The Great Vibrator Myth

Selfie stick. Electrical banana. Pocket pleaser. Magic wand. Divorce maker. Buzz Nightgear. Battery Operated Boyfriend. These are but a few colourful euphemisms for womankind’s best friend, found in millions of nightstand drawers across the globe: the vibrator. If you are a connoisseur of strange product origins then you’ve likely heard the quirky and unlikely story of the vibrator’s creation, which goes something like this: during the Victorian era, women were regularly diagnosed with female hysteria, a catch-all condition covering everything from fainting, insomnia, irritability, nervousness, or excessive sexual desire – really, any inconvenient symptom a woman could exhibit. The most popular treatment for female hysteria was the pelvic or clitoral massage, performed by a doctor in a clinical setting. Being completely ignorant of the female orgasm, doctors dismissed the resulting shudders and moans of ecstasy as mere “paroxysms”, maintaining that as no vaginal penetration was involved, pelvic massage had nothing to do with sex.

As the popularity of this treatment exploded, doctors devised various mechanical vibrating machines to relieve their aching fingers and wrists, speed up the massage process, and allow them to service many more patients per day. And thus, an iconic sex toy was accidentally born.

It’s an entertaining story, one which has been told and retold in countless books, documentaries, and even scientific papers, and inspired several works of popular entertainment including Sarah Ruhl’s award-winning 2009 stage play In the Next Room and the 2011 film Hysteria starring Maggie Gyllenhaal and Jonathan Pryce.

It is also completely false without a shred of evidence backing any of it. Something only extremely recently revealed.

That’s right: despite being widely reported as historical truth, the popular account of the vibrator’s creation is, in fact, a fantasy, concocted by a single historian based on dubious interpretations of historical records. Yet this narrative has remained largely unchallenged for more than two decades since, exposing worrying truths about how falsehoods can spread through popular culture and how academic research is fact-checked and published.

This is the scandalous story of the great vibrator myth.

The popular tale of the vibrator’s unlikely origins first appeared in the 1999 book The Technology of Orgasm by American historian Rachel Maines. The book proved hugely popular upon its release and received multiple awards, including the American Historical Association’s Herbert Feis Prize for “distinguished contributions to public history,” as well as the the American Foundation for Gender and Genital Medicine and Science or AFGGMS Science and Biennial Book Awards. While controversial at first, Maines’s conclusions have since become near-universally accepted, being cited in dozens of academic papers and books, popular histories, and sex manuals; and directly inspiring dramatic works like the aforementioned In the Next Room and Hysteria.

Yet despite reviewers praising the book for opening up an entirely new area of historical inquiry, in the years following The Technology of Orgasm’s publication, few researchers made any attempt to replicate or expand upon Maine’s research. That is, until 2018, when Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg, historians from the Georgia Institute of Technology, decided to examine the sources cited in Maine’s book. As Lieberman later stated:

“From what I knew of the history of sexuality, it sounded unlikely that doctors would be [regularly performing pelvic massages]. When I checked the sources, that was when I first really thought, okay, there’s something up with this.”

What Lieberman and Schatzberg discovered was shocking. As they bluntly state in their 2018 paper A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm, published in the Journal of Positive Sexuality:

“…we could find no evidence that physicians ever used electromechanical vibrators to induce orgasms in female patients as a medical treatment. We examined every source that Maines cites in support of her core claim. None of these sources actually do so…Maines provides remarkably few citations in support of them, instead padding her argument with a mass of tangential citations that obscure the lack of support for the core argument. But none of the sources she cites even suggest what she is arguing, at least not to a reader who is not already convinced that these practices occurred.”

