There was once an ailment, a wide-spread disorder until the early 1900’s, called Hysteria. But what was it? Where did it come from? Why were women the only ones to suffer from it? And what is the connection between this strange illness and vibrators?
The first step in understanding Hysteria is to understand where the word came from. Hysteria is derived from an ancient Greek word, ‘hystera’, which means uterus.
So the uterus is the center of this disease, its origins if you will. But why the uterus? The uterus has a long and unhappy history of being thought of as evil, as being the area of the woman’s body that causes sickness, mental instability and craziness.
Since the uterus had such a bad reputation it was easy for doctors to blame many unknown illnesses on it, and since Hysteria was caused by the uterus overwhelming the woman it belonged to and making her crazy, it was simple enough to call everything not understood Hysteria.
During the mid to late 1800’s, a time when Hysteria was at its peak, many doctors noted a trend in women who suffered from this illness. Many of those women turned out to be virgins, nuns, widows and even some housewives. But what is it that connects all these women?
The possibly obvious answer to that question is sex, or rather, the deprivation thereof. Women were considered to be weak and rather susceptible to mental instability and many doctors believed that bringing a woman to “hysterical paroxysm” would treat Hysteria. What is “hysterical paroxysm”? In today’s terms we would refer to is as an orgasm.
Since masturbation was a very terrible thing to do there were doctors who would help women who suffered from Hysteria. In order to do this they would provide women with pelvic massages, manually inducing hysterical paroxysm.
But unfortunately for the doctors this process was often very long, even taking up to a few hours. Spending that much of a day for just one patient was definitely not profitable. But to help them, in the mid 1800’s some doctors were able to use a water hose to massage the pelvic region.
But thankfully in 1873 a new tool was created and first used in an asylum in France to treat Hysteria. This tool was called a electromechanical vibrator. This wondrous tool allowed doctors to help their patients in a matter of minutes, not hours.
Around the early 1900’s many people started getting electricity in their houses. This allowed women to treat themselves in the safety and privacy of their very own homes. Vibrators started to become much more common around the country. Sears printed an ad in one of their catalogues in 1918 where the touted their vibrator as being “Very useful and satisfactory for home service.”
Thus started the great vibrator movement, allowing women a bit of vibrator fun at home, all in the name of keeping them sane and arose such great vibrators as the laya spot.
These days women would have a tough time convincing anybody they had Hysteria and that’s why they need to keep their vibrators around. But thankfully they don’t have to.
It’s logical to assume what happened may have helped in women’s adult products being to a great extent more received than sex toys such as the Fleshlight or other styles of male masturbators. But, then again, maybe not.
