hysteria and the vindication of feminists

Warning, some of this entry may be considered explicit material.

I am not a feminist. I believe that a lot of feminism has gone too far and they’ve swung to the opposite end of the pendulum. Now, I’m not denying that feminists have made some very positive changes to the world and that work still continues. I have read the Vagina Monologues, I’ve seen it on stage… which is a lot more than what a lot of conservatives will do. Ok, that doesn’t have anything to do with the rest of this entry, but you’ll see.

My husband is going to Uni for his Master’s in history. It was his intention to focus on Imperial England and the British Empire, but now his primary focus will be Chinese history with British Empire as his secondary field. So, with this study, comes a lot of historical research… and this means piles and piles of books.

Well this afternoon, he was searching through a website which specializes in “scholarly books.” He found they had a section on the history of sex (etc). Now, while for him this is not an interesting topic, for me it is. I am very interested in the history of sex, its relation to culture, society, and personal experience. So, of course, this piqued my interest.

Then he came across a book that was about the “Technology of sex.” Oooooh…. very interesting! The book focuses on female orgasm, and how societies have “dealt with the problem” over the centuries. I never really considered female orgasm as a societal “problem.” However, according to the research in this book (which was published by John Hopkins University, so I consider it pretty authoritative), doctors and even midwives were paid to “massage” women’s clitoris’ to help them deal with their hysteria.

What?

So… interesting job for a doctor. Its hard to believe that women were labeled as being sick for being horny. Well, hysteria involves a lot more than being horny — but, still. Funny how orgasm was seen as the “cure.” And, also funny how the idea of orgasm was a medical thing — something that husband or lover could not (would not?) do. How clinical or mysterious, how medicinal or unbalanced was the orgasm? Did women say to their family, “I need to go back to the doctor, I feel hysteria coming on”? Were their women who just chose hysteria to get that release? Was horniness recognized by women and did they exploit it?

If it happened to women today, perhaps. However, I bet that this did not register with them. If you were told you were crazy, and you were given to a doctor who touched you in a hidden, sacred area which made you twitch, moan, scream, and contort your body… it might be a little scary, even frightening to have something like that be done to your body. So, ignorence just perpetuated the belief that a woman’s bodies and female pleasure were “bad” and “dirty.”

So how recently did that idea change? When did female orgasm become something that can be discussed (and even joked about, studied, researched, sought out, conquered) by Western culture? And how many women in the US – a fairly liberated country, how still stuck in that, not to mention all the non-western countries?

And this made me see feminism in another way. Where would we be without the feminist movement? Without the movement that changed the force of people’s thinking? I really wonder…