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The first electric device advertised directly to the public and noticed eighty years later by Dr Maines was the Vibratile, which appeared in an 1899 edition of
McClure's
magazine. The Vibratile was offered as a treatment for neuralgia, headache and wrinkles. More than fifty more electric vibrators were swiftly invented, the technology taking off exponentially with the introduction of alternating current power. They weighed anything between five and fifteen pounds, and cost from $5
to $20 for luxury models with brass fittings and a velvet-lined box. None came with instructions; it was assumed that if you ordered one, you knew what to do with it.

The home electric vibrator was developed at a fitting time, at the very end of the prudish but sometimes surprisingly frisky Victorian era. It has to be emphasised, however, that even if its use as a clitoral stimulator was covert, it was still not blatantly sexual. In her heart, the vibrator owner wanted her little device to do what it said in the ads – improve her health – even though robust health in a woman was in itself regarded as vulgar and a little too Socialist for refined Victorian ladies of the old school.

Yet even some of the health lobby pointedly rejected the use of the vibrator. The new Germanic-inspired fad of nudism, the health movement's most radical wing, was in full sway by the end of the century. Yet not a single sexual nuance was allowed to seep through the wholesome text of
Health & Efficiency
, the British nudist magazine started in 1899 and still published. Its first editor, Charles Thompson, regarded masturbators as ‘moral imbeciles'.

It remains one of the Victorian era's most ironic postscripts that turn-of-the-century knitting magazines contained advertisements for several brands of intimate vibrators, while
H&E
, the masturbator's Bible for the next fifty years with its pages of nude photographs and gossamer-thin rationale as a journal promoting health, contained not a single acknowledgement that there was anything remotely sexual about people prancing about naked in the great outdoors and being photographed as they did so.

‘The sole criterion of frigidity is the absence of the vaginal orgasm'

Sigmund Freud,
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality

Just as it did not start with her ascension to the throne, the constipated ‘Victorian' attitude to all things sexual across the whole Western world, and the substantial tracts of the rest of the globe that were its colonial subjects, did not die with Queen Victoria. Almost every progressive step forward in the new twentieth century was accompanied by one step backwards in deference to the ways of the old era. There was frequently more the echo of Victorianism to be heard in the brave new Edwardian age than there was the shrill cry of modernity.

The puzzling old obsession with masturbation, for one thing, showed scant sign of being superseded by even a slightly more enlightened view. The founder of the Boy Scouts, Lord Baden Powell, then one of the most pervasive new influences on young men worldwide, wrote of masturbation in
Scouting for Boys
(1908): ‘It is called in our schools “beastliness” and this is about the best name for it … should it become a habit, it quickly destroys both health and spirits; he becomes feeble in body and mind and often ends up in a lunatic asylum.'

He explained his theory further in his
Rottering to Success
(1922): ‘[Masturbation] cheats semen getting its full chance of making up the strong manly man you would otherwise be. You are throwing away the seed that has been handed down to you as a trust instead of keeping it and ripening it for bringing a son to you later on.'

Baden Powell's beliefs on the matter may be fairly predictable, but you would not expect the founder of the Boy Scouts and the leading lights of radical Women's suffrage to have much common ground. Yet both are clearly the wagging tail of Victorian values at the beginning of the twentieth century. Melanie Phillips, in her study of the suffragist movement,
The Ascent of Woman
, maintains that the essence of the ‘Suffragettes', as the
Daily Mail
dubbed them at the time, was that men's rampant sexuality – as evidenced more than anything by prostitution – was ruining the world, both through their immorality and the spread of VD. Female sexuality, which was more restrained and controlled, was the antidote, and by women getting the vote, the whole world could attain new, spiritual heights.

