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Were vibrators invented by 19th-century doctors to cure women of “hysteria”? It’s story so good we all want it to be true — but it probably isn’t. From Mara Hvistendahl writing in Scientific American:

For a sex toy, the vibrator’s roots seem amazingly antiseptic and clinical. Prescribed as a cure for the curious disease hysteria, the device for decades found clinical application as a supposed medical therapy.

Derived from the Greek word for “uterus,” hysteria occurred in women with pent-up sexual energy—or so healers and early physicians believed. Nuns, widows and spinsters were particularly susceptible, but by the Victorian era many married women had fallen prey as well. In the late 19th century a pair of prominent physicians estimated that three quarters of American women were at risk.

The prescription of clitoral orgasm as a treatment for hysteria dates to medical texts from the first century A.D. Hysterical women typically turned to doctors, who cured them with their hands by inducing a “paroxysm”—a term that hides what we now know as a sexual climax. But manual stimulation was time-consuming and (for the doctors at least) tedious. In The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, science historian Rachel P. Maines reports that physicians often passed the job off to midwives.

Thanks to the vibrator, doctors and midwives could give their hands a rest and patients could get the treatment they needed… in the comfort of their own homes.

Patients were happy, too. The number of health spas offering vibration therapy multiplied, and the service was so popular vibrator manufacturers warned doctors not to overdo it with the modern appliance: if they met relentless patient demand, even mechanical vibration could be tiring. By the turn of the century needlework catalogues advertised models for women who wanted to try the treatment at home, making the vibrator the fifth electric appliance to arrive in the home—after the sewing machine, the fan, the teakettle and the toaster.

Ok, it’s a great story, but Fern Riddell is here to ruin our fun.

So did the real Dr Granville invent an electronic device for massage? Yes. Was it anything to do with the female orgasm? No. He actually invented it to help stimulate male pain relief, just as massage is used today.

Victorian doctors knew exactly what the female orgasm was; in fact, it’s one of the reasons they thought masturbation was a bad idea. A few theorised that it might be beneficial to a woman for her period pain, but the majority of doctors saw the art of self-pleasure as highly dangerous to your health.

This attitude was not because they were on some sort of anti-pleasure, or anti-sex crusade, but because orgasms were actually important to the Victorians. Marriage guides discussing the sex act often claimed that a woman in a sexually satisfying relationship was more likely to become pregnant, as the wife’s orgasm was just as necessary to conception as her husband’s. A book called The Art to Begetting Handsome Children, published in 1860, contains a detailed passage on foreplay, and shows us that, for the Victorians, sex, pleasure and love were concepts that were universally tied together. In A Guide To Marriage, published in 1865 by the aptly named Albert Sidebottom, the advice to young couples exploring their relationship for the first time is that “All love between the sexes is based upon sexual passion”. This is something I’ve come across time and again in researching Victorian attitudes to sex: sexual pleasure, and especially female sexual pleasure, really mattered.

So if doctors were using vibrators to treat their female patients, everyone knew exactly what was going on. The idea that female orgasms were discovered by humanity a mere 200 years ago is absurd when you think about it — our ancestors were just as sexual as we are and knew how to have a good time. But the story is still fun, and might make for an enjoyable doctor-patient role-playing scenario!

Addendum: There is merit to the use of sexual intimacy to heal and recover from grief or stress, but that’s more psychological than medical. If any wives out there have experience treating their “hysteria” with “paroxysms” please let us know in the comments!

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There’s an outside chance that this “unique Roman artifact” discovered at the fort of Vindolanda (Britain) is 100% definitely a 1,900-year-old sex toy.

Here, therefore, we assess this uniquely preserved object—currently the only known example of a non-miniaturised, disembodied carved wooden phallus from the Roman world. Combining current theories about the role of phallic representations with consideration of the size and form of the object, and potential use-wear, we propose three possible explanations for its use and significance at Vindolanda in the second century AD and reflect on its broader significance for studies of Roman sexuality and magic.

