Havelock Ellis, an English doctor, was the first authority to suggest openly that sex and reproduction did not need to be bedfellows. ‘Reproduction,’ he wrote, ‘is so primitive and fundamental a function of vital organs that the mechanism by which it is assured is highly complex and not yet clearly understood. It is not necessarily connected to sex, nor is sex necessarily connected with reproduction.’
Ellis also argued that in marriage one should ascertain not just the sexual needs of the husband but of the wife, too. His open-mindedness was informed by the occasional sexual peculiarity. He was an ‘undinist’, a man capable of being brought to orgasm by the sight of a woman urinating while standing up. (Another prominent undinist was Rembrandt.) This obsession had been prompted, Havelock Ellis said, by an incident at London Zoo when he was twelve and his mother was caught short and obliged to lift her skirts to urinate. In adult life, this was Havelock Ellis’s chosen method of arousal. His wife, Edith Lees, was bisexual, and when she died, he married one of her lovers. Unsurprisingly then, Ellis was always fascinated by case histories of other people with fetishes. A prostitute on the Strand in London once told him about a client whose complicated and expensive treat was to bring her to orgasm as she and another naked colleague wrung the neck of pigeons. Another client enjoyed licking a prostitute’s boots.
Charles Kingsley, author of The Water Babies, social reformer and committed Christian, was another Victorian who believed in the value of sexual intimacy. He spent his four-year courtship with his fiancée Fanny Grenfell imagining how sex would be. Fanny referred to the ‘delicious nightery’ of her ‘strange feelings’ and her troublesome ‘spasms’ – for which the doctor recommended getting married sooner. Charles reminded Fanny in a letter before their marriage, however, of the remarkable amount that can be achieved in an un-chaperoned instant. Other Victorian women who speak of their sexual feelings are rare, though. Coventry Patmore’s daughter, Emily, became a nun, but after dreams of religious fulfilment recounted awakening with ‘a throb of ecstasy’.
Kim Murphy, an American author and writer of an essay called ‘Frigid Victorian Women?’, has noted how in their confidential diaries it was not uncommon for women to mention their inequality in society – and their sexual feelings. Murphy has discovered a letter from a woman called Laura Lyman to her husband Joseph in which she says: ‘How I long to see you … I’ll drain your coffers dry next Saturday I assure.’
‘By the 1860s,’ Murphy writes, ‘diaries and letters reveal more explicit and intensely erotic discussions among middle-class couples. Mabel Loomis [the author and friend of Emily Dickinson] wrote in her diary after spending a passionate night with her fiancé, David Todd, “I woke up the next morning very happy though, and feeling not at all condemned.” Murphy notes how Loomis, in the privacy of her diary, admitted that she was content in sharing sexual intimacy with her fiancé.’
Karen Lystra, Professor of American Studies at California State University, has studied love letters of the nineteenth century to discover what courting and married couples were actually doing in parlours and bedrooms. ‘Instead of finding stereotypical couples who lacked in sexual intimacy,’ explains Murphy, ‘she discovered the middle class beheld sex with “almost a reverence for sexual expression as the ultimate symbol of love and personal sharing”. And while most women apparently resisted coitus before marriage, the sensuality in their letters revealed quite a range of acceptable erotic activity while courting.’
Dr Elizabeth Blackwell, according to Murphy, the first woman to earn a medical degree in the United States, wrote about the ‘immense power of sexual attraction felt by women’, while Ida Craddock, another advocate of women enjoying sex, wrote detailed instructions for men on how they should ‘arouse’ their wives, ‘and study carefully every movement with reference to its pleasure-producing effect upon her’. Craddock, a spiritualist and stenography teacher from Philadelphia, was the first woman known to have written a sex manual. Right Marital Living was remarkably graphic even by today’s standards: ‘Bear in mind that it is part of your wifely duty to perform pelvic movements during the embrace, riding your husband’s organ gently, and at times, passionately, with various movements up and down, sideways and with a semi-rotary movement, resembling the movement of the thread of a screw upon a screw.’ Warming to her theme, she further advised women to, ‘go right through the orgasm, allowing the vagina to close upon the male organ’. Craddock was arrested in 1899 for sending obscene material through the mail.
