Women, Vibrators and Hysteria: A Fascinating History
Hysteria is an illness that no longer exists, it afflicted women throughout history until the early to mid 1900’s. But why were women the only ones susceptible to this sickness? And why did doctors start providing pelvic massages and prescribing vibrators to cure it?
The answer lies in a part of the female anatomy, the uterus. The ancient Greeks had a word for the uterus, it was ‘hystera’.
So the uterus is the center of this disease, its origins if you will. But why the uterus? The uterus has a long and unhappy history of being thought of as evil, as being the area of the woman’s body that causes sickness, mental instability and craziness.
Since the uterus had such a bad reputation it was easy for doctors to blame many unknown illnesses on it, and since Hysteria was caused by the uterus overwhelming the woman it belonged to and making her crazy, it was simple enough to call everything not understood Hysteria.
It all comes back to the uterus and the lack of understanding of how the female reproductive system worked. But there was a definite trend of who tended to suffer from Hysteria, this included virgins, nuns, widows and the occasional housewife. But why? What do these women have in common?
No sex, and no sex led to a severe shortage of “hysterical paroxysm”, what we now know as an orgasm.
Since masturbation was a very terrible thing to do there were doctors who would help women who suffered from Hysteria. In order to do this they would provide women with pelvic massages, manually inducing hysterical paroxysm.
But unfortunately for the doctors this process was often very long, even taking up to a few hours. Spending that much of a day for just one patient was definitely not profitable. But to help them, in the mid 1800’s some doctors were able to use a water hose to massage the pelvic region.
Then 1873 rolled around, this year marked the first use of an electromechanical vibrator. These new vibrators allowed the doctors to help Hysteria sufferers not in a matter of hours but in a matter of minutes. Doctors could help many more women in a much smaller period of time.
Around the early 1900’s many people started getting electricity in their houses. This allowed women to treat themselves in the safety and privacy of their very own homes. Vibrators started to become much more common around the country. Sears printed an ad in one of their catalogues in 1918 where the touted their vibrator as being “Very useful and satisfactory for home service.”
And so vibrators became much more common place, women could use vibrators at home, which was not masturbating, since it was all in the name of keeping them healthy and sane which gave rise to wonderful toys such as the laya spot.
Unfortunately women can’t use that excuse anymore as Hysteria is not a recognized illness, but fortunately they don’t have to.
It seems logical to assume that all this might have played a part in women’s adult products being much more received than sex toys like the Fleshlight or other styles of male masturbators. Or maybe not.