The researchers offer some thoughts about “usage”:

Repeated use of wooden objects can damage or smooth their surfaces, depending on the intensity and frequency of handling and/or the time over which they were used. …

Tactile examination of the Vindolanda phallus reveals that the convex base end is smooth, which we attribute to intentional shaping during manufacture and/or exposure to repeated contact through use. A zone approximately 40mm in length along the underside and lateral faces of the shaft and an area 30–40mm long at the tip (upper shaft, glans and area behind it) were also notably smoother than other surface areas, possibly indicating repeated contact (Figure 7). The greater wear of the convex end and sides of the cylindrical base and the glans terminal may be significant for interpretation of the object’s function. Put simply, assuming such wear was caused by use, the phallus has perceptibly greater wear at either end compared with its middle.

The researchers consider several potential uses for the phallus before they get to the answer everyone wants to know: is it a sex toy?

Demonstrating that the Vindolanda phallus was used as a sexual implement is challenging. Although it explicitly imitates the anatomical form of a penis, modern implements are morphologically more diverse than human physiology; form alone is therefore not indicative. Nor does the size of the Vindolanda phallus preclude its use in this manner. Lubricants may be expected, but neither these nor human secretions are likely to survive archaeologically. Exactly how use-wear might manifest on an object of this type is also unclear and variations in use may be a factor. Research points to different perceptions, attitudes and uses of modern dildos across different genders and sexual orientations. In this regard, if the Vindolanda phallus functioned as a dildo, it need not necessarily have been used for penetration. Instead, actions such as clitoral stimulation might better fit the form and wear observed. Different modes of use, presumably, produce differential wear, but no definitive research exists, to our knowledge, that demonstrates this. Comparison of wear patterns on the Vindolanda wooden phallus with known examples of dildos is also difficult. The greater wear observed on the glans and upper shaft on the Vindolanda phallus compares favourably with the eighteenth-century ivory example noted above, in which differential surface colour and smoothing can be observed, even on photographs. Similarly, greater wear of the glans is observable on a stone double-dildo of the Sui dynasty (AD 581–618) in China, with double-dildos in Chinese historical texts typically described as made of ivory or wood for use in lesbian sexual acts.

And since I know you’re wondering, here’s the Ivory dildo, possibly French, 1701-1800; the wear near the head is clearly visible.

As we’ve written before, history is filled with people just like us.

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Our ancestors thought about sex as much as we do (or we wouldn’t be here), and their sexual euphemisms are pretty fantastic. Here are some fun sexual metaphors, presented without much commentary.

From the Bible:

  • Adam knew Eve … and she conceived (Genesis 4:1)
  • “uncover her nakedness” (Leviticus 18:7) and open his robe to spread it over her
  • keliy, “instrument, tool, vessel”, And David answered the priest, “Truly women have been kept from us as always when I go on an expedition. The vessels of the young men are holy even when it is an ordinary journey. How much more today will their vessels be holy?” (2 Samuel 21:5-6)
  • qoten, “small one” 1 Kings 12:10 (2 Chr 10:10): “My qotonniy is thicker than the loin of my father.”
  • yarek, “thigh” Judges 8:30: “And Gideon had seventy sons who came out of his yarek.”
  • The beams of our house are cedars, our rafters are firs (Song of Solomon 1:17)
  • His fruit is sweet to my taste (Song of Solomon 2:3)
  • He has taken me to the banquet hall (Song of Solomon 2:4)
  • I will go to the mountain of myrrh and to the hill of incense (Song of Solomon 4:6)
  • …my hands dripped with myrrh, my fingers with flowing myrrh, on the handles of the lock (Song of Solomon 5:5)
  • Let my lover into his garden and taste its choice fruits (Song of Solomon 4:16)
  • I have come into my garden, my sister, my bride (Song of Solomon 5:1)
  • I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit (Song of Solomon 7:8)
  • The word that is translated “hinge” (1 Kings 7:50), is the same word that is translated a woman’s secret parts” (Isaiah 3:17)
  • “the place of the breaking forth of children” (Hosea 13:13)
  • “If my heart have been deceived by a woman.. then let my wife grind unto another, and let others bow down upon her” (Job 31:9,10)