But before we dive into Lieberman and Schatzberg’s thorough debunking of Maines’s conclusions, it is worth noting that one fundamental pillar of her argument is largely accurate. For thousands of years, physicians did indeed recognize an affliction called female hysteria. However, the definition and purported causes of this disorder have varied widely over the centuries. The term itself derives from the Greek hystera, meaning “uterus” or “womb”, and was originally associated with the ancient concept of the “wandering womb”. This is exactly what it sounds like: the belief that the uterus can randomly wander around a woman’s body, putting pressure on various internal organs and causing all manner of health problems. This concept dates to at least the 5th century B.C.E., first appearing in the writings of Ancient Greek physicians Hippocrates of Kos and Artaeus of Cappadocia. However, at this time the term hysteria was not yet used, nor was the “wandering womb” theory universally accepted. Indeed, 3rd Century C.E. Roman physician Claudius Galen attributed the condition to the buildup of so-called “female seed”, which grew sour and poisonous unless regularly expelled via sexual intercourse. Unwed women and widows were thought particularly vulnerable. Early treatments for female hysteria included – naturally – marriage, as well as burning sweet or foul-smelling herbs to draw or push the uterus back to its natural position once again proving that humans are stupid.

Following a brief period in the Middle Ages when hysteria was largely attributed to demonic possession, because sure, why not, the wandering womb theory came back into vogue in the 16th century, along with a variation on the ancient theory of humorism. This held that all diseases were caused by an imbalance of four vital fluids or humours: black bile, yellow bile, blood, and phlegm. As in the classical era, the most commonly-prescribed treatment for a wandering or congested womb remained marriage and regular sexual intercourse with the sufferer’s husband.

By the 18th and 19th centuries, however, the wandering womb theory had finally been abandoned in favour of more “scientific” explanations. For example, German physician Anton Mesmer, a pioneer of hypnosis and the source of the term “mesmerize”, believed that hysteria was caused by a build-up of a type of energy he called “animal magnetism”, and that this energy could be redirected using magnets or electrically-charged metal rods. Meanwhile, French physician Joseph Raulin believed hysteria to be a “vaporous ailment” caused by air pollution in crowded urban areas. This was in keeping with contemporary miasma theory, which held that many diseases were caused by breathing in poisonous vapours or miasmas. Indeed, the term malaria literally translates as “bad air”, reflecting the belief that this disease was caused by poisonous vapours emanating from swamps and marshes. Interestingly, Raulin, along with many of his contemporaries, believed that both men and women could suffer from hysteria but that women, being constitutionally weaker and lazier, were far more susceptible… The past everybody.

By this time, the diagnosis of hysteria had grown to encompass a dizzying variety of ailments, with French physician François Bossier de Sauvages de Lacroix listing among the possible symptoms:

“…a swollen abdomen, suffocating angina [chest pain] or dyspnea [shortness of breath], dysphagia [difficulty swallowing], […] cold extremities, tears and laughter, oscitation [yawning], pandiculation [stretching and yawning], delirium, a close and driving pulse, and abundant and clear urine.”

In the mid-19th century, hysteria came to be seen as more of a neurological or psychological disorder than a physiological one. French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot characterized hysteria as a form of epilepsy and in the 1870s conducted extensive studies on hysteric patients at the Pitié-Salpêtrière charity hospital in Paris, capturing the various physical symptoms of the disorder in a series of widely-published photographs. He also developed various hypnotic methods for treating hysteria, based on the earlier work of Anton Mesmer. Others, however, took a decidedly more chauvinistic view of the disorder, with Harvard medical professor Edward Hammond Clarke claiming in his 1875 treatise Sex in Education that modern food, clothing, and education drew energy away from women’s reproductive organs, inflicting all manner of ailments. Clarke argued that women be barred from higher education, lest it lead to, to quote, “…physiological disasters [such as]…nervous collapse and sterility.” …

Others, like physician Frederick Hollick and psychiatrist L.E. Emerson, blamed hysteria on excessive sexual desire, promiscuity, masturbation, or sexual abuse in childhood.

Treatments for hysteria also become more varied and extreme. For instance, in the 1850s American physician Silas Weir Mitchell began prescribing the “rest cure”, which confined the patient to bed for weeks or even months on end. While this might not sound too bad, it is worth noting that patients were also forbidden from reading, writing, talking, or engaging their minds in any way, causing many to quickly and inexorably lose their sanity. Such was the case with American writer Charlotte Perkins Gilman who, after being prescribed the rest cure by Dr. Mitchell himself, recounted her experiences in the classic 1892 horror short story The Yellow Wallpaper.

