Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality (36 page)

Distempers,

and

Outragiousness,

the

preternatural Diseases of the Womb do induce, as if affected
Persons were inchanted….

WILLIAM HARVEY,
Anatomical Exercitations concerning
the Generation of Living Creatures
(1653)
Hysteria
was one of the first diseases to be described formally. Hippocrates discussed it in the fourth century BCE, and you’ll find it in any medical text covering women’s health written from medieval times until it was removed from the list of recognized medical diagnoses in 1952 (twenty-one years before homosexuality was finally removed). Hysteria was still one of the most diagnosed diseases in the United States and Great Britain as recently as the early twentieth century. You might wonder how physicians treated this chronic condition over the centuries.

We’ll tell you. Doctors masturbated their female patients to orgasm. According to historian Rachel Maines, female patients were routinely massaged to orgasm from the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s. Have a seat; the doctor will be right with you….

While some passed the job off to nurses, most physicians performed the therapy themselves, though apparently not without some difficulty. Nathaniel Highmore, writing in 1660, noted that it was not an easy technique to learn, being

“not unlike that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.” Whatever challenges male physicians faced in mastering the technique, it seems to have been worth the effort.
The Health
and Diseases of Women
, published in 1873, estimates that about 75 percent of American women were in need of these treatments and that they constituted the
single largest market
for

therapeutic

services.

Despite

Donald

Symons’s

protestations that “[a]mong all peoples sexual intercourse is understood to be a service or favor that females render to males,” it seems that for centuries, orgasmic release was a service male doctors rendered to women … for a price.

Much of this information comes from
The Technology of
Orgasm,
Maines’s wonderful book on this “disease” and its treatment through the centuries.1 And what were the symptoms of this “disease”? Unsurprisingly, they were identical to those of sexual frustration and chronic arousal:

“anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasy, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic edema, and vaginal lubrication.”

This supposed
medical
treatment for horny, frustrated women was not an isolated aberration confined to ancient history, but just one element in an ancient crusade to pathologize the demands of the female libido—a libido that experts have long insisted hardly exists.

The men who provided this lucrative therapy didn’t write about “orgasm” in the medical articles they published on hysteria and its treatment. Rather, they published serious, sober discussion of “vulvular massage” leading to “nervous paroxysm” that brought temporary relief to the patient. These were ideal patients, after all. They didn’t die or recover from their condition. They just kept returning, eager for more treatment sessions.

This arrangement might strike some readers as the very definition of “good work if you can get it,” but many physicians apparently felt otherwise. Maines found “no evidence that male physicians enjoyed providing pelvic massage treatments. On the contrary, this male elite sought every opportunity to substitute other devices for their fingers.”

What “other devices” does Maines have in mind? See if you can finish this series:

1. Sewing machine

2. Fan

3. Tea kettle

4. Toaster

5. ?

Here’s a hint: These are the first five electrical appliances sold directly to American consumers. Give up? The Hamilton Beach Company of Racine, Wisconsin, patented the first home-use vibrator in 1902, thereby making it just the fifth electrical appliance approved for domestic use. By 1917, there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes.

But before it became an instrument for self-treatment (“All the pleasures of youth … will throb within you,” one suggestive ad promised), vibrators had already been in use for decades in the offices of physicians who’d grown weary of

“rubbing their stomachs and patting their heads at the same time.”

Motivated by the wonders of industrialization, many doctors had sought a way to mechanize the delivery of their treatment. American ingenuity would mass-produce orgasms for women who were denied them in their “properly chaste,” sexually deprived lives: the first vibrators were invented by these enterprising physicians.

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical tinkerers designed all sorts of devices to provoke the necessary
nervous
paroxysms
in their patients. Some were diesel powered; others ran on steam, like little locomotives that could. Some were huge contraptions hanging from the rafters on chains and pulleys, like engine blocks at an auto shop. Others sported pistons thrusting dildos through holes in tables or involved high-pressure water directed at the patient’s genitalia like a fire brigade called in to douse the consuming flames of female passion. And all the while, the good doctors never publicly admitted that what they were doing was more sex than medicine.

But perhaps even more dumbfounding than their silence on being paid to provoke
nervous paroxysms
like so many Chippendale’s studs is the fact that these same medical authorities managed to maintain the conviction that female sexuality was a weak and reluctant thing.

The medical monopoly on providing socially acceptable extramarital orgasms to women was assured by a strict prohibition against women or girls masturbating
themselves
to orgasm. In 1850, the
New Orleans Medical & Surgical
Journal
declared masturbation public enemy number one, waring: “Neither plague, nor war, nor smallpox, nor a crowd of similar evils, have resulted more disastrously for humanity than the habit of masturbation: it is the destroying element of civilized society.” Children and adults were warned that masturbation was not only sinful, but
very
dangerous—sure to result in severe health consequences, including blindness, infertility, and insanity. Besides, these authorities intoned,

“normal” women had little sexual desire anyway.

In his
Psychopathia Sexualis,
published in 1886, German neurologist Richard von Krafft-Ebing declared what everyone already thought they knew: “If [a woman] is normally developed mentally and well-bred, her sexual desire is small.

If this were not so, the whole world would become a brothel and marriage and a family impossible.”2 To have suggested that women enjoyed, indeed
needed
regular orgasmic release, would have been shocking to men and humiliating to most women. Perhaps it still is.