From assorted poetry:

  • Afternoon delight
  • Assault with a friendly weapon
  • Attacking the pink fortress
  • Basket-making
  • Bedroom spelunking
  • Burying the white soft petals fallen from the apple tree
  • Burying treasure
  • Buttering the biscuit
  • Churning butter
  • Cleaning the cobwebs with the womb broom
  • Counting down to thunder
  • Dipping the wick
  • Doing the Devil’s dance
  • Drinking from the chalice
  • Easing the spring
  • Eating the sunbeam
  • Emptying your basket of figs
  • Extreme flirting
  • Feeding the kitty
  • Filling her out like an application
  • Fingering the smooth and polished kernel
  • Gathering rosebuds
  • Hot beef injection
  • Humming around her chamber
  • Kindly serving
  • Laying pipe
  • Lifting the veil
  • Looting flowers
  • Making the beast with two backs
  • My body writes into your flesh
  • Nut in the gut
  • Pants-off dance-off
  • Playing doctor
  • Playing dungeons and dragons
  • Playing with the box the kid came in
  • Puddle-snuggling
  • Praying with the knees upwards
  • Putting in the seed
  • Putting the bread in the oven
  • Putting the wand in the chamber of secrets
  • Riding the Bony Express
  • Rolling in the hay
  • Shampooing the wookie
  • Sheathing the meat dagger
  • Sinking the pink
  • Skinning the cat
  • Slap and tickle
  • Spilling your wine
  • Sporting
  • Spray-painting the cervix
  • Squat-jumping in the cucumber patch
  • Struggle snuggling
  • Stuffing the taco
  • Testing the humidity
  • Tickling her tummy from the inside
  • Two-person push-ups
  • Walking the plank
  • Warming her pearls
  • Wetting the willy

(Some sources: Ex Minister, Redeeming God, Thought Catalog, Book Riot.)

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Spring is here, and love is in the air!

Masturbating For Your Husband: How To Start and Touching Yourself — We’ve written about Mutual Masturbation and Finishing on Her Body and you can also incorporate masturbation into Role-Playing: Photographer and Model

Ideas to sexually tease your husband — see also How to Turn Your Husband On in Public

How to Make Your Wife Squirt, and from Women’s Health, How To Make Yourself Squirt During Sex

Sexual Assertiveness Training for husbands — see also How to Get Your Wife to Lust for You. If you want to use role-playing to practice husbandly assertive, check out Role-Playing: Bratty Wife.

Shave My What? — see also Sex Q&A: How Do I Get My Wife to Shave “Down There”?, Should I Shave My Balls? Yes!, and Licking Balls

Tips for Hotter Sex and How to Get Into Difficult Sex Positions

10 Things To Know about Medieval Sex and 10 Weird Things Victorians Believed about Sex — see also Can we *BLANK*? Not in the Middle Ages!, Historical Sexual Slang and Oral Sex in History, Including Paradise Lost

Finally, here are tons of sex games from The Undefiled Marriage Bed. They apparently like water guns a lot.

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Most everyone agrees that the female body is more aesthetically pleasing than the male, and women are much more commonly portrayed as reifications of beauty than are men. (Perhaps the most famous exception is Michelangelo’s David, above.) Men aren’t generally depicted for their beauty, but perhaps we can learn a bit about the historical “ideal male body” by examining some artwork of men who were at the top of the social hierarchy for another reason: martial prowess.

Redditor PartyMoses writes about depictions of men in 15th century fencing manuals.

I’m going to take some time to talk about a man named Paulus Kal. Kal was a fencing master who wrote a treatise on the knightly arts, and had a long career as a knight in various capacities, served some civic functions for Nuremberg, and was sworn in service to a couple of dukes. In the 1480s (probably), he wrote his treatise, which contained a fair amount of art.

