Hello I am a non academic, just a curious person. I was just doing some research and stumbled on this piece of writing:
The article (paper?) is a response to work by Rachel Maines which was eventually published in the 1999 book The Technology of Orgasm. Maines' work claims that in the 19th century, mechanical vibrators were used in the medical treatment of "hysteria" in women. As a person interested in sex, gender, politics, health etc, I have seen/heard this piece of information innumerable times so I can vouch for it being widespread. (Also see in the paper bottom of page 34 - 35, 36-37, 40-41.) I have not read this book myself.
From the conclusion:
In a nutshell, this is Maines’ argument: “Massage to orgasm of female patients was a staple of medical practice among some (but certainly not all) Western physicians from the time of Hippocrates until the 1920s, and mechanizing this task significantly increased the number of patients a doctor could treat in a working day” (Maines, 1999, p. 3). This entire claim is false. There is a bit of circumstantial evidence that a few physicians and midwives may have practiced genital massage before the 20th century, but the evidence does not support the claim that genital massage was ever a “staple of medical practice.” When it comes to the second, core part of the argument, that physicians used vibrators to mechanize the process of genital massage to orgasm, there is not one shred of evidence that this practice ever occurred.
... Perhaps her story of persecution in pursuit of truth gave her some immunity from criticism, especially since skeptics might have feared being lumped with puritanical no-nothings.
Rather than conservatism, the 19-year success of Technology of Orgasm points to a fundamental failure of academic quality control. This failure occurred at every stage, starting with the assessment of the work at the Johns Hopkins University Press. But most glaring is the fact that not a single scholarly publication has pointed out the empirical flaws in the book’s core claims in the 19 years since its release.
Looking around the internet, I found a comments thread where some of the contributors argue (among other things) that while the book was published by an academic press, it was not in a peer reviewed journal, so expectations regarding factual basis of arguments should not be so high. So whatever errors made by the author are basically no big deal.
Now this article published in 2018 is criticizing work that looks to have begun in the early 80s.
Do Lieberman & Schatzberg have available to them methods, information, networks, theories or other resources which would not have been available to Maines? (Like is it unfair to hold her work to modern standards?)
Is it pointless to critique such an old work?
Assuming Lieberman & Schatzberg's criticisms are substantial, does this (or should this) demonstrate the level of veracity from an academic press?
I am very curios to know if Maines has seen this article and if so what she thinks of it. Is there a way to know?
Also, I am interested in general thoughts about the hows and whys something like this got published and circulated in an academic-y environment and anything else that would not be apparent to an outsider. Are the discrepancies in interpretation of primary source materials attributable to legit difference of opinion, laziness, confirmation bias, intentional deceit, outside pressures, or ???
I hope this is an acceptable place to post this.
If anyone thinks they can make a briefer, clearer post about this, please be my guest. let me know so I can follow it.
(1 of 2: sorry, I know I tend to be longwinded on here, in brief: yes, this points to an important problem in academia, and even Maines has distanced herself from the claims she makes in that book) I wrote a few things about this very issue in a previous response when I addressed the representation and treatment of hysteria in 19th century Great Britain here. The third part of my reply is most relevant, especially my sidenote at the end about Maines' claim. Your questions are extremely interesting to me. For me, the case of Maines' book is a fascinating intersection of today’s research methods, the politics of contemporary scholarship, and the academic publishing world. I should say straight off that my opinion on this is pretty strong. I have been living in the culture of the humanities for well over ten years, and to me the history of this book shows a lot of what is wrong with that today. I anticipate this might create some difference of opinion, which I welcome, and I thought it would be important to share that up front.
