I recently saw In the Next Room (or the Vibrator Play), an extraordinary drama by Sarah Ruhl that brings Rachel Maines’s 1999 book, The Technology of Orgasm (Johns Hopkins University Press), vividly to life. In the play, set in 1883, a young doctor sees female patients who are suffering from “hysteria” and treats them by using an electric vibrator to bring them to orgasm. The women really feel better after each session and eagerly return for regular “treatments.” Amazingly enough, this was a common medical practice for decades – which I describe on pages 35-39 in my book, The Great Sex Secret.
Adjacent to the doctor’s examining room is his living room, where his very talkative wife spills out her thoughts and anxieties to anyone who will listen. At first, she knows nothing about the treatments her husband is administering, but gradually, from conversations with patients and sounds emanating from the examining room, the truth dawns on her. In an emotional scene, she begs her husband to give her a vibrator treatment. He’s shocked. She’s not ill, he says, and besides, it would be improper for a doctor to treat his own wife.
It strains credulity that Victorian-era doctors didn’t know that their treatments were sexual – and yet Rachel Maines’s carefully documented book says this was true. The play convincingly portrays the firewall this doctor had built in his mind between what he was doing to his patients and the virtually asexual relationship he had with his own wife. This common Victorian mindset was possible for three reasons: a middle-class belief that it was improper for “nice” women to feel sexual pleasure, ignorance about the female sexual anatomy, and strong prohibitions against masturbation.
One of the most telling moments in the play is when the doctor’s wife and a patient take advantage of his absence to pick the lock of the examining room door and experiment with the vibrator. They imagine for a moment what it would be like for intense sexual pleasure to be part of “relations” with their husbands – and burst into hysterical laughter. What a thought!
How long did this “medical” use of the vibrator continue? In the early 20th century, says Maines, several companies began selling hand-held vibrators for home use, advertising them in mainstream women’s magazines. Business was great until stag movies began showing the portable vibrators being used in obviously raunchy ways. The social camouflage was stripped away and people realized that home use of vibrators (and what was going on in doctors’ offices) was sexual. Open sale of vibrators ended and doctors stopped using them in their offices.
At this point in the early 1920s, Americans were at a sexual crossroads. Would the sorry state of “lovemaking” change? Would people find ways to improve lovemaking techniques now that they knew the site of female pleasure and the importance of regular orgasms to women’s health and happiness? Would men stop defining women’s sexual unhappiness as an illness? And would women speak up more forcefully for equal satisfaction in the bedroom?
No, no, no, and no. The evidence is that few people integrated the new insights into their sex lives and few women were more assertive about their sexual needs. And then Sigmund Freud published his theory about “immature” clitoral orgasms and “mature” vaginal orgasms and led an entire generation off in exactly the wrong direction.
You’re thinking that all this is a thing of the past – but is it? Did Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Dr. Ruth, and others help contemporary lovers put one-sided sex behind them? In the Next Room ends on a poignant note. The doctor and his wife seem to connect sexually – but their onstage lovemaking is remarkably vibrator- and hands-free. Did they really figure things out? And what percentage of lovers have today?
These questions are at the heart of my book. I’ll be interested in your reactions.
Adjacent to the doctor’s examining room is his living room, where his very talkative wife spills out her thoughts and anxieties to anyone who will listen. At first, she knows nothing about the treatments her husband is administering, but gradually, from conversations with patients and sounds emanating from the examining room, the truth dawns on her. In an emotional scene, she begs her husband to give her a vibrator treatment. He’s shocked. She’s not ill, he says, and besides, it would be improper for a doctor to treat his own wife.
It strains credulity that Victorian-era doctors didn’t know that their treatments were sexual – and yet Rachel Maines’s carefully documented book says this was true. The play convincingly portrays the firewall this doctor had built in his mind between what he was doing to his patients and the virtually asexual relationship he had with his own wife. This common Victorian mindset was possible for three reasons: a middle-class belief that it was improper for “nice” women to feel sexual pleasure, ignorance about the female sexual anatomy, and strong prohibitions against masturbation.
One of the most telling moments in the play is when the doctor’s wife and a patient take advantage of his absence to pick the lock of the examining room door and experiment with the vibrator. They imagine for a moment what it would be like for intense sexual pleasure to be part of “relations” with their husbands – and burst into hysterical laughter. What a thought!
How long did this “medical” use of the vibrator continue? In the early 20th century, says Maines, several companies began selling hand-held vibrators for home use, advertising them in mainstream women’s magazines. Business was great until stag movies began showing the portable vibrators being used in obviously raunchy ways. The social camouflage was stripped away and people realized that home use of vibrators (and what was going on in doctors’ offices) was sexual. Open sale of vibrators ended and doctors stopped using them in their offices.
At this point in the early 1920s, Americans were at a sexual crossroads. Would the sorry state of “lovemaking” change? Would people find ways to improve lovemaking techniques now that they knew the site of female pleasure and the importance of regular orgasms to women’s health and happiness? Would men stop defining women’s sexual unhappiness as an illness? And would women speak up more forcefully for equal satisfaction in the bedroom?
No, no, no, and no. The evidence is that few people integrated the new insights into their sex lives and few women were more assertive about their sexual needs. And then Sigmund Freud published his theory about “immature” clitoral orgasms and “mature” vaginal orgasms and led an entire generation off in exactly the wrong direction.
You’re thinking that all this is a thing of the past – but is it? Did Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, Dr. Ruth, and others help contemporary lovers put one-sided sex behind them? In the Next Room ends on a poignant note. The doctor and his wife seem to connect sexually – but their onstage lovemaking is remarkably vibrator- and hands-free. Did they really figure things out? And what percentage of lovers have today?
These questions are at the heart of my book. I’ll be interested in your reactions.