We think Kal depicted himself in the middle here, wearing the red/pink suit. He’s helping a knight (right) prepare for a duel. Take a look at Kal and a look at the anonymous knight for a moment. Kal doesn’t look the way we think of as “fit” today. He has a noticable belly, no definition of arm muscles, stout legs. He looks very similar in other images, even from (possibly) different artists. Now take a look at the arming knight: again, no muscle definition, the man in fact looks quite thin. It’s the same in most of the images throughout the treatise.

Aside from these fencers, PartyMoses also points to “Kal’s Birdman”:

I have eyes like a hawk, so you do not deceive me.
I have a heart like a lion, so I strive forward.
I have feet like a hind, so I can spring to and fro.

Obviously the ideal man is not an exquisite corpse or a nightmarish fusing of animal with human, but we are supposed to understand the animal-like features of the ideal fencer. Eyes that can’t be deceived, courage that won’t falter, quick feet. But look at the body of this ideal man. No muscle tone, nearly anywhere. An exaggerated waist even with a bit of a gut, thin arms, tapering legs.

(Follow the link above for commentary and many more pictures.)

Did 15th-century women swoon over these emaciated birdmen? Unfortunately I couldn’t find any depictions of men created by women of that era… maybe someone more proficient with art history would know the answer.

Women: are you familiar with any artwork that portrays an attractive male figure? Leave a comment and let us know.

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We commonly get questions — usually from a wife — about “weird” things her husband wants to in bed. Where did my husband get this crazy idea?

Well, as you know, humans have been having sex for a long time, and no matter how strict the rules are we’ve always been kinky. I recently listened to an episode of the Ask Historians podcast about libertine literature, and it mentioned a poem that I wanted to share titled “The Imperfect Enjoyment” from 17th century libertine writer John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester. (You can see a portrait of him above — he’s hot for his time!) Rochester is frustrated by his own premature ejaculation, and has written this poem to curse at his penis for failing. An excerpt:

When, with a thousand kisses wandering o’er
My panting bosom, “Is there then no more?”
She cries. “All this to love and rapture’s due;
Must we not pay a debt to pleasure too?”
But I, the most forlorn, lost man alive,
To show my wished obedience vainly strive:
I sigh, alas! and kiss, but cannot swive.
Eager desires confound my first intent,
Succeeding shame does more success prevent,
And rage at last confirms me impotent.
Ev’n her fair hand, which might bid heat return
To frozen age, and make cold hermits burn,
Applied to my dear cinder, warms no more
Than fire to ashes could past flames restore.
Trembling, confused, despairing, limber, dry,
A wishing, weak, unmoving lump I lie.

The poem is funny and poignantly humanizing. It’s easy to forget that our ancestors were as human as we are. The libertines are certainly not to be emulated in their philosophy, but why should they get to have better sex lives than married Christians? No way!

Do you have any sexy poetry to share? Leave a link in the comments.

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“Can we *BLANK*?” is one of the site’s most popular and frequently referenced posts. You can go read the details, but the short version is that just about any sexual activity is acceptable within marriage! But it may not surprise you to learn that people in the middle ages had a different view on sex.

If it’s not procreative, it’s fornication. If it’s done on a holy day, it’s fornication. You see above what happens if it’s oral: you get a life sentence of penance.

The penitential writers saw marital sex as a concession, not as a right or even a gift from God. The pleasure it brought was inherently sinful, a gateway to lust, so sex within marriage should be carefully contained and scheduled to ensure the most possible procreation and the least possible pleasure. Married couples had to abstain regularly or the very state of their marriage would degenerate into an illegitimate and sinful union. Even the children born of sex during a period where the couple should have abstained — mainly based on the Church’s liturgical calendar and on the wife’s reproductive cycle — were to be considered bastards.

There’s even a handy flowchart!

It’s no surprise that Christians often bring so much baggage into their marriages! These man-made rules and fears can steal away the joy of sex with our spouse.

Of course, people then weren’t much different than people now — it’s one thing to write a bunch of rules, and it’s another thing to follow them. Fortunately God hasn’t created nearly as many rules as people have.

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This post is also available as a podcast: Podcast #014: A Few Sexy Halloween Games

In the Victorian era, Halloween was less about scares than about finding true love. If you think modern Halloween is excessively sexualized, you may not want to read about how they partied in the early 20th century.

