Sexualities and technologies: How vibrators help to explain computers.

Introduction

A male colleague once asked me what my course in gender and technology had to do with English studies. Having taught the course twice, I would now explain to him that this course is indispensable for our majors, many of whom are in professional writing, because it helps them to see technologies not as neutral instruments, but as cultural artifacts shaped by the historical and sociopolitical contexts present at their inception. Investigating how contextual forces, in this case ideologies of gender and gender roles, interact with technologies is important preparation for students who will use technologies in workplaces and organizations and, therefore, should be prepared to do so critically and ethically. Through my research and teaching, I was repeatedly reminded that because technologies are also influenced by sexuality, a focus on gender is insufficient and, furthermore, in discussions about technologies, sexuality should not be conflated with gender.



Focusing on sexuality in relation to computer technologies, for example, can highlight the presence of sexed bodies and sexual objects in virtual spaces, such as multi-user, object-oriented domains (MOOs) and the World Wide Web, and emphasize the role these spaces play in reflecting and reifying hegemonic constructions of sexuality. Because students are close to computer technologies and tend to perceive them instrumentally, they may have difficulty identifying the mutual construction of sexualities and computer technologies without first understanding how paradigms of sexuality function and shape how technologies are developed, marketed, and used. As a result, I have incorporated a historical perspective into my courses, asking students to compare the relationships between sexuality and older technologies, including radios, telephones, microwave ovens, and vibrators, with contemporary examples.



Through reading pieces from the rich body of literature analyzing how dominant paradigms of gender and sexuality influenced and were reinforced by the invention, marketing, and use of technologies throughout history, students develop a sense of how to identify models of sexuality, trace their development over time, and discuss their interactions with contemporary technologies.



In this article, I first explore sex, gender, and sexuality theoretically and interrogate their relationships to one another and to technologies. I then present the case of the vibrator, a medical implement turned household appliance, and demonstrate how its unique history can be used to prepare students to recognize and critique the ways that technologies reflect and participate in constituting dominant cultural narratives of sexuality. In The Technology of Orgasm, Rachel Maines (1999) argued that physicians routinely used vibrators from the 1880s until the early 1920s to bring women to crisis (orgasm) as a treatment for hysteria and that this practice reflected a cultural perception that female orgasm was not part of sexual intercourse and negated the part of female sexuality not directly related to male penetration and male orgasm. Highlighting how the development of the vibrator both resulted from and perpetuated the designation of female sexuality as pathological proves to be a powerful step in prompting students to explore how technologies and sexuality interact. Finally, I demonstrate how this practice of cultural analysis from a safe historical distance prepares students to perceive the interactions of sexuality with contemporary technologies, including computers and information and communication technologies (ICTs), by applying the models learned from their examinations of early vibrators.



Locating sexuality in intersections of gender and technology

While scholars have developed sophisticated, nuanced, and theoretically informed analyses of the relationships between genders and technologies, these analyses often ignore sexuality or conflate it with gender. As a result, they miss the role that dominant constructions of sexuality, assumptions of heterosexuality, and heteronormativity play in shaping the construction and deployment of technologies and, in turn, the way technologies can be used to reify and/or challenge dominant narratives of sexuality. To interrogate the relationship between sexuality and technologies, it is important to recognize sexuality as independent from, yet connected to gender, constructed and historically situated, and linked to the invention, use, and proliferation of technologies.



Scholars agree that recognizing sexuality and biological sex as grounded in material interactions, yet simultaneously contextually defined and historically constructed, is key to understanding how sexuality is distinct from, yet related to, gender. Such discussions trace their origins to the work of Michel Foucault (1978) and its subsequent development to include a performative model of sexuality by Judith Butler (1993). Based on the work of these theorists, the abstractions identified as sexuality that are constructed and deployed at particular historical moments and among certain groups of people go beyond a simple acting out of desire performed by sexed bodies; normative and alternate understandings of sexuality, physical and discursive, also label, give rise to, and direct the acts and desires of groups and individuals.



The mutual construction of sexuality, gender, and certain technologies, particularly computer technologies, should be examined in educational settings, which are centers of the deployment of sexuality as well as progenitors of models for human and computer interactions. Binary and often asymmetrical gender distinctions, reductive understandings of sexuality, and heteronormativity are propagated in educational environments—through the ideologies that support particular constructions of sexuality and gender and through the technologies used therein. Debbie Epstein and Richard Johnson (1998) highlighted the central role of educational institutions in formulating the range of possible sexual identities and demonstrating the ramifications of particular positions.



