From a book review by Ariel Levy in the most recent New Yorker. Levy’s review is titled “Novelty Acts,” and sub-titled “The sexual revolution before the sexual revolution.”
As with our own sexual revolution, theirs involved technological as well as intellectual innovation. For centuries, physicians had been treating hysteria in their female patients with “pelvic massage,” but in the eighteen-eighties Dr. Joseph Mortimer Granville patented the first electromechanical vibrator, which advanced this particular medical procedure considerably. (The vibrator was made available as an over-the-counter treatment two decades later, when it was the fifth domestic appliance to be electrified, after the sewing machine, the fan, the toaster, and the teakettle; it remains the machine most important to a great many smoothly functioning households.)
Monk
The first sexual revolution
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