Debunking Victorian Vibrators
No, doctors were not vibrating women patients to cure diseases.
Confidence and Joy is a newsletter by Emily and Amelia Nagoski. Subscribe here. You can also follow Emily on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook!
I want to talk about the history of women’s sexuality in medicine, focusing, this time, on one particular misunderstanding of our past: British Victorian sexuality. Specifically, I want to make sure everyone reading this remembers that no, no actually, doctors weren’t vibrating women patients to orgasm to cure any diseases. God knows there was plenty wrong with medicine in general and medical treatment of women in particular in the 19th century, but this particular thing is not a thing that happened.
The idea originates from a short book by historian of technology by Rachel Maines, who misunderstood or mistranslated some early sources and thus hypothesized that this was a thing.
Let me reiterate: it was not a thing.
I finally read Technology of Orgasm while I was teaching a university class called Women’s Sexuality, and my students wanted me to talk about the idea, the history of vibrators, Victorian morals.
So I read it. And it didn’t sound right to me. It’s hard to pin down precisely what was missing, but the arguments felt flimsy and shallow in a way that, I guess, only a person with a specific kind of academic background would definitely notice?
So I went to look at the references—of which there were many. The references fill a lot of the volume of the book. And a number of the crucial references were not in English. Being a white American, I only read and write one language fluently. Dang. But! I had students who spoke and read German and French natively, and so I got microfiche and microfilms of the original documents, and I printed them out for my students to translate.
According to these translations by native-speakers of the languages, they did not say what Maines said they said.
Additionally, having read a lot of vintage and antique sex manuals myself, there is no way that doctors did not know exactly what female orgasm was. By the Victorian era, medical science considered the idea that a woman’s orgasm caused the release of an egg “controversial if not manifestly stupid” (PDF), but popular sex manuals of the time still repeated the idea and emphasized the importance of mutual pleasure and orgasm for both partners. They knew what orgasm was, and they believed it mattered during sex, whether or not it was necessary for reproduction.
But I’m not a historian, so when I taught my students about this history, I just said, “That was not what happened.”
Fern Riddell, who is an actual historian, did the same thing, and she wrote it in a book, and developed a much more comprehensive groundwork for clarifying why it just could not be true that doctors were unwittingly giving women orgasms as a “cure” for a medical condition.
There is no way doctors didn’t know what female orgasm was; thus, there is no way they were mistaking orgasm for some kind of purgative paroxysm.
So I had a Zoom chat with her, about her delightful and entertaining book Sex: Lessons from History, which includes, among other excellent tidbits, a letter James Joyce wrote to his lover, Nora Barnacle, about how much he loved when she farted as he “fucked her arseways.” “I hope Nora will let off no end of her farts in my face,” wrote this master of modernist fiction, author of Finnegan’s Wake and Ulysses, “so that I know their smell also.”
Illustration by Dylan Meconis : Website • Twitter
Hell yeah, my dude.
But this isn’t about Joyce or sex farts or modernist writing. It’s about how our understanding of our past can inform how we understand our present… and how we build a future.
So… why? Why did so many people dive head first into this idea? Why did this short work of historical non-fiction get optioned into a movie starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, among many other stars?
As Fern says, “We like to think of the Victorians as patriarchs to rebel against.”
The history of one generation is often written by the next generation, or the generation after that. The “Victorian era,” spanning over 60 years, was only documented as “history” per se after World War I, at which point a young generation deeply traumatized by violence craved a narrative of their grandparents as fusty, narrow, and ignorant. But also, the erotic sovereignty of many early feminists was deliberately written out of the mainstream narrative of Victorian and Edwardian activism for women’s suffrage, as a few leaders cleaned up the narrative to make it “respectable,” just as feminist movements across history have tried to sideline and erase eroticism and the women who believed in sexual freedom.
One day I’ll write a post about why feminism struggles in this way, advocating for bodily autonomy while simultaneously ignoring and erasing women’s eroticism.
Look, the Victorians were wrong about a lot of things about sex. But they were also right about a lot of things. The laws were bad—misogynist, racist, contrary to public health. Religious mores didn’t help. But the same is true today, all over the world, including the US, where I live.
How will the history of early twenty-first century sexuality be written? Surely the ongoing battle for basic bodily autonomy for all people will be part of it – reproductive rights, LGBTQIA2+ rights, the MeToo movement. Let me say to any historian reading this 50 or 100 years from now, it’s real: the legal encroachment on our bodies is happening in courts, the push to formalize the lies we tell children in classrooms about sexual health is happening, school district by school district; the increasing medicalization of sexual difficulties, especially women’s, is being driven by pharmaceutical companies, who see profit in selling drugs by promoting a scientifically outmoded model of how sex works in human bodies. Different religious organizations continue to tell people that all but a scant few of the sexual possibilities of their bodies are wrong and bad and dangerous and will send them to some version of hell. That’s all real.
And, at the same time, people are going to bed together and having joyful, pleasurable sex, even in the midst of the maelstrom.
It is our forever-history, so far, this dissonance between the political tug-of-war over who gets to control bodies (especially women’s bodies) and how we experience sexual pleasure today. Your bed (or your dungeon or your living room or your shower) is a place where history is made. When I write in public about people’s sexuality, I am documenting today, not just for you and everyone you love today, but for everyone who follows us.
Let the record show: we did not wait for the world to be fair before we rolled around like puppies in our beds, before we licked people we liked and put parts of our bodies inside someone else’s body. We didn’t wait until the law was settled or until we thought it was “respectable.”
⁓⁘⁕⁘⁓
Fern Riddell’s books are available wherever books are sold, including her Victorian Guide to Sex and Death in 10 Minutes, a biography of militant suffragette and birth control activist Kitty Marion that shows how post-World War I feminists wrote out sex positivity and sexual freedom, as well as violent extremism, from the narrative of the movement for suffrage in Britain. Two thumbs up, highly recommend!
Sex: Lessons From History by Fern Riddell
You can also follow Fern on Instagram and Twitter!
This week's newsletter was beautifully and arsefully illustrated by Dylan Meconis, the author of the gorgeous graphic novel, Queen of the Sea.
Queen of the Sea by Dylan Meconis
Questions or comments? Please email my very tiny team at unrulywellness@gmail.com
Feel free to say hello on 📷 Instagram, 🦤 Twitter and 🤖 Facebook – I don't always reply but I read everything.
Signed copies of Come As You Are can be obtained from my amazing local bookseller, Book Moon Books.
Stay safe and see you next time.