Another iconoclastic view of the Victorians’ sexuality was mooted by Steven Marcus in a groundbreaking 1966 study, The Other Victorians. He looked to the subversive underworld of Victorian licence and pornography as evidence of widespread reaction to prudery and control. One of his best examples of the illicit Victorian pursuit of recreational orgasm was an immense doorstop pornographic book called My Secret Life, of uncertain vintage or authorship but a bestseller for decades.
The author, ‘Walter’, is thought to have been a nobleman or at least a wealthy businessman with an insatiable appetite for women. My Secret Life amounts to 2,360 pages of hardcore porn. Most of the women Walter sleeps with are ‘gay women’ (prostitutes) of working-class or rural origins. One woman, in Marseilles, he reports as having two vaginas. Walter does not seem a great proponent of sexual equality, yet many readers have detected a thread of genuine love of women as well as sexual pleasure amidst the forests of verbiage; others, alternatively, have detected nothing more than a misogynist fantasy-monger with a rapist’s mindset.
‘Walter’ professed a moral justification for paying above the odds for sex with virgins: ‘Verily a gentleman had better fuck them for money, than a butcher boy for nothing. It is the fate of such girls to be fucked young, neither laws social or legal can prevent it. Given opportunities, who has them like the children of the poor? They will copulate.’ And he seemed genuinely to have adored women’s genitalia, and giving his rented paramours pleasure, arguing that to do so was ‘natural’ – a radical attitude for his time: ‘What more harm in a man’s licking a woman’s clitoris to give her pleasure, or of she sucking his cock for the same purpose, both taking pleasure in giving each other pleasure?’ he wrote.
There was an heretical body in medicine, too, that surreptitiously chipped away at the ‘official’ consensus. In the 1850s, Pierre Briquet, a French physician researching ‘hysteria’ in female patients, alighted on the idea that the syndrome was caused by sexual frustration, the cure for which was (as van Swieten was privately advising Royalty a century earlier) ‘la titillation du clitoris’.
In 1872, Dr Joseph R. Beck of Fort Wayne made what is credited as the first scientific observation of a female orgasm. He was inserting a pessary in a woman who had asked him to take particular care as she was prone to having an orgasm in such circumstances; the mind only boggles at how she delivered this information to him. Fascinated rather than fazed by such a prospect, however, Dr Beck accidentally-on-purpose carried out a little experiment, attempting deliberately to induce an orgasm in her (and, who knows, maybe in himself as well) by sweeping his ‘right forefinger quickly three or four times across the space between the cervix and the pubic arch’. Almost immediately, Beck recorded, the orgasm occurred.
Beck was not the first doctor to happen on the phenomenon of women roused to orgasm in the doctor’s surgery. Early in the century, the introduction of the speculum as a standard part of a physician’s kit had caused something of an uproar. Tales circulated among medics of women begging them for a vaginal examination and climaxing virtually the moment the instrument was brandished.
A British doctor, Robert Carter, wrote in 1853: ‘I have … seen young unmarried women, of the middle-class of society, reduced by the constant use of the speculum to the mental and moral condition of prostitutes, seeking to give themselves the same indulgence by the practise of solitary vice; and asking every medical practitioner … to institute an examination of the sexual organs.’ Ironically, the speculum had bee
n invented by an Alabama gynaecologist, James Marion Sims, who admitted, strangely for one in his specialism, that he loathed ‘investigating the organs of the female pelvis’.
Sims had probed a good few celebrated pelvises in his time, too. Having emigrated to Europe, he included among his patients Napoleon Ill’s Empress Eugénie, the Duchess of Hamilton and the Empress of Austria. There is no record of any of these women getting unduly excited by the sight of the speculum, but if they had, he doubtless would have followed the example of Otto Adler, a German gynaecologist who experienced the classic Victorian examining table orgasm, but even then refused to let it dissuade him from his pet theory that most women were subject to ‘sexual anaesthesia’. Adler bafflingly included in his sexually anaesthetised category not only the patient who climaxed in his surgery, but ten women who admitted that they masturbated to orgasm or were subject to strong sexual desires that could not be consummated by means of intercourse.
