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Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve

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Camray. It's ready. Are you welcome

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to stop mom never told you? From

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house top works dot com.

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Hello and welcome to the podcast. This is Molly

0:18

and I'm Kristin Kristen. Let's dive right

0:21

in to some statistics our

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favorite thing, all right, and it will

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I think we'll ease us into the topic of the day.

0:27

Okay, So I want to talk about something

0:30

that was published in two thousand nine which

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revealed that about

0:35

half of American adults use

0:37

a vibrator on a regular basis, on

0:39

a regular basis, and that is

0:42

men, that's women, that's

0:45

gay, that's straight, always people

0:47

using vibrators. And what was

0:49

interesting about this study in particular

0:52

not just the number of people that use vibrators,

0:54

but what was really interesting was that the

0:57

women who used them had better

0:59

sexual health because they're more likely to have

1:01

a gynecological exam during the past year,

1:04

They're more likely to do self

1:06

examinations to make sure that the body was still

1:08

everything was looking the way it was supposed to be, and

1:10

men were more likely to do testicular

1:13

self exams too. So basically, the study

1:15

was showing that these people who use

1:18

vibrators tend to take better care

1:20

of all their their special parts,

1:22

and the women and men also who were

1:25

using the vibrators also tended to rate

1:27

a little bit higher on sexual

1:29

satisfaction. So, with

1:32

no further ado, maybe we should back up

1:35

hundred plus years figure

1:37

out where where all the buzz came

1:40

from with vibrators, because

1:42

these days we might associate

1:45

vibrators with sex toys

1:47

and CD sex shops and

1:50

things like that, but their

1:53

history is purely rooted in medicine.

1:56

Medicine, very um and very

1:58

you know, no eyebrows ray East. When the vibrator

2:01

started uh to appear in doctor's

2:03

offices, it was it was non controversial

2:06

all whereas you know, you you read about a

2:08

study like this two thousand nine one, people like, oh

2:10

my gosh, all like people using vibrators. But

2:13

I think the link is that the better

2:15

sexual health and the better health overall

2:18

kind of links the modern statistics to

2:20

this history. We're going to go back to you, right, because

2:23

one thing I found really fascinating

2:25

about the history of vibrators is that it

2:28

was actually considered far

2:30

less controversial than the gynecological

2:32

speculum. Right, because

2:35

the speculum was inserted during an exam,

2:37

whereas vibrators were purely

2:39

external use. But let's talk about why

2:42

you might be using a vibrator in the Victorian

2:44

era. In the first place, one word hysteria.

2:48

Steria gripped a nation,

2:50

many nations. The women

2:52

just kept coming down with hysteria from

2:55

from early early times. Like you've got people

2:57

like Hippocrates Galen writing about

2:59

these uh fits that women

3:01

would have where they just couldn't breathe,

3:04

where they just were acting right. Everything

3:06

was, oh, it's just crazy, like the stereotypical

3:08

female craziness. These these early

3:11

doctors could not figure out and they always

3:13

blamed it on the womb and the uterus.

3:16

Yeah, in nineteen hundred BC, ancient

3:18

Egyptians blamed

3:20

hysteria, which we will later find

3:22

out is really just sexual frustration on

3:25

the uterus wandering from the

3:27

womb into the throat and making it

3:29

hard for a woman to breathe. And a

3:31

little a little linguistic

3:34

fun fact, hysteria comes

3:36

from the word uterus, And

3:38

we talked a little bit about that in the Celibacy

3:40

podcast, about how doctors of

3:43

olden days would would prescribe sex

3:45

as this way to curb the wandering

3:47

womb. Well sex for married people are

3:50

true, and that's that's where we're going to get into

3:52

why some some ladies needed more help

3:55

than others. Because in the sixteenth century,

3:57

if you weren't married, if you were say

3:59

single or widowed or a

4:01

nun, the cure for

4:04

your hysteria would have been vigorous

4:06

horseback exercise or movement

4:08

of the pelvis in a swing, rocking

4:11

chair or carriage. Or they told

4:13

once train started coming, when they had the Industrial

4:16

Revolution, they would tell theman just to hop a train and

4:18

to let the rocking and the train take care of it. But

4:21

let's say that there were no horses around, you

4:23

weren't married, or you were married,

4:25

and your husband just couldn't seem to solve this swim

4:27

problem on his own. He would go to

4:30

the doctor. And what the doctor would do is

4:32

he would massage the

4:34

volvular area until

4:36

he brought you to what was deemed a hysterical

4:39

proxys m a k A. An

4:41

orgasm, and this would cure the

4:44

classic symptoms supposedly of

4:46

hysteria, which would include anxiety,

4:49

sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness,

4:52

erotic fantasy, sensations

4:54

of heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic

4:57

edema, and vaginal lubrication

5:00

K sexual arousal. Yeah, I

5:02

mean really, it's just curing your your

5:04

libido. And so the thinking is is that maybe,

5:07

you know, people just weren't that knowledgeable

5:09

about what might lead a woman to orgasm.

