SEX TOYS Bringing Scrutiny and Surveillance to Women’S Studies Programs in Particular
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66884_LGBT_S_057-168.qxd 10/24/2003 2:08 PM Page 96 Sex Tourism well. During 1997, a women’s studies conference at the Murphy, Lawrence R. Perverts By Official Order: The Cam- State University of New York (SUNY) at New Paltz titled paign Against Homosexuals by the United States Navy. New “Revolting Behavior: The Challenges of Women’s Sexual York: Haworth Press, 1988. Freedom” became the focus of sensational publicity Rubin, Gayle. “Thinking Sex.” In Pleasure and Danger: Explor- nationwide when conservative Republican SUNY trustee ing Female Sexuality. Edited by Carol S. Vance. Boston: Routledge & K. Paul, 1984. Candace de Russy and conservative pundit Roger Kimball complained in the local and national press about the les- Lisa Duggan bian content at the conference, especially the lesbian sadomasochism and safer-sex workshops. As Kimball See also GOVERNMENT AND MILITARY WITCHHUNTS; POLICING AND POLICE; POLITICAL SCANDALS; SEXUAL lamented in an essay in The Wall Street Journal entitled “A PSYCHOPATH LAW AND POLICY. Syllabus for Sickos”: “‘Revolting Behavior’ was in fact a celebration of perversity and sexual libertinage.” Such attacks were supported by politicians and groups eager to SEX TOURISM. see TOURISM. slash funding and restrict curricula and programming for public higher education in the state of New York . This sex panic succeeded in alarming university officials and SEX TOYS bringing scrutiny and surveillance to women’s studies programs in particular. But defenses of academic free- Sex toys—objects specifically designed for erotic stimula- dom, women’s studies, lesbian visibility, and higher edu- tion—may well be as old as human technology. (Fetish cation’s critical mission limited the scope of the damage, objects that might, to a nonparaphiliac, seem entirely and galvanized support for public education as well. innocuous; specialized sadomasochism [S/M] gear; and ordinary objects put to erotic uses are not included in this Sex panics during the past century have consistently definition of “sex toy.”) Model phalluses, the oldest sur- had this kind of paradoxical impact. On the one hand, viving sex toys, have been found at archaeological sites they have resulted not only in the persecution and harass- from China to Cairo, and there is ample literary evidence ment of individuals, organizations, and institutions, but as to what use such objects were put by the women and they have also left layers of repressive sex laws and rein- men of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. One must be careful, forced anti-LGBT prejudice. On the other hand, they have however, about interpreting all such artifacts with a generated opposition as well, publicized alternative sex- prurient eye. The herms—phallic good-luck charms— ual and gender possibilities as they are denounced, and that decorated Greek thresholds, for instance, were clearly motivated the organization of LGBT populations. devices intended to ward off the evil eye, while bakers’ ovens in Pompeii sported erections as an exercise in sym- Bibliography pathetic magic intended to get the bread to rise. Bérubé, Allan. “The History of Gay Bathhouses.” In Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism. Nonetheless, the dildo has a long and proud history. Edited by Dangerous Bedfellows et al. Boston: South End Even that giant in the history of sex, the Marquis de Sade, Press, 1996. while in prison, had his long-suffering wife Renée-Pélagie Brenkert, Benjamin. “The Newport Sex Scandal, 1919–21.” provide him with prestiges—writing cases and other The Gay and Lesbian Review 10, no. 2 (March–April 2003): oblong objects made to his very exacting specifications— 13–15. and, when these were denied him by his jailers, fashioned D’Emilio, John, and Estelle B. Freedman. Intimate Matters: A his own from candle wax. History of Sexuality in America. New York: Harper & Row, 1988. Before the Twentieth Century Freedman, Estelle. “‘Uncontrolled Desires’: The Response to The history of the modern sex toy as an object of con- the Sexual Psychopath, 1920–1960.” In Passion and Power: Sexuality in History. Edited by Kathy Peiss and Christina sumption, provocation, and legislation begins with the Simmons. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. medical profession’s concern for women’s bodies. Rachel Gerasi, John. The Boys of Boise: Furor, Vice and Folly in an Maines, in her Technology of Orgasm, details the two- American City. New York: Macmillan, 1966. thousand-year history of “hysteria,” a vague complaint Katz, Jonathan Ned. Gay American History: Lesbians and Gay first described by Hippocrates. Symptoms of hysteria Men in U.S.A.: A Documentary. New York: Crowell, 1976. could range from excessive appetite or loss of appetite to Meyer, Richard. Outlaw Representation: Censorship and Homo- fainting, emotional excitement, and behavior that sexuality in Twentieth-Century American Art. New York: annoyed one’s husband or family. Its cause, however, was Oxford University Press, 2002. known quite