The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (2 page)

When I saw vibrator advertisements as early as 1906 for equipment strongly resembling the devices now sold to women as masturbation aids, my first thought, as I said, was that this could not possibly be the purpose of the appliances sold in the pages of the
Companion
. The second thought was that 1906 was very early for any kind of home electrical appliance. Telling myself I’d never follow up on the topic, I made a few notes on the titles, issues, dates, and page numbers of needlework publications carrying vibrator advertisements. I showed a few of the ads to my feminist friends, who were, of course, delighted.

In the meantime my trip to Michigan to deliver my very first scholarly paper had borne unexpected fruit. A textile historian in the audience, Daryl Hafter of Eastern Michigan University, introduced herself and urged me to join the Society for the History of Technology and its subgroup, Women in Technological History (WITH). After one SHOT meeting I was convinced that it was time for graduate study in the history of technology. While I was in graduate school from 1979 to 1983, I continued to make notes on “sightings” of vibrator references while grinding away diligently at my dissertation on textile history. By this time it was clear to me that publishing my suspicions about the vibrator would torpedo my career; surely no one would ever again take me seriously as a scholar if I continued this line of research. On the other hand, nobody was doing it.

After I graduated from Carnegie-Mellon University, I spent three years as an assistant professor at Clarkson University in northern New York. As a part-timer, my teaching duties were light and I had plenty of time for research. While churning out articles on textile history, I began a little file on the vibrator and started looking for museum collections with relevant artifacts. According to curators Bernard Finn (electricity), Deborah Jean Warner (scientific instruments), and Audrey Davis (medicine) at the Smithsonian Institution, the nation’s largest museum had no vibrators. Given that there were at least ten manufacturers of the devices in the United States in 1920, this was in itself somewhat odd. Chasing my topic through the various directories of museums and special collections, I wrote letters, including one to the Kinsey Institute, to which they replied with courtesy, promptness, and a very helpful bibliography, and one to an institution I had never heard of, the Bakken Library and Museum of Electricity in Life, in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

In writing to the Bakken Library I had carefully explained my research interests, describing the type of devices and documents I was seeking, and why. Throwing caution to the winds, in my concluding paragraph I commented that this was the first research I had ever done that appealed to both scholarly and prurient interest. Two weeks later I had a reply from the director that started, “Your letter appealed to our prurient interest …” Thus began a very fruitful research enterprise. The Bakken, founded by Earl Bakken of Medtronic, consists of a well-funded and scrupulously curated collection of historical medical instruments using
electricity and an imposing library and archive of material relating to this topic. In the artifacts collection, the Bakken had eleven vibrators, listed in their catalog as “musculo-skeletal relaxation devices.” A photograph of one of them is included in this book as
figure 6
. The library contained an overwhelming wealth of illustrations, texts, advertisements, and medical literature about my subject. I became a Bakken fellow for a week and spent five days wallowing in intellectual luxury. At the end of the week I made my first presentation on the vibrator to the staff and members of the Bakken and was asked to write a short article for the museum’s newsletter, which became my first publication on the subject.

It was on this research trip that I first became aware that the subject of the vibrator polarizes audiences. The sympathetic good humor of the Bakken staff can best be illustrated by the following episode. The curator and I were down in collection storage examining the vibrator collection, photographing, weighing, and examining the objects. The curator, Al Kuhfeld, a conscientious scholar with a wry sense of humor, was taking the opportunity presented by the visiting scholar (me) to expand and update the information on his catalog cards. Since I had museum training, I was permitted to write (in pencil, of course) on the cards the new information, such as weight, measurements, number of vibratodes (attachments), and so on. We came to the artifact shown in
figure 6
, an early twentieth-century medical vibrator with a selection of about half a dozen vibratodes. I asked the curator if the device was still operational. Looking into the box, Al unerringly selected the most appropriate of the attachments, plugged the cord into a wall outlet, and flipped the switch. No response. Unplugging the device, he pulled a small screwdriver from his pocket, made several mysterious adjustments, and again plugged in the instrument, which then buzzed vigorously when turned on. After a moment’s silent debate as to how this experiment should be performed, I placed the palm of my hand over the vibratode and mentally compared it with modern devices. Thanking Al, who began putting away the artifact, I wrote “runs” in the “remarks” section of the catalog card. The curator looked over my shoulder and nodded without comment. About half an hour later the museum’s director came down and asked how we were getting along. I told him we had just plugged in one of the vibrators and tried it out. “And did it work?” he asked. “We don’t know if it works,” replied Al solemnly. “We only know that it runs.”

