Socially camouflaged technologies: the case of theelectromechanical vibrator
Maines, R.
This paper appears in: Technology and Society Magazine, IEEE
Publication Date: Jun 1989
Volume: 8,
Issue: 2
On page(s): 3-11, 23
ISSN: 0278-0097
References Cited: 51
CODEN: ITSMDC
INSPEC Accession Number: 3498746
Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/44.31556
Current Version Published: 2002-08-06
Abstract
The case of the electromechanical vibrator, as a technology
associated with women's sexuality, involves issues of acceptability
rather than legality. The vibrator and its predecessor technologies,
including the dildo, are associated with masturbation, a socially
prohibited activity until well into the second half of this century.
Devices for mechanically-assisted female masturbation, mainly vibrators
and dildoes, were marketed in the popular press from the late nineteenth
century through the early thirties in similarly camouflaged advertising.
A history of the electromechanical vibrator is presented. The
electromechanical vibrator emerged in the 1880s as a medical instrument
designed to mechanize massage techniques used by physicians since
antiquity. Among these was vulvular massage to orgasm as a treatment for
hysteria in women. The sexual character of the therapy was camouflaged
in medical rhetoric which characterized female arousal as a pathological
syndrome from which relief was obtained in the `hysterical paroxysm'.
Manual massage was fatiguing and slow, however, and water and
steam-powered methods capital-intensive; when portable vibrators powered
by line electricity became available at the turn of the century they
quickly became dominant medical massage technology until the appearance
of vibrators in erotic films in the 1920s eroded the instrument's social
camouflage
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