The Technology of Orgasm

While researching her dissertation on the historical role of women in the textile arts, Rachel Maines discovered that the vibrator was marketed as a home appliance starting in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Scouring periodicals such as Needlecraft, Home Needlework Journal, Modern Women, McClure's, and Woman's Home Companion for information on needlework, she encountered advertisements that promised women a relaxation aid guaranteed to "throb within you" and restore "the pleasures of youth" (p. 19). Indeed, because they promoted bright eyes and flushed cheeks, men were encouraged to give vibrators to women as gifts. Though Maines has no doubt whatsoever that such tools were utilized by some physicians and some customers to produce sexual release in women, the vibrator in these decades was socially camouflaged as a medical instrument. By the 1930s, for reasons that can only be guessed at, this particular use of the vibrator disappeared from the respectable household and medical press. Only in the 1960s did the instrument reemerge, now openly marketed as a sex aid

Art · Human sexuality · Hysteria · Orgasm · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · The arts · Vibrator (electronic) · Visual arts · Engineering · Fashion and Cultural Textiles · Gender Studies · Medicine · Psychology