But it could always be worse; in extreme cases, women diagnosed with hysteria could be forcibly committed to psychiatric institutions and even subjected to surgical interventions including hysterectomy and clitorectomy – and to learn more about the horrifying history of anti-masturbation measures and discover whether flicking the bean or flogging the dolphin actually does any harm, please check out our previous video Is ‘Choking the Chicken’ Actually Bad For You?

Thankfully, advancements in psychiatry along with the early feminist movement eventually caused female hysteria to fall out of fashion as a legitimate medical diagnosis. However, as late as 1968, the condition was still included in the second edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – AKA the DSM-II. It would not be removed until the publication of the DSM-III in 1980.

It is here, however, where actual medical history and the narrative presented in The Technology of Orgasm part ways. In their 2018 paper, Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg break down Maines’s thesis into three main arguments before debunking each in turn. These are: a) pelvic massage was a long-established and widely-practiced treatment for female hysteria; b) Victorian doctors were unaware of the female orgasm or the role of the clitoris, and thus considered pelvic massage non-sexual since it involved no penetration; and c) the mechanical vibrator was developed specifically to make pelvic massage easier and more efficient.

As noted, in each case, Lieberman and Schatzberg found shockingly little hard evidence for Maines’s claims, writing that:

“If vibrating the clitoris were indeed a standard medical therapy in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, one would expect direct historical evidence of the practice, either from proponents or critics. Medical discourse at the time was very contentious. Physicians regularly lauded and attacked therapies that used new technologies, especially electrical devices, so historians would expect to find debates about clitoral vibration in medical journals. Vibrators were widely promoted for other medical therapies in this era. The American Medical Association was, in fact, quite critical of such vibrator treatments. Furthermore, any medical procedure that could have been perceived as sexual would surely have attracted the attention of censorious moralists. Yet Maines insists that these treatments were not seen as sexual, so according to her own logic, physicians would have had no reason to conceal the practice. Sometimes absence of evidence is really evidence of absence.”

And Lieberman and Schatzberg are far from alone in their criticism. Previously, classical historian Helen King of the Open University London questioned the claim that pelvic massage was a long-established treatment for hysteria, arguing that Maines had cherry-picked and misinterpreted many of her sources:

“Maines wants a line of history going all the way back to the time of Hippocrates, so she was determined to find doctors massaging their female patients to orgasm in the earliest written sources…but a Roman satire, describing ‘anointers’ at the baths who masturbate a woman to orgasm, is very different from saying doctors really did this. It’s a satire – it’s supposed to be outrageous… [Maines also does this by] reading a description about what happens when the womb is rubbed during intercourse and making that into a passage about masturbation by a doctor.”

Similarly, many sources which purportedly demonstrate the ubiquity of pelvic massage in the 18th and 19th centuries actually describe very different therapies:

“…medical sources that describe pelvic and gynecological massage in detail show that the practice was not sexual, did not involve the clitoris, and did not produce an orgasm. The term “pelvic massage” usually meant uterine massage, a treatment frequently used for conditions such as dysmenorrhea or uterine prolapse….Furthermore, none of her English-language sources even mentions production of “paroxysms” by massage or anything else that could remotely suggest an orgasm. This lack of evidence by itself undermines the core of her claim.”