The suffragists, Phillips argues, were hugely impressed by Charles Darwin, whose idea that mankind was on a trajectory from animalism to a superior, spiritual, state of being in which sexuality was almost nullified, struck home particularly. With their belief that women were intrinsically more spiritual and superior to men – many agreed with Mary Wollstonecraft from a century earlier, who held that women pursuing sexual pleasure were selfish – they would have horrified when mid-twentieth century feminists re-conceptualised sexual equality as meaning that they could be identical to men in the sexual area as well as elsewhere.

The Suffragettes had some bizarre theories, Phillips recounts. One, Elizabeth Wolstenholme Elmy, believed that even menstruation was the result of unrestrained male lust. Another, Frances Swiney, believed that men were only ‘rudimentary females' and their sperm was ‘a virulent poison'. She
was particularly opposed to cross-racial and cross-class breeding, a theme taken up with relish by the female founders of the modern birth control movement.

Victorian suspicion of sexuality extended its tendrils well into the sexually liberated middle of the twentieth century. Laws against oral sex, even between married couples, remained theoretically in force, and in some US States have yet to be repealed. In a 1961 book,
Sexual Behaviour: Psycho-legal Aspects
, Frank Caprio and D. R. Brenner recount this sad twentieth-century case: ‘A husband was performing cunnilingus on his wife in the privacy of their bedroom. One of three children in the family, unaware of the sexual activity of the parents, opened the door and observed what was going on. The child, frightened by what he had seen, ran to a neighbour with the story. The police were called and the husband arrested. He readily admitted the act and stated that he did not see anything wrong with it. He further said that the wife did not object to what he was doing and that, in fact, she encouraged him. Armed with this confession, a conviction was obtained and the man sentenced to prison for five years.'

Victorian sexual attitudes and their accompanying strand of hypocrisy extended to the upper reaches of American society. The passionately anti-homosexual FBI director, J. Edgar Hoover, said publicly in the 1950s, ‘I regret to say that we of the FBI are powerless to act in cases of oral-genital intimacy, unless it has in some way obstructed interstate commerce.' Hoover might have passed for a conviction-driven moral campaigner and ultimate family man were he not at the same time as making such stern pronouncements having a long-term gay affair with his deputy, Clyde Tolson, and attending Washington parties in women's clothing; at one, according to a fellow reveller, Hoover wore a red dress with feather boa.

In a sense, even turn-of-the-century radicals like the artist Egon Schiele (1890-1918) were still dancing to the Victorian tune. Schiele painted self-portraits of himself masturbating as a protest against the conservatism of Austrian society. It would
have been pointless had masturbation not been taboo. The same small but glowering Victorian storm cloud might still be said to have been hovering seventy years later over John Lennon and Yoko Ono when they staged their bed protest in Amsterdam – or even Richard Branson, who gave an entire business empire the name Virgin in the 1960s because it was still considered a slightly daring word to use amongst a public still influenced by Victorian moral values.

As in any age, in the mid-to late twentieth-century, radicalism was a minority view. More in tune than a Schiele or a Lennon with the establishment consensus during most of the century were the sentiments of Dr O.A. Wall. He wrote in 1932: ‘A well-bred woman does not seek carnal gratification, and she is usually apathetic to sexual pleasures. Her love is physical or spiritual, rather than carnal, and her passiveness in regard to coition often amounts to disgust for it; lust is seldom an element in a woman's character, and she is the preserver of chastity and morality.'

But evidence that Victorian sexual repression was finally crumbling, or perhaps never existed for the less ‘well-bred' at least, can be found in the charming reminiscences of Laurie Lee, describing his sexual debut before World War I in
Cider With Rosie
– or the franker boyhood recollections of Harry Daley, a policeman originally from Lowestoft, who had an affair with E. M. Forster and published his reminiscences in a 1986 autobiography,
This Small Cloud:

