http://www.erotic-toyz.com/shop/history_vibrator.asp
Vibrators are ilegal in alabama and its a year hard labor in prison to own one i think . . or maybe sell it.
History of The Vibrator
The first mechanical vibrator, according to Maines, was invented in the 1880s by a British physician as a way to more quickly and effectively perform a "therapeutic massage." Therapeutic massage was an age-old "remedy" for "hysteria" -- that dastardly catch-all disease that mysteriously plagued women throughout the centuries until both science and feminism proved it to be a myth and it ceased to exist. Starting in the first century A.D., Maines writes, doctors manually massaged women to orgasm in hopes of purging them of this mysterious illness. The vibrator was invented as a way to get the job done more quickly -- therefore allowing the doctor time to see more patients.
"The Technology of Orgasm" is an exhaustive history, not only of the invention of the vibrator in its various guisesurge image (which, judging from the included illustrations, were frighteningly inventive) but also of the rise of hysteria, sexual inequality between the sexes and the questionable medical practices that grew around it. She meticulously covers everything from the ancient Greek doctor Galen, who spoke of massaging a patient's genitals until "she emitted turbid and abundant sperm" and was "free of all the evil she felt," to the appearance of vibrators in erotic silent films of the early 1900s, and on through the vibrator habits of modern-day Cosmopolitan readers. Ever wonder why the baths were so popular with women in the 1800s? It might have something to do with the "douche treatments" that were offered there, during which fabulous contraptions would shoot warm jets of water at a women's nether regions until she begged for mercy.
Although the book does get bog
ged down by dry academic prose -- specifically, in a rather dense first chapter wherein Maines indulges theories about androcentric sexuality (i.e., sex centered around penetration and the male orgasm) -- and medical terminology, the subject matter is inherently fascinating. It's downright bizarre to imagine the bespectacled, mustachioed Victorian doctors in their white lab coats, grimly massaging the splayed women on their examining tables to paroxysms of pleasure.
What, for example, are we to think of the scene of this "cold water douche," applied to his female patients by 19th century doctor Henri Scoutetten: "The first impression produced by the jet of water is painful, but soon the effect of the pressure, the reaction of the organism to the cold, which causes the skin to flush, and the reestablishment of equilibrium all create for many persons so agreeable a sensation that it is necessary to take precautions that they do not go beyond the described time, which is usually four or five minutes. After the douche, the patient dries herself off, refastens her corset, and returns with a brisk step to her room."
Even though it was masked by medical minutiae, the root purpose of the vibrator hasn't really changed in 100 years. Although, then, women might not have been quite as conscious about why, exactly, they were heading to the doctor, it was the same reason that women use vibrators today: to release sexual tension. The "symptoms" of hysteria -- which included anxiety, sleeplessness, nervousness and any other kind of female behavior that the male of the species might find baffling -- could easily be symptoms of sexual frustration. Or, as Maines puts it, "when marital sex was unsatisfying and masturbation discouraged or forbidden, female sexuality, I suggest, asserted itself through one of the few acceptable outlets: the symptoms of the hysteroneurasthenic disorders."
Unfortunately, we can only guess these women were thinking about their treatments. While male doctors diligently and dryly recorded the medical usage of their vibrating machines, the historical record lacks any writing by women about their experiences with vibrating massage, Maines explains. Was the vibrator some kind of Victorian in-joke for liberated women who got their jollies by traipsing off to the doctor? Or did women really believe that they were sick, and that the "massage" was a cure? Did the women enjoy their orgasmic medicine or resent it as an intrusion on their privacy? Was it a kind of prostitution? Who was kidding whom? Or did everyone take it as seriously as the doctors seem to have done in their clinical frenzies?
From the doctor's viewpoint, at least, is seems that the notion of a woman actually enjoying the massage was baffling. Chalk it up to androcentric sexuality, writes Maines: "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 paroxysms during treatment."
Of course, we've gotten past that notion. Which, it seems, is why the lawmakers in Alabama felt a need to pass their law.
