“Victorian-Era Orgasms and the Crisis of Peer Review”
But quite a compelling article in The Atlantic (Robinson Meyer & Ashley Fetters), with the subtitle “A favorite anecdote about the origins of the vibrator is probably a myth.” An excerpt:
It’s among the most delectably scandalous stories in the history of medicine: At the height of the Victorian era, doctors regularly treated their female patients by stimulating them to orgasm. This mass treatment—a cure for the now-defunct medical condition of “hysteria”—was made possible by a new technology: the vibrator. Vibrators allowed physicians to massage women’s clitorises quickly and efficiently, without exhausting their hands and wrists.
It’s a disturbing insight, implying that vibrators succeeded not because they advanced female pleasure, but because they saved labor for male physicians. And in the past few years, it has careened
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