Another boy took out his large cock, the first I'd seen with hair round it, spat in his hand, and started to masturbate in the proper manner. After a minute or two he said he was tired and asked me to do it for him, which I did with pleasure. Thus began one of the happiest periods of my life; the real beginning of my happy life, the first awakening to knowledge of the pleasure and warmth in other people's bodies and affection; the realisation that physical contact consolidates and increases the pleasure and happiness to be got from mutual affection … It
was all open and uncomplicated … Whenever in our wanderings we came to a secret place, a wood, a shed or a deserted building, we would merrily wank away … Nowadays, for some reason or other, this traditional experience is thought to be undesirable … We continued happily and unworried for a long time, until the sort of people one finds in the fringes of church life, noticing the dark rings under our eyes, warned us that boys who played with themselves went mad and had to be locked away. This was a typical mean, dirty-minded trick, for they had been boys themselves and knew it was not true. In any case it didn't stop us. Henceforth we wanked and worried, whereas formerly we had experienced nothing but satisfaction and contentment.

Then we have Frank Harris (1855-1931), a poor boy from County Galway who went to America, came back to England, became a sub-editor on the
London Evening News
, an editor of literary journals and a notorious Edwardian rake. This passage is from his 1923 book,
My Life and Loves:

The next moment I was with her in bed and on her; but she moved aside and away from me. ‘No, let's talk,' she said … To my amazement she began:

‘Have you read Zola's latest book Nana?'

‘Yes,' I replied.

‘Well,' she said, ‘you know what the girl did to Nana?'

‘Yes,' I replied with sinking heart. ‘Well,' she went on, ‘why not do that to me? I'm desperately afraid of getting a child, you would be too in my place, why not love each other without fear?'

A moment's thought told me that all roads lead to Rome and so I assented and soon I slipped down between her legs. ‘Tell me please how to give you most pleasure,' I said and gently, I opened the lips of her sex and put my lips on it and my tongue against her clitoris. There was nothing repulsive in it; it was another and more sensitive mouth. Hardly had I kissed
it twice when she slid lower down in the bed with a sigh whispering: ‘That's it; that's heavenly!'

For an earthier confirmation still that orgasmic pleasure was alive and well, Victorianism notwithstanding, in the early-twentieth century, we have this First World War marching song, sung by British troops to the tune of ‘Do Ye Ken John Peel':

When you wake up in the morning and you're feeling grand
,

And you've such a funny feeling in your seminary gland
,

And you haven't got a woman, what's the matter with your hand?

As you revel in the joys of copulation
.

While the twentieth-century trend in openness about sexuality generally progressed in a forward direction, albeit principally in the Western world, which was taking the sexual lead at this time, in the case of the vibrator, time ran backwards. From being virtually out in the open in the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, the vibrator quite abruptly dived for cover at the start of the 1920s. The reason for this is thought to be its starring role in the first ‘blue' or ‘stag' movies, which dictated that the distance between the safely medicalised practice of powered female masturbation and the reality that it was a wholly sexual habit could no longer be maintained.

The earliest known stag film made in 1915 was called
Free Ride
and was vibrator-free. The film concerned a man picking up two female hitchhikers and having sex with them – both vaginal and anal. Even bestiality made its screen debut before masturbation. In another film from the same period, three girls agree to have sex with a boy but on the stipulation that it is through a fence. They then substitute a goat for themselves. The boy, however, is unaware of the switch and exclaims, as patrons read on the caption card: ‘That's the best girl I've ever had in my life.'

A generally positive, if oblique, spinoff of the Victorian era,
meanwhile, was the rise to prominence of Sigmund Freud and psychoanalysis, which became world famous with the publication in 1905 of his
Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality
. Freud was, like the Suffragettes in Britain, very much a product of his nineteenth-century past, but his techniques, unquestionably informed, and continue to inform, the greater part of today's psychology and psychosexual medicine.

The young Freud studied ‘hysteria' under Charcot at the Salpêtrière. As a result of the slightly humiliating interrogations of women that he witnessed there, he invented the idea of the private, sacrosanct psychoanalytical couch, where infantile sexual traumas that caused dreadful symptoms in adults could, through conversation, be gently drawn like a poison from patients.