Saturday, April 21, 2012

So, I am about to watch the 2011 movie "Hysteria", directed by Tanya Wexler, with Maggie Gyllenhaal (I adore her).
Just waiting for my pop corn to be ready.



Well well well. I had NO CLUE it was such an ancient device, (ignorance mode: ON). I seriously thought its birth was pretty modern. It seems that I was wrong. Quite wrong. 
Apparently some... experts claim that Cleopatra herself had one (calabash filled with buzzing bees... I SWEAR I haven't gone crazy! Check this here:  http://www.health24.com/sex/Sex_toys/1253-2616-3503,32082.asp) 

Furthermore, the grandfather of all modern dildos is kept in China, at the Ancient Sexual Culture Museum in Shanghai. It is supposed to be 4000 years old.  


After I managed to get the mental image of this thing filled with buzzing things out of my head (I'm hating the fact that I cannot help imagining everything I read right now!), I continued my little research. Ok, so since most ancient times women had to deal with this sort of disease called Hysteria (the word comes from the greek for "Uterus" (Hustéra), so it seems only females were affected by it), which caused irritability, discomfort, nervousness and so on. The female genre got  lucky then, because men did their best to find a cure. What they've found, as a cure, was the genital massage (Eureka.). Theurapetic, dont' get them wrong, as they were so sure it had nothing to do with pleasure and sex, since there was no penetration involved.


Doctors used this method for centuries, and in the end their poor hands started to get tired (I'm feeling so sorry, that I am devastated), so some dude came to rescue them. This guy (almost impossible to state who he was) introduce electricity as a new player in this game, and of course it started doing its job offering some relief to doctors' exhausted hands. It seems that the first vibrating device was French, called "tremoussoir". It was 1734, and there was no electricity involved yet, but a spring. Maybe it didn't work that well, as doctors continued using their own fatigued hands. Then, in 1864, an American man used steam, and invented a machine called "Manipulator". 


The machine we see in the movie, invented in 1883 by Granville, is stated to be the first vibrator in history (using electricity). And 1899 was year of the first vibrator with batteries. 
During the 20's, though, the vibrator appeared in porn movies, so it became impossible not to associate it  with sexual practices, and could no more be described as a medical cure. The vibrator as it is known today (wireless) appeared in 1968. 


 

Now, there's no such thing as Hysteria anymore, we talk about a wide range of affections instead, for example depression, with related therapies.

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