5:11

Really wasn't a topic for polite conversation,

5:14

and so going to the doctor to have

5:16

this regular massage was not seen

5:18

as as anything deviant or

5:21

or wrong. It was purely curing medical

5:23

symptoms. The doctors didn't

5:26

seem to get any pleasure out of it. It was just, you

5:28

know, another another day at the office.

5:31

And because you know, it was advocated

5:33

by so many medical professionals, I was

5:35

like, all right, this is something I'll

5:37

have to do regularly. Every two weeks or so. We'll

5:39

head into the doctor's office get my massage, be

5:42

cured from hysteria for a few weeks.

5:44

And doctors would use volvular massage

5:47

for non orgasmic purposes

5:49

as well, including to treat constipation,

5:52

arthritis, muscle fatigue, laryngitis,

5:55

and tumors. So bringing

5:57

women to hysterical paroxysm

6:00

and men too sometimes had

6:03

a wide range of applications.

6:05

But one thing about these

6:07

massages sometimes

6:09

they were just kind of tiresome for

6:11

the doctors. Sometimes their hands

6:14

just got really worn out. And I'm not trying to

6:16

be crassed. There there

6:18

medical records of doctors really

6:22

to like try and cure this hysteria.

6:25

And also if you were a doctor in business, it

6:27

was not very easy

6:29

to see a bunch of patients if you never knew

6:31

how long a hysterical patient was going to

6:33

take uh to reach her prooxism.

6:36

And so it was, you know, it wasn't

6:38

a very good business model to have these

6:41

indeterminate appointments

6:43

going on. And also for

6:45

for a while, water treatments became

6:48

popular, and while

6:50

they did work maybe a little bit more, a little

6:53

easier than than the manual treatment, they

6:55

weren't exactly clean and

6:57

not exactly portable. So in

7:00

the eighteen eighties, doctor

7:02

Joseph Mortimer Grandville

7:05

comes along in patents the first

7:07

electro mechanical vibrator,

7:10

and my goodness, were doctors

7:12

everywhere relieved. Oh my goodness.

7:14

It just took off, and there were all sorts of models

7:16

that doctors could buy. You can buy like hand

7:18

cranked models. You could buy models

7:21

that you operated with the foot pedal. There

7:23

were some that were like forks and they

7:25

vibrated that way, and then some hung from the

7:27

ceiling. I don't know how that works. And

7:29

there were I mean, it just

7:32

just every single model of a vibrator

7:34

that you could imagine, even some ceiling

7:37

models attached the tables. Why

7:39

a coil is called vibrate

7:41

tiles, turbines,

7:44

gas engines, and it was just it

7:46

was a revelation for doctors

7:48

that they could just, you know, turn this thing on

7:51

and and it was worked much faster than

7:53

using your fingers. It was a little cleaner,

7:55

and again, as he said, it wasn't like a speculum

7:58

that you had to insert. They were just doing us on

8:00

the external genitalia. So

8:02

it was on the up and up according

8:04

to society. And get this,

8:07

the vibrator was only

8:09

the fifth household device

8:11

to be electrified, after the sewing

8:14

machine, fan, tea kettle, and

8:16

toaster. So before we have the electric

8:18

vacuum cleaner and iron, we

8:21

had the we had the vibrator.

