The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction Read Free

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.” Herfemale 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 highenergy 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