around like fucking. Yeah, I know.

You talking about the fucking work. Come on. I was hoping it would be full of a bunch of double entendres, like the main thrust of my book. Like, it was like asterisk to the end it like, I see what I'm doing. I just want you to know that I know you wanted her book to be the poem Senior Dildo exactly

I've reached out to your ends with the same word exactly so I read in college I read it again this month and this month when I read it it just didn't hold water the way that it did for me in College and it felt like there were a whole lot more holes in it. It felt like there were a whole lot more things that didn't jive with my understanding of that period. And frankly, there were things in it that didn't seem true to me. And it turns out they might not be true. And it turns out that quite a bit of this book, which created this very popular narrative that many folks know about the medical history of vibrators isn't necessarily substantiated. So now we're going to fast forward to 2017. And this

is our first alternate version of events that comes up. De-bunking. Oh, academic fight. Love these. So we're in 2017. Our next character to sort of enter the story is a historian, Rachel mains as a historian of technology. Halle Lieberman is a historian of sex and gender at the Georgia Institute of Technology. In 2017, Lieberman published a book called Buzz, the stimulating history of the sex toy. of the sex toy. And in 2018, the next year, she co-authors a paper that is straight up called Failure of Academic Quality Control, the technology of orgasm. Oh! She writes a whole paper, it's published in the Journal of Positive Sexuality, and she goes back to all of the primary sources that main sites in her book and fact checks all of it

and then writes a paper to be like, here's what I've found. This is like a diss track. It is kind of like a diss track. The paper that Lieberman writes is pretty careful with its language and talks about this not as a problem with Rachel Mainz, but as a systemic problem, wherein academics are not really fact-checking each other. That they'll just read work from other academics, sort of absorb that narrative and be like, that must be what it is. So she talks about the dozens, if not hundreds, of citations, that lead back to this work and all of this sort of stuff, and she's like, yeah, yeah, but nobody

fact-checked it. Yeah. It's a lot of work because a lot of this stuff comes from like archives, you have to spend the day, you can't take materials out. I mean, totally. Yeah, it's a huge problem because actually going back to all these sources would be like a month-slong project in a lot of cases. So she says, and I quote, we found no evidence in these sources that physicians ever used electro-mechanical vibrators to induce orgasms in female patients as medical treatment. Whoops.

There is not evidence that doctors used it on people with vulvas at the time. There is not evidence that hysterical paroxysm was a treatment for hysteria, and there's actually not evidence of hysterical paroxysism outside of Maine's book. Oh, right. So basically that whole thing of like stealth orgasms, like that didn't happen.

Lieberman is like, I fact-checked it, it didn't happen. Huh. So it gets a little bit worse, I just sent you a little quote. Ooh. Also from this Lieberman paper. So it says, as we show below, mains fails to cite a single source that openly describes use of the vibrator to massage the glitoral area. Furthermore, none of her English language sources even mentions production of paroxysms by massage or anything else that could remotely

suggest an orgasm. So basically, it's not there. Yep. The sources that she's citing as evidence for a claim don't even include anything remotely resembling the claim. Correct. Oh. Lieberman also argues that they were used for a broad range of conditions. Vibrators are being used at this point to induce labor. Wow.

Granville himself used them to treat constipation, diabetes, aches and pains, not for hysteria or on-w women's bodies. The genital use that she finds, that Lieberman finds, is that as much as they were used sexually, were used and applied to men's periniums to restore sexual vigor. So not only were they not being used to provide pleasure to women, they were being used to give Jude's boners face. Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Huge missed opportunity for there to be a follow-up to this movie about a bunch of dudes going in.

Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! And I think there's something in my prostate. I think you need to vibrate that a little bit. Do it again, but with dudes! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Everything you said about power structures, I'm now ignoring and I'm gonna start working on that screenplay.

So I mean, that's another one where it's like, totally take a 21st century lens and apply it here. And you're like, man, oh man, one of those doctors somewhere was either gay or wanted to use a vibrator just for his own. Just for it. There's more to explore here than just like, hmm, a little saucy romp. Also, the, because we're so used to it now,

but at the time, like an object that vibrates, would have seemed like kind of magical, right? I mean, the whole concept of electricity would have seemed kind of sci-fi. And so if you have this object like a little wand that vibrates, I feel like you would sort of use it for everything. Absolutely. So like the treatments that vibrators. I feel like you would sort of use it for everything. Absolutely.