8:23

And by nineteen seventeen there were

8:25

more vibrators in the

8:27

home than electric toasters. I

8:29

know, that's insane, crazy

8:31

and um and so there were you would find them

8:34

in all these catalogs. In fact, a lot of the

8:36

knowledge we have about the vibrator today

8:38

is thanks to researcher named Rachel Mains

8:41

who was actually doing a history

8:43

of needlecraft in America. So she

8:45

took a spicy churn, very

8:47

unexpected term because she was paging through this old

8:50

needlecraft catalog and started finding

8:52

these advertiser advertisements

8:54

for home vibrators. And this

8:56

wasn't from nineteen o six. Imagine

8:59

looking through all these old needlecraft catalogs

9:01

and and finding these as that you would normally expect

9:03

to find in Saucia magazine. So that's

9:06

when she ditches the needlecraft

9:08

and uh starts investigating why

9:11

vibrators are being sold at that time, and comes

9:13

across this hysteria thing and the

9:16

fact that the women weren't being we're really

9:18

being treated quite right, but their

9:20

partners. And she ends up writing

9:23

a book called The Technology of the Orgasm,

9:25

which is really, I guess, kind of the

9:28

go to book for the history

9:31

of the vibrator. And just for fun, uh,

9:33

here's here's an advertising tagline

9:35

from one of those very respectable magazine

9:38

nights for vibrators, It says, all the

9:40

pleasure of youth will throb inside

9:43

of you. That sound too bad,

9:45

And vibrators were in fact

9:47

so popular that they were a driving

9:50

force behind the creation of the

9:52

small electric motor. So

9:54

really, I mean, this is a huge technological innovation

9:57

that we have to thank, you know, the vibrator

9:59

for without Without vibrators,

10:02

in this crazy about women's hysteria,

10:05

you know, would we would we have a

10:07

vacuum cleaner. Vacuum cleaner and

10:09

you know, I mean maybe the women would have never been able to get

10:11

up to vacuum if they kept having all these hysterical

10:14

symptoms that they never figured out how to cure. If

10:16

we still had to go get volbular massages

10:18

every two weeks, my god signed

10:20

to podcast, how would we have a break through the glass

10:23

ceiling? And men, don't think

10:25

that you were absent from this revolution

10:27

as well, because nine nine, just a

10:29

few decades after the women's vibrator

10:31

movement really gets going. John Muir

10:34

a ka that legendary naturalists

10:37

invent patterns of vibrator for men as well.

10:39

Some men are also using vibrators at this time.

10:41

Their ailments can be cured by a vibrating

10:43

massager. Probably probably not using them

10:46

as much as women, but you

10:48

never know, you never know. So we've

10:50

got vibraries being sold directly to men and women

10:52

be a catalog. We've got doctors administering

10:55

massages in their doctor's offices. Now,

10:58

unfortunately, along comes Freud.

11:00

I don't know, maybe not unfortunately, I guess, I don't

11:03

know. You can draw your own conclusions because

11:05

old Freud comes along and he's like, this

11:07

is not gonna work. We need to stop

11:09

treating women's hysteria with these

11:12

massages with orgasms.

11:14

They need to talk it out. That is the only thing

11:16

that's going to work. You're not really solving

11:18

their problems, but just you know, putting a band

11:20

aid on them. Stop doing this,

11:23

talk to them, so you

11:25

know, you can you know Freud, you can

11:27

make a ton of jokes about Freud and women

11:29

and sex. But he was the one who brings

11:31

an end to this. See ends all the fun. But

11:34

right around that same time, vibrators

11:36

start showing up in stag

11:39

films. That is true in the nine twenties.

11:41

Uh As as Slate

11:43

puts it, stagg reels blew the vibrator's

11:45

cover because a lot of people I guess

11:48

based on Main's research, just sort of pretended

11:50

that what was happening was not an orgasm,

11:53

it was just you know, a

11:55

brief history hysterical paroxysm.

11:57

And I think it has a lot to do with that.

12:00

We've mentioned many times now that

12:03

nothing was going inside of a woman.

12:05

It was all outside, you know, no sexually

12:07

different than a back massage, because

12:09

remember this time, you know, Victorian

12:13

couples did not have Cosmo magazine

12:15

to help learn how to

12:17

please a partner, so intercourse

12:20

might have been very bland. Let's

12:22

just say. And um,

12:24

you know, at this point, when you've got these stag films

12:27

coming out, they're showing, you know, they're

12:29

making that explicit connection between what the vibrator

12:31

does and what happens in the bedroom.

12:33

So that's that's sort of when I think the first

12:36

explicit that we could find link between

12:38

sex and the vibrator comes into play. Yeah,

12:40

and once it becomes tainted by

12:42

those stag films, the most famous of which is

12:45

called The Nun's Story, not

12:47

the one with Audrey starring Audrey

12:49

Hudberd. But once the once vibrators

12:52

get the sixy edge to it, they

12:55

have to go under the rug

12:58

and it becomes something that allers

13:00

call camouflage technology.