definitely: the wandering of the uterus in the 96 encyclopedia of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history in america 66884_LGBT_S_057-168.qxd 10/24/2003 2:08 PM Page 97 Sex Toys body, brought about by a lack of the sexual release Interestingly, because of their “therapeutic” use, the thought to be derived solely from penetrative heterosex- Comstock Act of 1873, which made the distribution of ual intercourse. Needless to say, women who rejected het- “obscenity” illegal, was never applied to the sale and pro- erosexual norms or who experienced same-sex desires duction of vibrators. Thus, they were openly advertised in often found themselves diagnosed with hysteria. women’s magazines and even sold through the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. It was not until the 1920s and 1930s, The treatment for hysteria, according to physicians when early pornographic movies made apparent to the from Galen to Avicenna, was marriage and vigorous love- men of America for what purpose their sisters, wives, making—or, if these measures failed, or if the woman’s sweethearts, and daughters were using these vibrators, condition was unalterably single—use of a dildo or a doc- that such devices disappeared from the public eye. tor’s massage of the woman’s genitalia until a “hysterical paroxysm” (that is, an orgasm) was produced. By these Sexual Revolutions means, female needs for sexual satisfaction were trans- formed into a disease requiring allopathic treatment. This Much to the disappointment of orthodox Freudians— transformation placed women, and by extension their who, following another ancient myth, fervently argued desires, in the position of the patient—an object to be that the “mature” female orgasm is centered in the acted upon by the (inevitably male) doctor-savant. (Such vagina—sexologist Alfred Kinsey, in his Sexual Behavior treatments were most likely also performed by midwives, in the Human Female (1953), reported that 88 percent of but since midwifery was an oral, not written, tradition, women masturbated by stroking their labia minora and this is difficult to document.) clitoris. About 20 percent had used “vaginal insertions” in conjunction with other masturbation techniques, but Performing such cures for hysteria proved morally “the insertions that are made are usually confined to the difficult, as well as fatiguing, for the emerging profes- introitus or intended to stimulate the anterior wall of the sional caste of physicians. This problem was solved by the vagina at the base of the clitoris” (p. 581). Furthermore, invention of devices such as the “hydriatic massage” in “Douches, streams of running water, vibrators, urethral which the hysterical paroxysms were induced by a jet of insertions, enemas, other anal insertions, and still other water, available at fashionable American spas as early as methods were occasionally employed, but none of them the 1760s, and the trémoussior, an early wind-up vibrator, in any appreciable number of cases” (p. 163). invented in France in 1734 and available to American colonists as early as the 1750s. Such “therapies” allowed Kinsey also noted that “Many males, basing their the doctor to remove himself from the object under “sci- concepts on their understanding of coitus and upon their entific” scrutiny and treatment, the female body, though conceit as to the importance of the male genitalia in they also led to frequent complaints that women were coitus, imagine that all female masturbation must involve taking matters into their own hands, going to “take the an insertion of fingers or of some other object into the waters” without first seeking a medical opinion. depths of the vagina,” but this hardly reflected the actual practices of “homosexual females,” who “have a better Though Charles Goodyear’s vulcanization process, than average understanding of female genital anatomy” patented in 1844, allowed for the mass manufacture of (pp. 162, 581). (Interestingly, however, Kinsey found that cheap rubber dildos to more efficiently produce hysteri- 18 percent of childhood sex play was by vaginal penetra- cal paroxysms, the great breakthrough in industrial tion among lesbian-identified interviewees, as opposed to orgasm technology came in 1869 with the introduction of 3 percent of heterosexual women.) a device ominously named the “Manipulator.” Invented by an American physician named George Taylor, the The information on the comparative rarity of auto- Manipulator was a steam-powered vibrator consisting of erotic insertions in the Female report matched what Kin- a flat table on which the patient lay with her pelvis posi- sey had found five years earlier in Sexual Behavior in the tioned over a vibrating ball connected by a drive train to Human Male: “Urethral insertions and other masochistic a steam engine. An electromechanical vibrator appeared techniques, and anal stimulation and anal insertions in 1883, but it was not until the introduction of a battery- occur only very occasionally. Sometimes devices which powered version in 1899 that relief from hysteria became simulate the female genitalia may be used for masturba- truly convenient.