Going back to Lieberman and Schatzberg, they note multiple instances where Maines distorts or misinterprets her sources in service of her narrative:

“Maines’ second key claim is that genital use of vibrators was a standard treatment for hysteria and related ailments, such as neurasthenia. [The] sources she cites contradict this claim. Some of her cited sources do not even mention hysteria, while most of her sources on hysteria do not mention vibrators. Even when medical sources did endorse vibration treatment for hysteria, it was rarely a primary treatment, and never recommended for application to the vulva…

[In one example], Maines twists a quote to make it seem to support her claim about clitoral massage for hysteria:

In 1903 Samuel Howard Monell effectively summarized the demand of physicians since Hippocrates for some simple means of getting results with their hysterical patients:

“Pelvic massage (in gynecology) has its brilliant advocates and they report wonderful results, but when practitioners must supply the skilled technic with their own fingers the method has no value to the majority.” For physicians in this line of work, the vibrator was a godsend: “Special applicators (motor-driven) give practical value and office convenience of what to what otherwise is impractical.”

On its face, this quote appears to be strong evidence. However, the context of the quote shows otherwise. Maines implies that Monell was discussing hysterical patients; however, nowhere in the book does he mention treating hysteria with pelvic massage. In fact, the quoted passage occurs in a discussion of massage for “fractures, dislocations, and sprains.”

Even more questionable is Maines’s claim that Victorian doctors viewed clitoral massage as non-sexual and thus unproblematic. By the 16th Century, when marriage and regular intercourse were commonly prescribed to release built-up “female seed”, physicians such as Pieter van Foreest and Gioanni Matteo da Grado vigorously opposed any substitute procedure such as the manual manipulation of the genitals by either the patient or a doctor. Such manipulation was seen as explicitly sexual, and only recommended as a last resort – and even then, it was only ever performed by female midwives, not male doctors. Thus, the claim that Victorian doctors 300 years later would be unaware of the sexual nature of clitoral massage is patently absurd. In The Technology of Orgasm, Maines herself even states that:

“Theodore Thomas, for example, wrote in 1891 that the purpose of the clitoris was ‘to furnish to the female the nervous erethrism which is necessary to a perfect performance and completion of the sexual act’ and went on to observe that orgasm could be produced by clitoral stimulation ‘outside of intercourse’”

Indeed, that vibrators could be used for sexual stimulation was well-understood by contemporary doctors like the amusingly-named American gynaecologist James Craven Wood, who wrote in 1917:

“The greatest objection to vibration thus applied is that in overly sensitive patients it is liable to cause sexual excitement… [but if] the vibratode is kept well back from the clitoris, there is but little danger of causing such excitement.”

Hallie Lieberman further drives home the absurdity of Maines’s claim in a 2020 New York Times article, writing that:

“Imagine arguing that at the turn of the 20th century, female nurses were giving hand jobs to male patients to treat them for psychological problems; that men didn’t realize anything sexual was going on; that because female nurses’ wrists got tired from all the hand jobs, they invented a device called a penis pump to help speed up the process. Then imagine claiming nobody thought any of this was sexual, because it was a century ago.”

On this note, in The Technology of Orgasm, Maines outlines her second major claim by stating:

“…the androcentric definition of sex as an activity recognizes three essential steps: preparation for penetration (‘foreplay’), penetration, and male orgasm. Sexual activity that does not involve at least the last two has not been popularly or medically (and for that matter legally) regarded as ‘the real thing’…since no penetration was involved, believers in the hypothesis that only penetration was sexually gratifying to women could argue that nothing sexual could be occurring when their patients experienced the hysterical paroxysm during treatment.”

In reality, as Lieberman and Schatzberg point out:

“…the historical evidence demonstrates that penetrative use of vibrators was actually a standard medical practice. Most vibrator companies produced penetrative vaginal attachments, and nearly every vibrator sold to physicians included these…ironically, when Maines argues that massage with vibrators only occurred on the vulva, her sources demonstrate the opposite point: they show that massage occurred inside the vagina…

Furthermore, of the sources Maines cites in support of this claim, only one explicitly recommended using electrotherapeutic devices on the vulva, a 1909 book by female physician May Cushman Rice. However, Rice was not referring to treating hysteria, but rather to the use of high-frequency electrodes to treat vulvitis, inflammation of the vulva. A few pages later, she suggested treating vaginismus (vaginal muscular spasms) by applying internal vaginal electrodes. Again, Rice never mentioned hysteria or hinted at anything that could be interpreted as sexual stimulation. As with the other sources we discuss, Rice’s work lends no support to Maines’ core claims.”