A century ago, the rituals surrounding the celebration at the end of October emphasized love. Newspapers recommended parlor games that promised to reveal romantic fortune. Even the cast of characters was more oriented toward matters of the heart.

“Halloween in the early 20th century had far less emphasis on blood, gore and scary monsters, and much more emphasis on courtship, romance and the opportunity for love,” Daniel Gifford, the former manager of museum advisory committees for the Smithsonian National Museum of American History explained in a museum blog post last year.

“In fact, the image of Cupid was often interspersed among the more familiar black cats, witches and jack-o’-lanterns.”

For Halloween maybe you and your spouse can play a fun Victorian game like snap apple! The image above will give you an idea of how to get started — it’s a seasonal bifecta! You can also check out the sexy Halloween games we posted way back in 2014, and leave your own ideas in the comments below.

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The term “blow job” as slang for oral sex performed on a man, or fellatio, pretty much rules the roost. There are plenty of other terms for the act, but “blow job” is by far the most common. It’s such a strange bit of slang: there’s no blowing involved, and though it can be a bit of work it’s an act of love, not labor. So what’s the deal?

Here are a couple of analyses that purport to explain the origin of the term — I’ll try to quote the less graphic parts. Click the links at your own risk, but the etymology is quite interesting.

The inestimable (and late) Christopher Hitchens wrote that “blowjob” is Victorian in origin.

The crucial word “blowjob” doesn’t come into the American idiom until the 1940s, when it was (a) part of the gay underworld and (b) possibly derived from the jazz scene and its oral instrumentation. But it has never lost its supposed Victorian origin, which was “below-job” (cognate, if you like, with the now archaic “going down”).

However, Chelsea G. Summers writes that no-one ever connected “blow job” with “below-job” until Hitchens wrote it. She digs deeper into the seventeenth century to inspect terminology used to describe oral sex. She decides that “to blow” has a long history as a euphemism for orgasm (i.e., to explode), and that “job” descends from many other labor terms used as sexual slang.

And it’s not just Americans: the English-speaking world at large has enjoyed a long, filthy history with “blow.” An explosion, a hard hit, or the act of producing a sound from a horn instrument, “blow” is already a versatile word, and slang takes full […] advantage of its flexibility. “Blow” meaning “fellate” dates to 1930, but the word has been doing sexy duty for centuries. “Blow” meaning to achieve orgasm came about in 1700; “blow” meaning to bring to orgasm showed as early as 1650; and “blow” meaning [sex] appeared in a 1644 edition of Mercurious Fumigosus, a weird, smutty zine-style newsletter produced by John Crouch, a Royalist journalist imprisoned during the British Interregnum. While other terms have lost their erotic luster with time, “blow” has held firm. Dudes have blown their loads only since 1993, but we’ve got more than three hundred years of people achieving orgasm with “blow.”

Sex slang through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was deep into play. People engaging in sexual intercourse would “dance on a rope,” “play at mumble-de-peg,” or “frisk,” while “larking” was the earliest slang term for oral sex. True, “job” as slang for [having sex with] dates to the early sixteenth century, and both “business” and “work” to the early seventeenth, but the sheer number of play terms vastly outweigh labor terms until the early twentieth century. Then, “job” proliferates—hand, mouth, brown, finger, rim, and non-specific “sex job” grow like mushrooms in the shade of “blow job.” In modern times, sex slang is all work and decreasing play, and “blow job” leads the way towards labor.

So there you go: two options for the history of “blow job”. “Fellatio” descends directly from Latin for “to suck”, but unless you really must discuss oral sex in polite company it seems unlikely that “blow job” is going anywhere anytime soon.

What do you and your spouse call it?

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Reader “L” writes:

I would be interested to hear your thoughts on this quote from Sheila Wray Gregoire:

“Now, I’m not against spicing things up, and I do think lots of things can be fun! But when we’re wanting ‘more’ because we’ve programmed ourselves to think ‘the weirder the sexier’, there’s a problem.”