So like the treatments that vibrators are used for at this point are utterly bananas. It will cure your diabetes. It will cure your laryngeitis. It will cure your aching muscles. If you're a farm worker or if you work in a factory, they use them on, they recommend using them on people's scalps

to reverse hair loss. It's a treatment for obesity. Sure, sure. So I couldn't really find anything that definitively sold Rachel Maine's social camouflage model that like everybody knew and they were just buying these, right? Lieberman argues, sure there might have been

some social camouflage, but there's no evidence that vibrators were being sold as a primarily sexual thing. There's no evidence of the everybody knew that it was mostly sexual, right? What there's evidence of is all of the non-sexual uses. So here you go, I am going to send you, there, that's what we like to see. Oh

Wait, what the fuck Okay Okay, so it's an old ad Uh-huh the headline on the ads is here's health and power Vim and vigor and then what the fuck? There's like a little suitcase. Yeah, so there's a big suitcase with like a bunch of tools in it that looks like a fucking time machine.

It has like a bunch of the weird knobs and shit and like cranks, and then there's a photo of a guy shirtless holding something to his chest. It looks like a Maraka. It's got like a little tiny handle and a really, really big bulbous head, and it's metal. And it has, yeah, like the top fit I guess looks kind of like a bird house or something. Then there's a woman who's also holding one on her arm.

What the fuck? How are people even using this as a sex toy? So this is the dispute was like, were these ads undercover ads for sex toys, or were they really being marketed for all of these purposes? Like treatment of diabetes or gout or hair loss or whatever. And this is the thing where it's like hard to know

how they were actually being used because we have all these anti-abcinity laws. You can't actually advertise them as actually, like, let's start there and then we'll get into this, like, how they were marketed business. So around this time is when we have really, really the heyday of obscenity laws. And in the US, there was not anything bigger than the Comstock Act. It sounds like you're familiar with the Comstock Act. Wasn't this the thing that they kind of wanted to get around censorship laws?

Like, you know, it's hard to get through the First Amendment, etc. But they made it like a logistical law. They're like, oh, you can publish obscene things. Oh, we're not going to make a law preventing you from publishing obscene things, but we're just going to make a law saying that the post office, which is a government agency, cannot distribute obscene things. You can't send it through the mail and you can't own it and you can't give it away and you can't sell it.

Oh, that's more strict than I thought it was. Yeah, totally. So you can basically, like, you could make it and then destroy it, I guess? Great. So the Comstock Actuals signed in the law in 1873. Its name for this guy, Anthony Comstock, who was an extremely staunch sort of Christian, who dedicated his life to fighting vice

by which he primarily just meant porn. Oh. The Comstock Act made it a criminal offense to send obscene, lute, lascivious, immoral, or indecent publications in the mail. Totally normal terms with fixed definitions. We all know technically what immoral means. Immoral, all agree on that.

What that means for the research here is that advertising of sex toys and acknowledging that they might be used for sexual pleasure would have been a criminal offense. And this is the thing that because these are our primary sources, we don't really know. What we do know is that these ads appeared in the Sears Robot catalog. They appeared in the New York Times.

They appeared all over. These are like a big deal ads that were kind of everywhere. And they were all making these big claims about the health benefits of using vibrators. I'm not seeing any like coded language in here. Yeah. Oftentimes when you're marketing a product is one thing and you're telling people to use it as another, you'll have these sort of like double entendres or something. This just says, vibration is life. In vibration there exists many of the secrets

of life. It just seems like normal wellness clap trap that we read for the show constantly. All the time. Yeah. Over time we start to get other ads that start to be like more specifically targeting women. So I just sent you one for the Venus Adonis electric normalizer. Ooh, electric normalizer. Oh, it looks like an iron. Uh huh. Yeah, it's like a lady doing like fitness, like Jane fond of fitness stuff, but she's got this little vibrating,

yeah, like thing the size of an iron that seems to be attached to her with some sort of strap. Yeah, so they're marketing it at this point as like pleasurable massage, like relax, have a massage, but also specifically, quote, an enjoyable, helpful means to slim trim hips, the small waist, flat abdomen, shapely legs, a streamlined figure,

and physical wellbeing. See, people think there's something magical about vibrating. There's no biological reason why an object vibrating would reduce your body fat. Like it's just a compulsive absurd. No, it's those big belts that, right? Like from like the 50s where people just got on this sort of like treadmill looking platform

and just had like a big rubber valve agitating their middle section. They're like, I'm losing weight all day. Were you like, are you? I think people just think that if something is like quote unquote technological, that it just does everything, they're like, oh, it's technology, hips, acne, whatever, yeah.