Although Epstein and Johnson’s (1998) study centered on sexuality in primary and secondary education, the working out of sexual identities through the negotiation of various sanctioned and unsanctioned positions is part of higher education as well. On university campuses, homosexuality may be acknowledged as a legitimate sexual identity and tolerance may be encouraged and taught, yet on many campuses, including my own, heterosexuality tends to exist as an unacknowledged norm and openly gay or lesbian students and faculty are critiqued for revealing their identities in the classroom. For example, at the institution where I work, a student who recently posted a request for information about a math professor on the professor review section of the student online discussion forums received a reply indicating that the professor in question was reputed to be a good teacher but “a little gay” and so might not be a good choice for some students. Perceived homosexuality is seen as exceptional and worthy of comment in assessments of faculty members and courses, while heterosexuality, which is viewed as normal or constant, is rarely noted as a determiner of a teacher’s value or ability to connect with students.



Because heterosexuality is often transparent and assumed even in university settings, Linda Stepulevage (2001) argued that it is important to examine how sexuality and, in particular, heteronormativity function to perpetuate asymmetrical gender relations, such as the male dominance of computer-related and technological fields. Stepulevage (2001) remarked, “Unless we begin to articulate the heterosexual relations that are taken for granted in gender relations, we lose an opportunity to challenge the conflation of gender and heterosexuality that complicates social relations in male-dominated domains like computing”.



Challenging this conflation is particularly important in computer classrooms where students’ assumptions about their own and others’ sexual identities may affect how and even whether they interact productively with technologies. Because demanding equal control over or access to computer technologies might be seen as a feminist act and because feminism is conflated by some with lesbianism, female students may not assert themselves or their proficiency with these technologies, endeavoring to “perform a version of female” that is unremarkably heterosexual.



The presence of computer technologies both promotes and highlights the effects of sexuality and heteronormativity, effects which must be acknowledged, unpacked, and discussed. Failing to focus on sexuality and interrogating the roles it plays in gender–technology intersections results in missing a layer of possible meaning that may lend insights into how technologies can be used to maintain particular social norms related to gender, such as cultural assumptions of males’ greater computer prowess or females’ fears of using technologies. Such norms must be challenged to foster greater equality within educational spaces, including computer classrooms.



Sexuality and technologies: The case of the vibrator

In the undergraduate and graduate writing courses focused on gender and technology that I teach, I have observed a change in students’ willingness and ability to discuss sexuality in general and relate it to the development of technologies, particularly computer technologies, after our discussion of the technological advance of late nineteenth and early twentieth century vibrators. Building on my anecdotal observations of students’ reactions and on subsequent research, I explore below how and why examining early vibrators and their connections to sexuality proves to be instructive for recognizing and analyzing intersections of computers and sexualities.



A brief overview of the courses I teach in gender and technology provides a useful context for this discussion. Both courses, the undergraduate course, which I taught first, and the graduate course had the same goals, which were to help students

(a) to understand the reciprocal relationships between genders, sexualities, technologies, and other cultural artifacts and learn a variety of approaches for viewing and studying these relationships;
(b) to apply various modes of critical analysis and theoretical models to cultural artifacts such as texts, films, and web sites that contain narratives of gender, sexualities, and technologies and discuss the ramifications of their respective representations;
(c) to write coherently about interactions of genders, sexualities, and technologies;
(d) to create media projects, including web sites, MOO exhibits, and videos, based upon reflections about and analysis of experiences with or representations of genders, sexualities, and technologies; and
(e) to develop strategies for considering seriously and speaking and writing academically about unfamiliar ideas and perspectives regarding gender, sexualities, and technologies. Both courses were divided into four sections:
(1) theoretical lenses for examining gender, sexualities, and technologies;
(2) intersections of gender, sexualities, and computer and Internet technologies;
(3) intersections of gender, sexualities, and home, leisure, and workplace technologies, including microwave ovens, radios, race cars, and computer games; and
(4) intersections of gender, sexualities, bodies, and reproductive technologies.



Course readings included a wide variety of articles from peer-reviewed journals and academic collections. Students were encouraged to reflect critically about their experiences with gender, sexuality, and technologies, to explore connections to race and socioeconomic status, and to focus on the gender and sexuality of males as well as females.



Students in both courses read the preface and first chapter of Maines’ (1999) text, The Technology of Orgasm, in the section of the course on home, leisure, and workplace technologies. As Maines explained in her historical study, the electromechanical vibrator was invented as a medical technology in the 1880s and was used in ways that perpetuated dominant yet mythical conceptions of sexuality. The connections Maines made between the invention of the vibrator and androcentric concepts of (hetero)sexuality prove to be insightful and, I would argue, instructive for understanding how technologies support particular constructions of sexuality and gender and are shaped by those constructions.



According to Maines, the vibrator’s history is especially revelatory because of its use in treating women for hysteria, a disease that has been identified as a key component of dominant constructions of Western, androcentric sexuality. Vibrators are part of a history that “connect[s] gender, clinical practices and hysteria to show how women and the feminine were portrayed and labeled as deviant”. Likewise, Foucault (1978) identified the hysterization of women’s bodies as one of the “four great strategic unities… which formed specific mechanisms of knowledge and power centering on sex” and connected the hysterization of women to the construction of sexuality by noting that the disease precipitated “a thorough medicalization of [women’s] bodies and their sex”. According to Bankey (2001), the image of the hysterical woman that medical doctors constructed in the nineteenth century codified reliable symptoms for all doctors to identify and women to imitate, including “duplicity, theatricality, suggestibility, instability, weakness, passivity, and excessive emotionality”. Women could be labeled as hysterical based on a myriad of symptoms and complaints, physical and emotional, literal and figurative, and for exhibiting overt sexuality or other socially inappropriate behavior. Bankey (2001) observed, “These signs and movements were often associated and conflated with representations of the feminine; thus, excessive femininity is simultaneously understood as deviant behaviour”.