It stems from the porn argument — many men have been conditioned through porn to be aroused by what they’ve seen and that there is an escalating factor as seen by the lack of what you might call vanilla interactions in porn today.

When I hear that argument (not so much about porn’s influence, but about it being the driving behind any interest in sexy games, bondage, etc.), I question how anyone could arrive at introducing extra-curricular activities into their sex lives without some kind of societal influence. No one lives in a vacuum and it is more impossible today than it was 20 years ago. I also personally don’t like the use of the word “weirder”, but that’s a whole other argument I could have.

What are your thoughts on this?

Thanks for the question! As you might expect, I’ve got a lot of thoughts. The quote comes from a post Sheila wrote about the dangers porn can create in a marriage. We agree: porn is dangerous to your marriage. Your sexuality should be focused on your spouse.

However, porn didn’t invent anything it depicts. As Ecclesiastes 1:9 says:

What has been is what will be,
and what has been done is what will be done,
and there is nothing new under the sun.

Our ancestors were no more virtuous or innocent than we are. The Bible is full of sex. Shakespeare’s works are full of sex. Some of the oldest known works of art are pornographic. Ancient Roman graffiti was largely pornographic. A modern person may learn about a sex act from the internet, but our ancestors did everything we do.

It’s worth adding that men aren’t the only ones looking at porn — women also consume and are influenced by porn. Surveys indicate that a higher percentage of men than women view porn, but up to 30% of women are willing to admit to Cosmo that they view porn “daily” or “once every few days”. I’d bet that the actual number — women who won’t admit it — is higher.

Finally, let’s talk about “weird” sex. Literally:

1. involving or suggesting the supernatural; unearthly or uncanny:

2. fantastic; bizarre:

3. Archaic. concerned with or controlling fate or destiny.

I don’t think people mean supernatural, so let’s go with definition number two: fantastic or bizarre. Neither word is inherently negative.

Fantastic: conceived by an unrestrained imagination; odd and remarkable; extravagantly fanciful; marvelous; incredibly great or extreme; exorbitant; highly unrealistic or impractical.

Bizarre: markedly unusual in appearance, style, or general character and often involving incongruous or unexpected elements; outrageously or whimsically strange; odd.

In both cases, “weird” is opposite to “normal” — so what’s normal? The Bible doesn’t differentiate between normal sex and weird sex, only between Godly sex and sinful sex. The only way to define “normal” is with reference to some environment and culture. Something normal in one place and time, to one person, may be weird to another. Normal and weird are determined by your perspective and your biases. Godly and sinful are determined by God.

Some sex act may be normal and sinful at the same time, or Godly and weird at the same time. Consider:

So, that’s the long way of saying: “weird” is in the eye of the beholder. With a few limits, if you want to do it and your spouse agrees, go for it.

I think there are also two other things a person can mean when they use the word “weird”.

First, they can simply mean: “I don’t want to do that”. It’s perfectly acceptable to be apprehensive about some sex act, but it’s important to communicate and explain why. Saying something is “weird” is a passive-aggressive way of shaming your spouse into hiding their desire. Don’t use “weird” as an excuse to just say no.

Second, “weird” can mean novel, something new. We definitely don’t think it’s wrong to seek out new ways to enjoy sex with your spouse! We write about that all the time. As Sheila would seem to agree, we do recommend prioritizing penis-in-vagina sex, but we also think it’s healthy to push your boundaries and explore new things. A desire for new experiences is common in many areas of life, not just sex. You may not like everything you try, and that’s ok!

Finally, check out that third definition for “weird”: controlling fate or destiny. All sex is weird like that!

What do you think? Fantastic, bizarre, novel? How does culture influence your sexual relationship with your spouse?

Update: Commenter Juliettte makes some great observations about the positive effects that culture can have on married sex!

Please use the contact pages for Sexy Corte and El Fury to send us your questions. We will only share your question if you give us permission, and we’ll never reveal your name or any other identifying information. You can ask questions anonymously, or use a free anonymous email server like Mailinator.

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