There was nevertheless in the decades following Dr Beck’s ‘experiment’, a positive cult of male doctors purposefully fiddling – by consent, unlike in Beck’s case – with their sexually frustrated female patients. The previously pointless ‘sexual paroxysm’ now seemed to be a state that offered temporary relief of a variety of ‘hysterical’ symptoms; indeed, the hysterical symptoms produced by Mesmer, in his apparent experiments in Paris with orgasmic women, were clearly the exultant product of ‘hysteria’ rather than hysteria (as in extreme sexual frustration) itself.
The female orgasm was slowly fighting its way to the recognition and respect it began to acquire in the next century. It sounds more than a little dubious today, but in 1878 Desiré Magloire Bourneville, a male doctor at the Salpêtrière, a large hospital in Paris, published a three-volume work containing photos of women in the process of orgasm. Some of the women were seen tweaking their nipples, others arching their backs, other rocking backwards and forth and tossing their head.
His clinical notes read more like soft pornography than medical research: ‘Then her body curves into an arc and holds this position for several seconds. One then observes some slight movements of the pelvis … she raises herself, lies flat again, utters cries of pleasure, laughs, makes several lubricious movements and sinks down on to the vulva and right hip.’ During all of this action the vaginal fluids are carefully accounted for: ‘La vulve est humide’, or, ‘La secretion vaginale est très abondante’ were such notes.
Doctors such as Havelock Ellis and Elizabeth Blackwell achieved their conceptual breakthroughs without resort to such spectacular methodology. Havelock Ellis was the true Mateo Columbo of female sexuality at the turn of the nineteenth century. He observed that men’s and women’s orgasms are strikingly alike, but – a daring suggestion – that women are naturally inclined, if given the chance, to desire and to have more of them than men. ‘Every woman has her own system of manifest or latent erogenic zones, and it is the lover’s part in courtship to discover these zones, and to develop them in order to achieve that tumescence which is naturally and properly the first stage in the sexual union,’ he wrote.
Blackwell, in a 1902 collection, Essays in Medical Sociology, concurred, stating that ‘the unbridled impulse of physical lust is as remarkable in the latter [women] as in the former [men]’ She referred to women’s orgasms as ‘sexual spasms’, and opined that it is not intercourse that women crave principally but, ‘the profound attraction of one Nature to the other which marks passion, and delight in kisses and caresses – the love touch’. By the ‘love touch’ she meant foreplay ‘by hand and by tongue’, which was, she avowed, a woman’s version of ‘physical sexual expression’.
Some of the most remarkable progress, however, in the story of the female orgasm, as well as the most positive proof ever found that a healthy orgasmic culture existed underground in the Victorian era, took place almost surreptitiously in the late-nineteenth-century. It was chronicled in an extraordinary study published in 1999 by Dr Rachel P. Maines and entitled The Technology of Orgasm.
In the late 1970s, Maines was an academic specialising in the history of technology and working on a book about nineteenth-century needlework, with reference to early-American sewing machines. Her research took her to the Bakken Museum of Electricity in Life in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which kept a unique collection of eleven domestic appliances from the birth of electricity.
Curators there had for many years been puzzled by a mysterious collection in their basement, which they were unable to catalogue because they could not work out what the devices were used for. They were of widely different design, but all those that still worked purred gently when you plugged them in. The oldest was produced by the Weiss Instrument Manufacturing Company, Chambers Street, Manhattan. (Weiss are still in business in Holtsville, NY, making instruments for the refrigeration and airconditioning markets. They do not mention their background in sex toys in company literature.)