If, as Maines claims, Victorian doctors saw vaginal penetration as a prerequisite for sexual activity, then such attachments would not have been so widely and openly used. That they were, however, strongly suggests that this claim is false – and to learn more about the late 19th/early 20th century fad of electrotherapy and the weird and wonderful devices used to administer this treatment, please check out the video on the subject over on Our Own Devices, the personal channel of this video’s author, Gilles Messier.

In the end, Lieberman and Schatzberg’s paper completely demolishes every major argument made in The Technology of Orgasm. Not only did clitoral massage for the treatment of hysteria not have an extensive history stretching back to antiquity, but it was rarely – if at all – practiced even in the Victorian era. And while vibrators were widely used in Victorian medicine, they were not invented to increase the efficiency of clitoral massage, being used instead to treat other gynaecological ailments. Thus, the amusing and scandalous story of the vibrator’s creation is just that: a story, pieced together from carefully cherry-picked and conveniently misinterpreted sources. It is, in other words, seemingly a work of academic fraud. More on what Maines herself has to say about this in a bit.

But, what, then, is the real story? How did the ubiquitous sex toy we know and – er – love today actually come to be? Most sources which follow Rachel Maines’s narrative credit the invention of the electric vibrator to British physician Joseph Mortimer Granville. In the 2011 film Hysteria, Granville, played by actor Hugh Dancy, is shown creating the device to more efficiently “service” his patients and later becoming hugely wealthy off his invention. But while Joseph Granville was a real person and did indeed invent an electric vibrator in the 1880s, he did not use his device for the treatment of hysteria, in fact explicitly warning against this application. Rather, he used it almost exclusively on men to treat a wide variety of ailments from chronic pain to deafness. The only sexually-related application mentioned in any of his writings is the stimulation of the perineum – the area between the genitals and anus – to treat male impotence.

Further, according to Maines’s narrative, the legitimate medical use of these devices provided vibrator manufacturers with a plausible cover under which to market their wares. As Lieberman and Schatzberg explain:

“[Maines] argues that the electromechanical vibrator was able to become a mainstream consumer appliance in the early 1900s because it was considered to be a medical device, not a sexual one. The vibrator’s sexual uses remained hidden for over two decades until the late 1920s, when stag films began showing women using vibrators for sexual pleasure. As a consequence, vibrators lost their “social camouflage… as a home and professional medical instrument,” doctors stopped using them in their practice, and mainstream companies stopped marketing them.”

The truth, however, is much more nuanced. When the first mechanical vibrators were introduced in the 1880s, they were touted as a miraculous technological panacea capable of treating hundreds of ailments including insomnia, paralysis, neuralgia, epilepsy, tuberculosis, sciatica, lumbago, gout, deafness, vomiting, constipation, impotence, haemorrhoids, and even wrinkles. They remained popular with all manner of medical practitioners until 1915, when the American Medical Association issued a public statement declaring vibrators marketed for medical use to be a “a delusion and a snare”. Faced with the collapse of the lucrative medical market, vibrator manufacturers pivoted to selling their wares directly to the public. Early 20th century newspapers and magazines were packed with ads for personal vibrators of all shapes and sizes. At the time, obscenity laws such as the 1873 Comstock Act forbade manufacturers from advertising sexually-related products, forcing them to focus instead on the health and lifestyle benefits of their wares. Early vibrator advertisements often featured glamorous-looking women massaging themselves in bed or the bath, with the ad copy for the Arnold Vibrator promising:

“Every woman can have a faultless complexion and youthful, finely proportioned figure. There is no further need of powder, paint, pads, or other deceptions.”

And while many of these products were sold with dildo-like attachments, these were strictly marketed for treating uterine complaints and other non-sexual uses….