Today, vibrators are status implements for most young educated women who consider themselves wise in the ways of the world. Many of my girlfriends -- whom, admittedly, are a rather urban and liberal bunch, though certainly not debauched libertines -- nonchalantly display their vibrators as totems to their sexual independence; scattered haphazardly around their rooms, peeking out from under their beds, winking up at accidental visitors in random drawers. Vibes are just a part of the urban landscape, and a good boyfriend is one who sensitively buys you one for Valentine's Day. (Read: He's attentive to your sexual needs.) I still remember the feeling of liberation when I finally summoned up the nerve and bought my first vibrator -- and, subsequently, the pleasant surprise of discovering just how effective it was.
The vibrator is quite possibly the most potent symbol there is of women's sexual agency. The possession of a vibrator tells the world (or, at the least, yourself) that not only are you comfortable with your own peculiarly female sexuality, but that you are able to give yourself sexual satisfaction -- that you aren't sitting around twiddling your thumbs waiting for a man to decide to send you into paroxysms of ecstasy. Nope, you're using those thumbs in the way that the Goddess above (whoever she may be) probably intended them to be used -- to control the on-off switch on your vibrating tube of joy.
After all, Kinsey determined that 70 percent of all women don't come to orgasm by penetration alone, and according to a recent University of Chicago survey, roughly 25 percent of all women (compared to 8 percent of all men) fail to have orgasms during sex at all. No wonder women need vibrators -- to make up for such disappointments. (Or, perhaps, to add to the bedtime activities and ensure that those disappointments don't happen again.)
As Maines describes in "The Technology of Orgasm," the moment the vibrator became a personally controlled object, rather than a tool to be manipulated by the medical community, the jig was up. Although the early vibrators were enormous contraptions, steam-powered or controlled by foot pedals, the advent of electricity and batteries around the turn of the century meant that vibrators became increasingly cheap and portable. Patients began buying vibrators for themselves, thereby saving cash on all those visits to the doctor. Coinciding with the national fascination with electrotherapy and newfangled technologies and medicines, manufacturers began marketing these portable "massagers" in magazines using vaguely orgasmic terminology. "The device," writes Maines, "was marketed mainly to women as a health and relaxation aid, in ambiguous phrases such as 'all the pleasures of youth ... will throb within you.' When marketed to men, vibrators were recommended as gifts for women that would benefit the male givers by restoring bright eyes and pink cheeks to their female consorts."
Around the 1930s, vibrators disappeared from advertising altogether, only to reappear in the sexually liberated 1960s -- this time, in their full sexual glory. They've only grown more visible since that point, and, thanks to the sexual revolution and pro-sex feminism, we now have a whole industry that has spread from erotica shops in liberal urban centers to those Midwestern sex-toy Tupperware parties, selling vibrators to women and men without disguising their purpose: to quickly bring women to a mind-blowing orgasm. And this, apparently, is just not acceptable to those puritanical moralists in Alabama who seem to be living examples of Maines' androcentric theories. God forbid a teenage girl might see a vibrator in a window somewhere and suddenly understand that sexual satisfaction doesn't have to mean hoping that her boyfriend will figure out where her clitoris is.
Of course, vibrators are still often wrapped in ambiguous terminology -- you can still find ads featuring women gingerly holding pink plastic vibrators to their cheeks, apparently marketing some kind of dubious facial relaxation. The most popular vibrator among the women I know is the famous Hitachi Magic Wand, a plug-in model with a mind-boggling array of attachments, which for years has been unself-consciously marketed as a massage device. And, as the ACLU pointed out last week, vibrators are still used as medical devices, albeit in a different way than they historically were -- these days, they are prescribed by doctors who intend them as marital aids for troubled couples.
So, in all likelihood, you can still buy a vibrator in Alabama -- just put it in a box that says "massager" and sell it in a health shop. Although convincing the cops that the purple veined model is just a muscle relaxant might still be a challenge
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