At the seminar I presented at the Bakken, I saw for the first time the contrast between those who listen eagerly to my results, laughing at the inescapably humorous aspects, and those whose discomfort with the topic is expressed in a glazed look. Since then I have had numerous opportunities to observe these effects in audiences large and small. Groups consisting only of women simply laugh and ask questions. In mixed groups the women look uncomfortable and ask little, though they laugh just the same; they are aware that it is a major breach of etiquette to mention in mixed company the relative inefficiency of penetration as a means of producing female orgasm. The men are divided into laughter and blank stares: the former, I gather, are those for whom my research confirms that women are as sexual as they had always hoped, and the latter are those for whom it confirms that women are as sexual as they had always feared.

After my return from the Bakken, the Liberal Studies program at Clarkson wanted to publicize the then rare phenomenon of one of its members’ receiving a fellowship, but there was concern about the reaction of the rest of the faculty (primarily engineers and scientists) to my subject matter. The issue was resolved by placing a notice in the faculty newsletter that I had “received a grant-in-aid … from the Bakken Library of Electricity in Life in Minneapolis, Minnesota. She will use the grant to study the impact of small electric appliances in the home.”
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Shortly after completing my brief article for the Bakken newsletter, I began to receive invitations to present papers on the vibrator to university audiences. At this point I discovered what I should have realized all along: that some people, most of them male, take my findings personally and resent them as an implied criticism. One of my first academic venues for this topic was a long-established institution housed in ponderous, ivy-covered stone buildings. About eight people attended the seminar I spoke at, with the male faculty arranged on one side of the table and the women faculty and graduate students on the other side. After my presentation, one tenured senior professor (wearing the obligatory herringbone tweed jacket) said he was not entirely convinced by my argument, since the sexual experience of women using vibrators and their predecessors was “not the real thing.” While I was collecting my wits to formulate some sort of response to this fundamental misunderstanding, one of the women graduate students rescued me. “Don’t you see, Dr. So-and-So? Most of the time, it’s better than the real thing.” Her
female colleagues nodded solemnly, and Dr. So-and-So subsided. This was clearly not what he wanted to hear. I have since encountered this objection in many forms, of which the most straightforward, as I recall, was the complaint, “But if what you’re saying is true, then women don’t need men!” The only possible reply is that if orgasm is the only issue, men don’t need women either.

I also gave a presentation at a medical school in Canada, a prospect that terrified me, since I would have to tell my hair-raising story to physicians. To my surprise, they reacted with the same polarization I had observed elsewhere, with one relatively minor difference: before the presentation one doctor simply refused to believe that I was actually going to talk about vibrators. My paper had been given some innocuous title like “Physical Therapies from Aretaeus to Freud,” but one of his students told him what was really going to be discussed. When he saw me in the hall he said, “You wouldn’t believe what people told me you’re going to talk about!” When I replied that the rumors, however vicious, were probably true, he vigorously denied that it was possible. “But she said you were going to talk about vibrators!” When I confirmed that this was indeed my topic, he was aghast, but he showed up anyway. After the talk he complained that no doctor could now get away with such goings-on as I described, which of course is true. One of his colleagues jeered at this objection: “Oh, come off it. You’re just sorry you missed all this.” Needless to say, the audience roared. A historian commented to me afterward that he had noted the blank stares of those who had asked no questions. “There’s a lot of peer pressure not to seem uptight in those situations,” he said. “They just smile and think of the queen.”

