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

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 RachelMaines 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.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
    Like all hardworking historians, I have more intellectual debts