However, as time went on, manufacturers grew more and more explicit in their marketing, filling their advertisements with images of shirtless men and women in low-cut tops with coy taglines like “Invented by a woman who knows a woman’s needs.” Of course, physicians and moral guardians were perfectly aware of what these products were being used for behind closed doors, with one 1912 men’s advice book warning that:

“Various electric vibrators have been abused by the unscrupulous … to give vibratory massage of the generative organs … a sensation similar to that of masturbation.”

But thanks to the narrow tightrope of plausible deniability vibrator manufacturers managed to walk, there was nothing the prudes could do to stop this illicit trade. Indeed, when in the 1950s the U.S. Food and Drug Administration launched a major campaign against personal vibrators, their concerns had nothing to do with masturbation. Rather, they sought to crack down on the outlandish and unsubstantiated health benefits still being claimed by vibrator manufacturers.

But thanks to obscenity laws and conservative social attitudes, it was not until the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 70s that women began to more freely talk about masturbation and vibrators. In the late 1960s, New York sex educator and artist Betty Dodson began hosting women-only masturbation workshops to help women regain the sexual knowledge long denied them by society, writing in 1974 that:

“I have found that the vibrator gives me the strongest and most consistent form of stimulation and is especially good for women who have never experienced orgasm.”

One of the vibrators used in Dodson’s workshops, the Hitachi Magic Wand, went on to become one of the most popular and recognizable sex toys in the world, being ranked the “No.1 Greatest Gadget of All Time” by Mobile Magazine in 2005. Today, the discerning consumer can choose from thousands of exotic and sophisticated vibrators to suit any taste, from internally-inserted “love eggs” and pocket-sized “bullets” to larger, more elaborate models like the “rabbit” with attachments for both vaginal and clitoral stimulation. Many models feature wireless or USB charging, different vibration intensities and rhythms, and can even be be synched to a user’s favourite songs – including, of course, “Good Vibrations.” But in many parts of the world – including the United States – social progress has lagged far behind technological progress. For instance, several U.S. states including Texas, Louisiana, and Alabama both have “obscene devices laws” prohibiting devices “…designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs” carrying penalties of up to $10,000 and one year in jail. Vibrators also remain illegal in many nations including the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Thailand, Malaysia, India, and Vietnam. For this reason, manufacturers carry on the age-old tradition of marketing their products as “personal massagers.”

Getting back to the main subject of this video, given how radically the real history of the vibrator deviates from the narrative presented in The Technology of Orgasm, why did it take nearly two decades for anyone to scrutinize and debunk Rachel Maines’s claims? In the conclusion of their 2018 paper, Lieberman and Schatzberg attempt to give an explanation:

“Our answer to this question must be somewhat speculative. Fundamental to its reception is the book’s sex appeal. It tells a scandalous story of transgressed boundaries, of dimwitted doctors providing women with sexual satisfaction. Maines has historicized the doctor-patient fantasy, a staple of erotica.Yet, unlike the porn fantasy, Maines’ narrative can be discussed without social reproach because of its academic respectability.

Yet the book’s appeal isn’t just sexual. Maines’ story fits narratives of progress in sexual knowledge, allowing readers to see themselves as worldly sophisticates in contrast to the clueless, desexualized Victorians. Physicians look particularly ignorant in this account, having no clue what the clitoris was, let alone an orgasm. Maines also portrays women as victims of profit-hungry physicians. Such victim narratives were a staple of feminists critiques of medical care in the 1970s. Women have no real agency in Maines’ account, as the historical actors are all male physicians, and women’s voices are completely absent. However, readers can still view the female patients as heroes who subvert patriarchy by procuring orgasms under the guise of medical treatment. The story is thus paradoxical—women are victims, but the tools used to victimize them bring them orgasms, a delicious irony.”

The salacious allure of Maines’s narrative is seconded by Helen King, who writes:

“[That story] just appeals to people now. It’s like some porn movie scenario with the doctor that – nudge, nudge – knows what the problem really is.”

In other words, Maines’s narrative was just too good to not be true so people ate it up.