In June 1986, right after the publication of my first article on the vibrator in the Bakken newsletter, I lost my job at Clarkson University. I had been teaching in the School of Management, and before that in the Liberal Studies program. One afternoon I picked up my mail and found a photocopied list of new office assignments. My name was not on it. Inquiries to the dean revealed that I no longer had a job at Clarkson. There seemed to be several reasons, among them that my intellectual interests simply did not fit into the School of Management, but there were two other complaints: first, it was feared that alumni would stop giving money to the school if it was discovered that a member of its faculty was doing research on vibrators, and second, that my very high
energy level “wasn’t compatible with the rest of the faculty.” Since I had only a part-time position, there was nothing for it but to pack my books and go.

I had already been doing some contract cataloging work for a museum near the university, so when I left Clarkson I expanded my client base and became the owner of a business that provides cataloging, inventory, and research services to museums and archives. Meanwhile I continued to make presentations and give papers on the vibrator, including one at Cornell University near my new home in Ithaca, New York, and another at the Society for the History of Technology’s annual meeting in October 1986. At this latter, my audience appeared to be struggling desperately to keep a straight face, probably out of a misguided respect for my scholarly dignity, until I called the vibrator a “capital-labor substitution innovation.” This produced a hearty guffaw from the Smithsonian’s curator of scientific instruments, Deborah Jean Warner, after which others seemed to realize it was all right to laugh. One of the questions raised at this meeting was asked by a well-known Darwin scholar, who pointed out that doctors who failed to recognize the orgasm in their patients must never have seen one in their wives.

By far the most entertaining of my adventures with vibrator historiography, however, was the brouhaha occasioned by my 1989 article in
Technology and Society
, a publication of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE): “Socially Camouflaged Technologies: The Case of the Electromechanical Vibrator.” Early in 1988 I had noticed a call for papers for a special issue of
Technology and Society
, under the editorship of Robert Whelchel, with eminent electrical historian James Brittain as guest editor. I cobbled together a brief discussion of the social camouflage aspect of my research and sent it in; the article went through the usual referee process and was accepted with revisions. The only hint of possible trouble was a letter from Brittain that closed by saying my article was to be a kind of test of IEEE publication policy, as they had not published an article like mine “since they began in 1884.”

The article was published in July, when many professors and engineers are on vacation. In September I received a telephone call from Bob Whelchel. The Technical Advisory Board (TAB) of IEEE was threatening to withdraw the publication charter of
Technology and Society
on the grounds that since there couldn’t possibly be anyone named Rachel
Maines who had actually written this article, it must be some sort of elaborate practical joke on the part of the co-editors. It could not, according to the TAB, have been refereed, and the references must all have been faked. The nine-page article had fifty-one footnotes to more than 160 sources, some of them in Latin and Greek. As one TAB member expressed it, “It read like a parody of an IEEE article. It contained dozens and dozens of obsolete references.” Whelchel and Brittain were preparing for an inquiry at the November 1989 TAB meeting, at which they would be required to show proof of my existence (!), evidence that Maines and Associates was a respectable business establishment, and proof that the article had been refereed. Others were busily verifying the existence of my references.
⁴

Shortly before the November meeting, I received another call, this time from a reporter for IEEE
Spectrum
, a newspaper that goes out to all 350,000 members of IEEE. The October issue had a half-page article on the foofaraw on the Technical Advisory Board, including a quotation from one member who thought I should have used radar detection devices in automobiles as my example of a socially camouflaged technology. He also considered my article as written more “to titillate than to enlighten,” apparently rejecting the possibility that both could occur simultaneously. At the meeting, cooler heads prevailed: referee reports were shown, a letter from my colleagues in the Society for the History of Technology was produced, and the antivibrator faction was made to realize that the IEEE was in danger of making itself a laughingstock. Letters in later issues of
Spectrum
all expressed the view that it was about time for the IEEE to take a courageous look at some new issues. I was told that subscriptions to
Technology and Society
went up as a result of the controversy, illustrating yet again that efforts at censorship simply provide valuable publicity for what they attempt to suppress.