Understanding how hysteria was medically defined and treated proves to be essential to grasping why vibrators were developed and how they perpetuated androcentric conceptions of sexuality. The medical literature from the fifth century B.C.E. through the nineteenth century provides evidence that physicians through the ages agreed that hysteria in women was caused by a “lack of sufficient sexual intercourse, deficiency of sexual gratification, or both” and should be treated, in part, through vaginal massage and, in some cases, stimulation to orgasm, called crisis or the hysterical paroxysm in the nineteenth century. Despite doctors’ associations of hysteria with sexual frustration, its treatment through genital stimulation using manual massage, hydriatic massage therapy, and, subsequently, the vibrator was not considered sexual because the stimulation of the female body outside of the androcentric sexual paradigm of foreplay, penetration, and male orgasm was not viewed as a sexual act. As a result, married women whose symptoms were not relieved through intercourse with their husbands, as well as the single and celibate, could receive socially acceptable treatment for hysteria by medical professionals. As Maines argued,

The androcentric focus, in fact, in many cases effectively camouflaged the sexual character of medical massage treatments. Since no penetration was involved, believers in the hypothesis that only penetration was sexually gratifying to women could argue that nothing sexual could be occurring when their patients experienced the hysterical paroxysm during treatment.



Based on the large numbers of women affected by hysteria and the similarity of proscribed treatments to the stimulation of women to orgasm, Maines argued that what was labeled as hysteria was in many cases not a disease but normal, unfulfilled female sexual desire “under social conditions that interpreted it as pathological”. Treating this lack of fulfillment as a medical problem left intact the androcentric construction of sexuality—labeling many women as sick, weak, and abnormal, and suppressing any threat to the dominance of penetration or the predominance of the male experience in heterosexual intercourse.



The technology of the vibrator facilitated and perpetuated the construction and treatment of female sexuality as pathology in several ways. First, the vibrator aided in the camouflage of the manipulation of female genitalia as a medical procedure through the introduction of innovative technology. Some physicians set up vibratory theaters, akin to operating rooms, filled with elaborate vibratory devices. As Maines noted, some vibrators cost up to $200 and were large and unwieldy, reinforcing their specialized, clinical nature.



When vibrators became smaller, increasingly portable, and readily available for the home or beauty parlor, physicians vocally questioned the effectiveness of those devices for treating hysteria and other ailments and encouraged their colleagues to purchase only expensive, medical models. Second, the vibrator made it possible for physicians to have less direct contact with their patients’ genitals, which also helped the procedure to be viewed as clinical instead of sexual manipulation. Finally, because the vibrator helped them to increase their earnings, physicians had an incentive to continue to support the dominant disease and treatment paradigms for hysteria.



Manual massage of one woman to the hysterical paroxysm could take a physician up to an hour; however, by using a vibrator, the time was reduced to ten minutes, allowing physicians to treat five or six women per hour. Maines noted that in the late nineteenth century one physician in the United States claimed that treating “frail women,” many of whom were certainly diagnosed with hysteria, accounted for three-quarters of the sum of all physicians’ incomes, or one hundred and fifty million dollars. With so much money at stake and the vibrator providing the technological means to earn it more quickly, physicians were motivated to resist any revision of the disease paradigm of hysteria or question the use of vibration in its treatment.

Fig. 1. Photograph of an early twentieth-century, Whitecross portable vibrator with vibratodes.

The medical use of the vibrator decreased in the early twentieth century, when vibrators began to be marketed directly to consumers as home health devices through advertisements in women’s sewing magazines, such as Needlecraft and Home Needlework Magazine, and in catalogues, such as Sears and Roebuck’s. However, after vibrators began appearing in pornographic films in the 1920s as devices of female sexual pleasure, they could no longer be camouflaged as medical technologies and disappeared from women’s magazines, catalogues, and doctors’ offices.



As overtly sexual devices, vibrators may have become taboo not only because sex toys were inappropriate for public discourse, but perhaps because such devices invoke the possible inadequacy of penetration and, therefore, posed—and continue to pose—a threat to male egos and masculine sexual supremacy by offering women options for sexual satisfaction. Even though vibrators as sexual devices are no longer taboo, conversations about them often arouse discomfort and, although they are the subject of articles in magazines for women and men, advertisements for them are conspicuously absent from contemporary periodicals. In the absence of references to vibrators in most mainstream media, their history and participation in the construction of sexuality have largely vanished from our collective consciousness.