notforprophet

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Inspired by someone who likes *toys*

It is now largely forgotten that the world was once catastrophically threatened with hysteria. More dangerous than the post-modern threat of a nuclear cold war, hysteria challenged humanity and drove the greatest minds to strive for innovative relief. Does this claim sound hysterical? It isn’t (Well, maybe it is. But then that would be consistent with this blog’s theme!).

Actually, in the latter half of the 19th century, there occurred a medical pandemic among women which was labeled “hysteria” with symptoms ranging broadly to include lassitude, irritability, depression, confusion, palpitations of the heart, headaches, forgetfulness, insomnia, muscle spasms, stomach upsets, writing cramps, ticklishness, weepiness. abnormal fear, unexplained sweating, and excessive vaginal lubing (unprovoked sexual readiness)—in other words, almost anything! It was, at that time, deemed that about 80% of women suffered from this critical “dementia.” The medical solution? Hand massage of the vulva until the patient reached orgasm! Yes, many doctors (all males) spent much of the latter part of the 19th century masturbating women who flocked to doctors’ office for the “cure.” (Tragically enough, women who couldn’t reach orgasm so assisted due to a predisposition for clitoral orgasm—which wasn’t induced—were diagnosed as “sexually immature” by the likes of Freud and his brethren and constrained to years of unfruitful, even psychically-damaging, therapy to induce orgasms only in the vagina. But that is another story…)

You might think that this was a pie job (little jack horner, sat in a corner…stuck in his thumb, made her bum hum) for horny male doctors. But actually, the doctors were generally extremely overworked, distressfully fatigued, and in desperate search of a faster, less draining solution to saving femininity, and thus humanity, since everyone was aware that “hysteria” would take down the pillars of civilization, if unabated.

But this was the age of the steam engine, the steamboat, and forays into canal construction. Little wonder then that eventually a real man (Dr. George Taylor, 1869) would devise a coal-fed, steam-powered contraption called the “Manipulator” for pelvic massages (paddle that pelvis, down that lazy river…) Unfortunately, the dimensions and expense of this orgasm-assistant were such as to make it unpractical in all but very formal institutional settings.

Yet, lo and behold, another doctor was thinking *small* and devised the first battery-powered, portable vibrator (Mortimer Granville—1883), “good ole Mort”. However, though a fantastic innovator, he was morally-stodgy in asserting that his invention was not for assisting female orgasms but merely for the excitation of men’s skulls. Right, dude. And condoms are balloons. And handcuffs in the bedroom are in case you need to arrest a burglar breaking in at night. (Didn’t he realize that once the women got a-humming that men’s skulls would get all the excitation they could handle??!!)

Immensely popular from the onset, this invention, marketed as the Weiss vibrator, was almost as tremendous a relief to doctors worn down by vulva-throbbing as it was it was to the women “undergoing” this newest electromechanical “therapy.” No wonder a recent study of female portraiture pre- and post-vibrator periods shows women’s post-smiles spreading wider by at least a quarter-inch!

Fact: The vibrator was only the fifth household device to be electrified, after the sewing machine, fan, tea kettle and toaster, and preceding by about a decade the vacuum cleaner and electric iron – obviously suggestive of a woman’s priorities!