Totally. So, vibrators were seen as such a magical sort of thing that they were used in part to sell consumers on the idea of like signing on for sort of like modern electrical appliances broadly. So I'm gonna send you a quote from this piece in the conversation, which is just great. It says, for American housewives in the 1930s,

the vibrator looked like any other household appliance, a non-sexual new electronic technology that could run on the same universal motor as their kitchen mixers and vacuum cleaners. Before small motors became cheap to produce, manufacturers sold a single motor base with separate attachments for a range of household activities, from sanding wood to drying hair,

or healing the body with electrical vibrations. Mm-hmm. Oh, so they had one, like, leaf blower engine set up, and then they could, like, attach different things to it, to, like, make them a rang, or, yeah, sand their deck, whatever they needed it for. So Lieberman's argument here is you can't really make the claim that these were widely understood to be sexual if there's no evidence that they were widely understood to be sexual at the time. That's a very, very, very 20th and 21st century lens to put on a 19th century thing.

So people were just, they were selling vibrators as just like a vibrating object. It wasn't like wink, wink. Totally. And if there was a wink wink happening at any point, we don't really have evidence of the wink wink. Right. One of the things that Lieberman brings up is that you could get things that were

billed as rectal attachments. Yeah. What? Yes. But they were like, it's for medical purposes. Oh, I mean. It's for a cure for ex and such condition or for your digestion or for what, right? Like for restoring sexual vigor to men.

I mean, in a way. Right. That is what it's doing. It is. I know. So, in addition around this time, part of those like rectal attachments and you know essentially like penetrative attachments, right? Are being sold for treatment of medical conditions that were thought to be brought on by too much masturbation. They were like, you're masturbating too much. You need treatment with a vibrator.

Wait, what? So put a vibrator up your butt? Yeah. So basically, the belief at this point was that men who masturbated too much, quote unquote, were thought to bring on impotence for women, too much masturbation was believed to bring on hysteria. And this was where we get the masturbation causes blindness stuff. So people were like, oh, I gotta do the anti masturbation thing of using a vibrator. I need my sight. So this is like, well, I got to do the anti-mastervation thing of using a vibrator.

I need my site. So this is like how this is being marketed, but again, it's not necessarily how it's being used, right? Because the women are surely getting the rectal ones and just like using them non-rectally, I presume. Or using them right? I mean, yes, totally, whatever. Undoubtedly, there were people who were using these sexually. The question is, how many people, the question is, when people saw these ads, did they understand them to be coded in some way or to be, right? Was this like an open secret, I guess, is the question? So what happens after Lieberman's article comes out

and she's debunked the heck out of Rachel Maynes? Like, what happens? So this is where it gets really fun and fascinating to me, especially on the heels of our mains, like what happens? So this is where it gets really fun and fascinating to me, especially on the heels of like our episode, I don't know, a month ago about Walter Willett and Catherine Flegal. If we had a Walter Willett in this situation, what we would have is an astonishing blow up, right? Yeah. And essentially what happens with this one is a reporter goes to Rachel mains and is like, hey, this other historian says your work is not as factually sound as you think it is.

And Rachel mains just responds with like, yeah, it's like totally appropriate and normal for other scholars to look into scholars work. You know what? And especially like younger scholars to question the work of older scholars. Like, that's good. And we don't have to agree. We love to see it. We love to see it. Although it's nice that they're nice to each other,

but also like there's a pretty large factual claim here that I feel like you have to be addressed. Yep, sure does. Because like for all we know, Lieberman is lying. All we have is the opinion about the contents of primary sources from two different people. Yep, that's exactly right. So like does anybody go back and check?

Not to my knowledge. Like not to my knowledge have there been further checks on like, okay, what does it actually say? Okay. Lieberman writes this big paper that is like the big problem here is that nobody fact checked it. So I fact checked it and then it comes out

and people are like good point and then nobody fact checks it. Yeah, I know. And then nobody seems to do anything. It doesn't seem like there's then an epilogue where something happens as a result of that. Lieberman gets some op-eds in some high profile papers. She gets an op-ed in the New York Times

talking about this is maybe a myth. She gets some popular media placed elsewhere. So there are little ripples, but nothing makes it as far as the fucking Maggie Gyllenhaal movie. Right. Of course. It's a tricky thing. I don't want to like cast aspersions on Maine's intentions or how she got to where she was going or any of that kind of stuff. But it is really, really hard

to figure out how one historian could look at a primary source and go, ah-ha, doctors invented vibrators to use on women who were hysterical and have another historian look at the same primary source and go, that's not there. Yeah, yeah. It's really hard to get to how this happens other than I found a narrative and then I figured out how to make that narrative true. Right. Or you look through these primary sources and you're like, ooh, under this one reading, they could have meant this or something.

Right. But you don't realize that you're looking for a story you're already telling yourself. Yeah. If you're so clear to me that this comes from the, like, the blanks that are getting filled in here are getting filled in by a boomer white woman. Okay. There's stuff about this that is sort of like a very generational view on sexuality, right? Which was just sort of like, women knew, women's sexual pleasure transcends any sort of timeline. It's like a very free love kind of argument, right?