Rachel Maines' book The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction came out in 1999, published by the University Press of Johns Hopkins University. Among other things, it argues that devices nominally marketed as massage implements for health purposes were advertised in a way that makes it clear they could help women masturbate and orgasm. Another key premise of Maines' book is that sexual stimulation in general (especially of the clitoris) and the vibrator specifically were used on women to alleviate the imagined disease of hysteria. This idea has since spread widely, including to an episode of Law and Order SVU in 1999 ("Hysteria," season 1 episode 4), a documentary film in 2007 (Passion and Power: The Technology of Orgasm), a theatrical play in 2009 (In The Next Room (or The Vibrator Play)), and a film starring Maggie Gyllenhaal in 2012 (Hysteria). It will become relevant later that none of these (including the interviews with Maines herself in the documentary) present Maines' ideas as unproven hypotheses or as possible interpretations, but as accepted historical understanding.
Perhaps Maines’ thesis is appealing because it creates an image of ignorant Victorian medical men kept in the dark by their own prudery and taboos, not realizing that what Maines would have them call paroxysms are actually orgasms. The book combines this with female sexual agency, creating the story that something designed by men to “alleviate hysteria” came to empower women sexually. It creates, perhaps, the image of a Victorian doctor going from hospital room to hospital room massaging his aching hand, leaving women either sexually satisfied without his even realizing it or traumatized by sexual assault (depending on who retells the story), and thinking to himself, “There must be a better way.” This is clearly the narrative reproduced, for example, by this blog on Psychology Today, which lists Maines as its sole source. The problem with this story, as you point out, is that it’s simply not what Victorian sources actually contain.
Lieberman and Schatzberg are not the first to cast a shadow Maines' claims. That is Sarah Rodriguez, who in 2007, as part of an article titled “Rethinking the History of Female Circumcision and Clitoridectomy: American Medicine and Female Sexuality in the Late Nineteenth Century”, demonstrates that doctors in the United States fully understood the connection between the clitoris and sexual pleasure in the 19th century. Rodriguez briefly mentions Maines, writing that
In contrast to Rachel Maines’ contention that “the role of the clitoris in arousal to orgasm was systematically misunderstood by many physicians, since its function contradicted the androcentric principal that only an erect penis could provide sexual satisfaction to a healthy, normal adult female,” a rethinking of the history of clitoral surgeries reveals that physicians understood the clitoris to be the key to female sexual instinct. (328)
and does not pursue this to the conclusion that this obviously destroys Maines’ entire argument. In one of those “you can’t make this stuff up” moments, Rodriguez’s 2014 book on the same topic has a quote on the back from Maines praising the book and its importance to research on female sexuality, despite the fact that her footnote on page 198 makes the same point the article did. And yes, Maines is cited as the author of The Technology of Orgasm.
A more explicit critique comes next from Helen King, who in her 2011 article specifically addresses the second chapter of Maines’ book, which argues that such "treatments" for women could be found in Greco-Roman (and to a lesser extent medieval and early modern) sources. King finds many holes in Maines' arguments, some of which include using translations that silence the roles and experiences of women, as well as assuming that modern ideas and expressions of sexuality can be mapped onto the discourses of the past.
Maines’ claims for ancient women’s sexual practices are without foundation, and often based on taking all the sources – medical texts, satire, case histories, philosophical discussions – at the same level. .... She has selected texts that can be made to fit her hypothesis, glossing over the finer points. Her one-sided account has made it more difficult to understand the complex lines of transmission within the ancient sources, and in their later reception... In addition to the misleading readings of her chosen texts, her work is also flawed by its assumptions of continuity in women’s sexual expectations and practices. It is, however, precisely these assumptions that have proved so appealing to modern readers. (232)
King's article focuses specifically on the ancient material, as she is a classicist.
King's article, as you mention, was followed by the more sweeping critique written by Lieberman and Schatzberg. They make absolutely no bones about repudiating Maines: they suggest that Maines was negligent at best and purposefully misleading at worst. It seems to me at least that she started from a conclusion and read it onto the documents she found, relying on claims that, since medical texts could not refer to female genitalia and orgasm directly, we have to read these texts euphemistically. In quotation after quotation that Maines uses, she assumes orgasms being induced when this is simply nowhere to be found in the original work, taking for granted that therapeutic massage would have been sexual in nature and therefore reading accounts of genital massage and its technology as accounts of genital stimulation.