13:02

Vibrators don't go away, they just

13:04

become home massagers. A

13:07

backscratcher. Yeah. So

13:09

um, that's how they were sold in catalogsies with

13:11

very you know, uh,

13:14

euphemistic titles. You can't

13:16

really say what it's for. And in some states, like there's

13:19

this case in Alabama where you can't say it's

13:21

a sex toy. You have to show

13:23

that it's used for medical purposes.

13:26

And going back sort of to that old Victorian

13:28

era. So um. But one

13:30

interesting fact that I came across, because

13:32

I don't remember this was in the eighties

13:35

when Reagan was president, his surge in General

13:38

see Everett mailed out this list of safe

13:40

sex options to every household. Um,

13:43

and vibrators were on the list. Yeah. And they

13:45

did this in response to the AIDS

13:47

epidemic at the time, So they were trying to

13:50

educate people on on safe sex and

13:52

lo and behold, vibrators

13:54

kind of come back into a little more public

13:57

acceptance, come a little more out in the open. You

13:59

can stop using things like backscratcher

14:01

to get them into catalog We all know why

14:04

you're getting the Hatachi magic wad, the

14:06

jig is up. So

14:09

that was the history of vibrators. The buzz

14:11

on this this fascinating device

14:13

that may have you know, led to the vacuum cleaner.

14:16

So if you have anything

14:19

that you would like to add, bearing

14:21

in mind that we do have a spam filter, do you

14:23

have a span filters? Don't title the email vibrator

14:26

the g rated jokes.

14:28

Our email is mom Stuff at how

14:31

stuff works dot com.

14:36

And I have an email that was sent

14:38

to that very address. It was from Kristen,

14:40

but not you, Kristen. This is Christen

14:43

with a cake and she writes,

14:45

I'm a librarian and I love my career very much.

14:47

I graduated from college with a teaching degree and wasn't

14:49

particularly happy in that profession. I realized

14:52

that I didn't go into teaching because I love teaching,

14:54

but because I loved learning. Big

14:56

difference, and I'm back to graduate school from my MLS

14:58

and I've been extremely happy and it's per qassion ever since.

15:01

When you tell people you're a librarian, they always

15:03

assume that you work in a public library. I

15:05

think it's important for people understand that there are many opportunities

15:08

outside of public libraries. Librarians

15:10

are employed by hospitals, law firms, universities,

15:12

museums, art galleries, manuscript galleries,

15:15

private corporations, government agencies,

15:17

and publishing companies. I've seen job

15:19

postings over the years for companies like WebMD,

15:22

ESPN, and Pixar, just to name

15:24

a few. If someone enjoys learning on a daily

15:26

basis and seeks variety and their occupation, librarianship

15:29

is an excellent career choice. Maybe I should

15:31

become a librarian. I really want to become

15:33

a library and I think, all right, Well, I've got another

15:36

library related email here from Lydia.

15:39

Lidia writes, I am a professional librarian

15:41

and have been from his fifteen years, and

15:43

I guess I'm considered one of those cool or

15:46

hip librarians. I have some fellow

15:48

cool librarian friends, and we're happy to use

15:50

our personal biases and interests

15:52

to enhance our libraries collections and

15:54

interesting and maybe subversive ways.

15:57

But in general,

15:59

I've think most librarians are really square.

16:02

Just try going to a library conference

16:05

or large meeting. Hipsters will certainly

16:07

find a niche. But as a whole, groupings of

16:09

librarians are heavily weighted with the

16:11

elderly female grandma front

16:13

be, can't dance, doesn't get out too

16:15

much type. Don't get me wrong, some

16:18

of them might be fascinating people too, But

16:20

believe me, it's not like working

16:22

for MTV. But I wonder,

16:24

Molly if V has

16:27

a library. Oh, I bet that a

16:29

little bit. I thought you're gonna ask whether MTV just

16:31

has old people working there. Hurt loader

16:34

zing And on that note, uh,

16:36

you guys, doon write us at mom Stuff at how stuff

16:38

works dot com. You can also follow us

16:40

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16:43

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16:47

but I should have said second to last,

16:50

because really, finally, you can read our

16:52

blog stuff I've Never told you

16:54

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