And the Lieberman book then feels much more like a millennial take on it, which is like, whoa, wait, it's more complicated than that. I don't know what it is, but I don't think it's this. Right. Which also feels like a very millennial critique. Wait, wait, this doesn't feel right. Yeah, I don't know what the right thing is, but this isn't it. Hang on, hang on, mom. Yeah, absolutely. It also, it also feels to me like it's important that Lieberman is like a social researcher and mains is a technology

researcher. Absolutely. I've come across this as well that when you're somebody who's looking at the technology first, it creates these kind of blind spots where it's like you make the technology more important potentially than it was at the time or more exotic than it was at the time. And you strip away all the ways in which technology always fits into existing social structures and social understandings and just normal people being people stuff. Part of the story that we're talking about today is the problem with primary sources, right?

And the sort of shortcomings of primary sources. And it's worth noting that the overwhelming plurality of primary sources that we do have are about really class-privileged white women who are ostensibly straight people and cis people. That's who would have had the income to hire a doctor. That's who would have been able not to work and to have a husband sort of care for them and not be expected to sort of do any other jobs, right? That's who we're talking about here because that's who we've got information on. Right, and that's what gets saved in history

is rich ladies, lawdentham diaries. It's not random factory workers writing down their thoughts at the end of a day. I mean, it's also in a society that doesn't also have mass literacy either, right? Or literacy is something that only the wealthiest and most educated 10% of the population has, all of your primary sources by definition

are gonna be coming from a very unrepresented part of the population. This is just a problem with historical research writ large. Yeah, who has the resources to publish, who has the resources to create and make ads, right? And sort of publish ads, the primary sources are marketing. Right. They're marketing too.

People with disposable incomes. Yeah. I mean, of course historians know all this, but it's easy to then look back in history and say, oh, based on all these sources, this is what society was like. And it's actually like, no, this is what, like, the people who were buying stuff society was like. This is what society was like for the people who we let write stuff down. Yeah.

Yeah. So here's the other thing that influences the research here. In addition to these obscenity laws, both of these scholars have talked about the contemporary constraints on their work. And Rachel Mainz actually says very publicly that she struggled to get a publisher for her book. She struggled to keep her job, that she was told by her university that they were afraid that alumni would stop donating if they found out that this was a topic of scholarship.

This is in 2001. Oh, wow. And she is very straightforwardly like those messages were delivered by men with more institutional power than me. And I believe that they experienced my work as an implied criticism. There is such a deep discomfort, particularly amongst straight men,

about talking about women's sexual pleasure or the sexual pleasure of like anybody who's not also a straight dude. Everything is the controversy about WAP this summer. Everything is a version of that. I'm just like, oh, woman is talking about how much she likes having sex. All of these dudes are Ben Shapiro. Yes. The last thing I'm saying on this topic, which is just like a little Koda, is the Comstock Act has been dismantled pretty much, but all of those that whole network of local obscenity laws

still remains in place in lots of places, right? Oh, yeah. One of the big cases just after Rachel Main's book was released in 2003 in Cleburn, Texas, a woman was arrested for selling sex toys to a couple looking for a marital aid, that couple turned out to be undercover police officers. The youth of cops time. It's a stun. No? Why?

It's a stun. It's a stun. It's a stun. They end up dropping the charges against her. Okay, good. Because if she was found innocent of these charges or she decided to appeal, that could lead to the repeal of the Texas law. Oh, so you wanted to keep the law

so you could keep threatening people with it and get the to plea deal out. Yes. Great, great work. That's part of the reason why sex toys are still marketed. Like if you go into a CVS or a Walgreens, you'll see all these things are like massagers and like novelty items and like marital aids because there are still plenty of markets where you actually can't sell something that is explicitly marketed as a sex toy.

I mean, it gives us a lot, it's similar to the Comstock laws, and that you're casting the law as broadly as possible, and then that gives you the discretion to basically arrest and harass anybody that you don't like. Yeah, I mean, I think like part of what I find so interesting about this story is that it really ties together a bunch of stuff that we talk about pretty frequently, right? Which is like, you decide on an outgroup, you reverse engineer a diagnosis to reinforce that outgroup status, you sort of put all these constraints on the treatments or access that that outgroup has to sort of rectifying the thing that you have decided is wrong with them. And normally we're talking

about bias in interpreting data. In this case, the way that bias shows up is straight up in the sources that we have access to. Which is why I preemptively am jealous of the historians of the deep future, which will have Tumblr to look back on when the smartest thoughts. I really want you to get in a time machine, HG Wells style and go like 50 years into the future and be like, I'm a historian of beauty YouTubers. That's kind of what I'm doing at this point

in my career. I'm the foremost historian on Tati Westbrook. Ask me an AMA. Thank you.