Maines was pretty sure what the curious early Weiss and other instruments were. She had previously noticed in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century magazines such as Needlecraft, Home Needlework Journal, Modern Women and Woman’s Home Companion, puzzling advertisements for a large number of electrical home appliances. They were advertised as performing all sorts of labour-saving chores like powering a fan, but always illustrated by drawings of women applying the machines to their necks or backs, and accompanied by puzzling copy describing the effects of the instruments with words like ‘thrilling’ and ‘invigorating’, along with phrases such ‘all the penetrating pleasures of youth will throb in you again’. When marketed to men, they were recommended as gifts for women that would restore their wives’ bright eyes and pink cheeks.
The inexplicable appliances in Minneapolis were nothing less than the world’s earliest electrical vibrators. The modern vibrator, it turned out, had been invented in the 1880s by a British doctor with an interest in the humane treatment of the insane, Joseph Mortimer Granville. His machine went into production as the Weiss vibrator. Hysteria was, by Granville’s time, one of the most commonly diagnosed problems in women, and from the mid-nineteenth century it fell to a small number of progressive (but highly paid) doctors manually to masturbate their female patients back to good health. Not every doctor offered the treatment; the majority, after all, had probably never seen an orgasm in their wives, let alone in their patients.
The vibration cure for ‘hysteria’ had been studied by Dr Jean-Martin Charcot, a physician at the Salpêtrière, at the same time as Bourneville was painstakingly working on his collection of photos of women having orgasms. Charcot and his team experimented doggedly with shaking machines, swings and train rides, massage and electrotherapy. He disliked administering the massage most, complaining bitterly at how time-consuming and tricky it was.
Even pre-electric power, in both Britain and the US, there had for several decades been wind-up clockwork vibrators made from wood and ivory, manual massagers that squirted oils, massagers with water jets, models with rollers, and padded tables with holes in them through which a sphere vibrated, controlled by a steam machine. Some of the less cumbersome very early vibrators were portable, allowing doctors to take them on house calls.
The Weiss electric vibrator was a boon initially to the specialist masturbation doctors, who could now do in five minutes what used to take up to an hour, but could charge their patients the same, typically two dollars. The resulting powered orgasm was also more intense. Once vibrators were offered as home appliances, most of the doctors were put out of that particular part of their business. They tried to warn women away from what one physician described as ‘these mere trinkets which accomplish little more than titillations of the tissues’. But the truth was, lucrative though it may be, masturbating women was not a business they greatly cherished and most were glad to see the back of it.
The first electric device advertised directly to the public and noticed eighty years later by Dr Maines was the Vibratile, which appeared in an 1899 edition of McClure’s magazine. T
he Vibratile was offered as a treatment for neuralgia, headache and wrinkles. More than fifty more electric vibrators were swiftly invented, the technology taking off exponentially with the introduction of alternating current power. They weighed anything between five and fifteen pounds, and cost from $5 to $20 for luxury models with brass fittings and a velvet-lined box. None came with instructions; it was assumed that if you ordered one, you knew what to do with it.
The home electric vibrator was developed at a fitting time, at the very end of the prudish but sometimes surprisingly frisky Victorian era. It has to be emphasised, however, that even if its use as a clitoral stimulator was covert, it was still not blatantly sexual. In her heart, the vibrator owner wanted her little device to do what it said in the ads – improve her health – even though robust health in a woman was in itself regarded as vulgar and a little too Socialist for refined Victorian ladies of the old school.
Yet even some of the health lobby pointedly rejected the use of the vibrator. The new Germanic-inspired fad of nudism, the health movement’s most radical wing, was in full sway by the end of the century. Yet not a single sexual nuance was allowed to seep through the wholesome text of Health & Efficiency, the British nudist magazine started in 1899 and still published. Its first editor, Charles Thompson, regarded masturbators as ‘moral imbeciles’.
It remains one of the Victorian era’s most ironic postscripts that turn-of-the-century knitting magazines contained advertisements for several brands of intimate vibrators, while H&E, the masturbator’s Bible for the next fifty years with its pages of nude photographs and gossamer-thin rationale as a journal promoting health, contained not a single acknowledgement that there was anything remotely sexual about people prancing about naked in the great outdoors and being photographed as they did so.
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The Orgasm from Freud
to Lady Chatterley
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