While the anti-masturbation frenzy has roots deep in Judeo-Christian history, it found unfortunate medical support in Simon André Tissot’s
A Treatise on the Disease Produced
by Onanism,
published in 1758. Tissot apparently recognized the symptoms of syphilis and gonorrhea, which were considered a single disease at the time. But he misunderstood these symptoms as signs of semen depletion due to promiscuity, prostitution, and masturbation.3

A century later, in 1858, a British gynecologist named Isaac Baker Brown (president of the Medical Society of London at the time) proposed that most women’s diseases were attributable to overexcitement of the nervous system, with the pudic nerve, which runs to the clitoris, being particularly culpable. He listed the eight stages of progressive disease triggered by female masturbation:

1. Hysteria

2. Spinal irritation

3. Hysterical epilepsy

4. Cataleptic fits

5. Epileptic fits

6. Idiocy

7. Mania

8. Death

Baker Brown argued that surgical removal of the clitoris was the best way to prevent this fatal slide from pleasure to idiocy to death. After gaining considerable celebrity and performing an unknown number of clitorectomies, Baker Brown’s methods fell out of favor and he was expelled from the London Obstetrical Society in disgrace. Baker Brown subsequently went insane, and clitorectomy was discredited in British medical circles.4

Unfortunately, Baker Brown’s writing had already had a significant impact on medical practice across the Atlantic.

Clitorectomies continued to be performed in the United States well into the twentieth century as a cure for hysteria, nymphomania, and female masturbation. As late as 1936,
Holt’s Diseases of Infancy and Childhood,
a respected medical-school text, recommended surgical removal or cauterization of the clitoris as a cure for masturbation in girls.

By the middle of the twentieth century, as the procedure was finally falling into disrepute in the United States, it was revived with a new rationale. Now, rather than a way to stamp out masturbation, surgical removal of large clitorises was recommended for cosmetic purposes.5

Before becoming a target for surgery, the clitoris had been ignored by male authors of elaborate anatomical sketchbooks for centuries. It wasn’t until the mid-1500s that a Venetian professor by the name of Matteo Realdo Colombo, who had previously studied anatomy with Michelangelo, stumbled upon a mysterious
protuberance
between a woman’s legs. As described in Federico Andahazi’s historical novel
The
Anatomist,
Colombo made this discovery while examining a patient named Inés de Torremolinos. Colombo noted that Inés grew tense when he manipulated this small button, and that it appeared to grow in size at his touch. Clearly, this would require further exploration. After examining scores of other women, Colombo found that all of them had this same heretofore “undiscovered” protuberance and that they all responded similarly to gentle manipulation.

In March of 1558, Andahazi tells us that Colombo proudly reported his “discovery” of the clitoris to the dean of his faculty.6 As Jonathan Margolis speculates in
O: The Intimate
History of the Orgasm,
the response was probably not what Colombo had anticipated. The professor was “arrested in his classroom within days, accused of heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft and Satanism, put on trial and imprisoned. His manuscripts were confiscated, and his [discovery] was never permitted to be mentioned again until centuries after his death.”7

Beware the Devil’s Teat

The “illness” that led frustrated women to the offices of vibrator-wielding doctors a century ago often led someplace far worse in medieval Europe. As historian Reay Tannahill explains, “The
Malleus Maleficarum
(1486), the first great handbook of the witch inquisitors, had no more difficulty than a modern psycho-analyst in accepting that [a certain] type of woman might readily believe she had had intercourse with the Devil himself, a huge, black, monstrous being with an enormous penis and seminal fluid as cold as ice water.”8 But it wasn’t only sexual dreams that attracted the brutal attentions of erotophobic authorities. If a witch-hunter in the 1600s discovered a woman or girl with an unusually large clitoris, this “devil’s teat” was sufficient to condemn her to death.9

Medieval Europe suffered periodic plagues of incubi and succubi, male and female demons thought to be invading the dreams, beds, and bodies of living people. Thomas Aquinas and others believed that these demons impregnated women on their nocturnal visits by first posing as a succubus (a female spirit who has sex with a sleeping man in order to obtain his sperm), and then depositing the sperm in an unsuspecting woman in the form of an incubus (a male spirit ravishing a sleeping woman). Women thus thought to have been impregnated by malevolent spirits flitting about like nocturnal honeybees were at special risk of being exposed as witches and dealt with accordingly. Any stories these women might have told regarding the true origins of their pregnancy conveniently died with them.

Though now considered one of the finest novels ever written,
Madame Bovary
was denounced as immoral when it was first published in late 1856. Public prosecutors in Paris were upset that Gustave Flaubert portrayed a headstrong peasant girl who flaunted the rules of established propriety by taking lovers.

They felt her character met with insufficient punishment.

Flaubert’s defense was that the work was “eminently moral” on those terms. After all, Emma Bovary dies by her own hand in misery, poverty, shame, and desperation. Insufficient punishment? The case against the book, in other words, turned on whether Emma Bovary’s punishment was agonizing and horrible
enough,
not on whether she deserved such suffering at all or had any right to pursue sexual fulfillment in the first place.

But even Flaubert and his misogynistic prosecutors could never have dreamed up the punishments said to befall immodest women among the Tzotzil Maya of Central America. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy explains that “the h’ik’al, a super-sexed demon with a several-foot-long penis,” seizes women who have misbehaved, “carrying them off to his cave, where he rapes them.” Little girls are told that any woman unlucky enough to become pregnant by the h’ik’al “swells up and then gives birth night after night, until she dies.”10