But the general public falling for an entertaining story is one thing; the fact that it took nearly twenty years for any scholars to fact-check Maines’s book speaks to deeper issues within the field of academic history. As Lieberman and Schatzberg argue:

“The success of Technology of Orgasm thus serves as a cautionary tale for how easily

falsehoods can become embedded in qualitative fields….The success of her book suggests that academics rarely check each others’ facts carefully, especially when repeating stories that they want to be true.

…[Indeed] We believe that Technology of Orgasm is not an isolated case. The same pressures to

publish that produce flawed research in the natural sciences and quantitative social sciences also exist in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. In the humanities and qualitative social sciences, these pressures encourage narrow, banal, and irrelevant research, often disguised by horrid prose and vapid theorizing…

There are few safeguards against flawed empirical research in the humanities. Scholarly

publishing rarely involves any sort of fact checking. Peer reviewers and readers for academic

presses are not expected to confirm a manuscript’s empirical claims, beyond what they already

know. Book reviewers likewise rarely examine citations or sources. Far more fact-checking

occurs in a typical magazine article than in a scholarly publication, despite complaints from

journalists about a decline in the practice. Because fact-checking is not a routine

practice in scholarly publication, factual challenges to scholarship, particularly in the field of

history, are rare, and can be perceived as personal attacks rather than part of the scholarly

Process…

Unless a spirit of fact checking and fearless critique is built into the culture of scholarly publishing, false historical narratives like Maines’ will continue to be published and even praised.”

In many ways, the unchallenged publication of The Technology of Orgasm resembles an inadvertent version of the Sokal Affair, an infamous scholarly hoax which similarly revealed a disturbing lack of academic rigour in the humanities. In 1996, Alan Sokal, a professor of physics at New York University and University College London, submitted a deliberately nonsensical academic paper to the journal Social Text to find out whether:

“…a leading North American journal of cultural studies…[would] publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors’ ideological preconceptions.”

As expected, the paper, titled Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity, was not subjected to peer review by an expert and duly appeared in the journal’s spring/summer issue. Three weeks later, Sokal published an article in the magazine Lingua Franca revealing the paper to be a hoax, causing much embarrassment and controversy.

Speaking of embarrassment, in response to Lieberman and Schatzberg’s paper, Rachel Maines expressed surprise that it took twenty years for someone to challenge her claims, stating in an interview with The Atlantic that:

“What I said was that this was an interesting hypothesis, and as [Lieberman] points out — correctly, I think — people fell all over it. It was ripe to be turned into mythology somehow. I didn’t intend it that way, but boy, people sure took it, ran with it.”

But Lieberman, Schatzberg, and other critics have rebutted this excuse, citing the definitive language used in The Technology of Orgasm as evidence that Maines intended her conclusions to be more than just an “interesting hypothesis.”

But so what, you might ask? After all, popular history is full of distorted, mythologized, or downright false facts? Well, unfortunately, our interpretation of social and cultural history can have a profound impact on our everyday lives, even hundreds of years after the fact. For example, the Technology of Orgasm was directly cited in two recent legal cases challenging the constitutionality of state laws banning the sale of sex toys: State of Louisiana vs. Christine D. Brenan in 2000 and Williams v. Prior in 2002. In the former case, Maines’s purported historical evidence convinced the court that:

“…the state’s obscene-devices statute fails rational-basis review under the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution…[and that] the legislature cannot make a device automatically obscene merely through the use of labels.”

While in the latter, the judge ruled that:

“That evidence has convinced this court that there exists a substantial history, legal tradition, and contemporary practice of deliberate state non-interference in the private, consensual, sexual relationships of married persons and unmarried adults.”

However, if Maines’s historical narrative is shown to be false, it is possible that these rulings may be overturned in the future.

But more fundamentally, as Hallie Lieberman writes:

“[The] myth isn’t harmless. It’s a fantasy that contributes to the ways we still misunderstand female sexuality and that perpetuates harmful stereotypes that continue to resonate in our laws and attitudes.”

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