By: Gyovanni Boston-Crompton
As
a woman, we all get called crazy on a daily basis. Why we are crazy? Most men
would say that we are hormonal, we have periods, we have estrogen, and a
vagina. Also, many men like to say my favorite quote of all time that after a
female has received “good dick” from someone they go crazy as well. Even though
the word crazy is thrown around in a lighter manner than before, it was once
considered a disease to be crazy, hormonal, or even becoming aroused. To think
that if were to be just mad at the world due to a period that I would be
considered to be having a disease and that I would have to be medically
treated. Now that is just crazy.
In
order to be treated for this disease you needed to display the vast array of
symptoms. Several symptoms of this female disease were irritability, nervousness,
muscle spasms, and sexual desires. They also believed that too much lubrication of the vagina and having fantasies of sex were also a part of the symptoms as
well. This “disease” dates back to the 500 B.C. where many inscription in Egypt
and Italy that talked the wombs of women moving throughout their body and cause many different hysterical diseases. Hysteria
was not given a name until Hippocrates used the word “Hystera”, which means
uterus. In 200 A.D. Galen, who was a Roman physician, thought that hysteria was
the result of sexual deprivation. He believed that if you were a married woman
all you needed to do was to have sex and if you were divorced, unmarried, or
widowed you would need to have pelvic massages which many people would follow
suite with this method of treatment for the disease. In the 19th
century female hysteria was common within one fourth of the women population.
In the 1860's, they would use hydrotherapy in spas which they would douche the
woman in order to cure the hysteria. George Taylor created the first vibrator
that was steamed-powered in 1869, which lead to the portable vibrator that was
made by Joseph Mortimer Granville in 1885. In 1898, saddle machines became
popular as well to treat hysteria. Almost everyone kept a vibrator in their
home and it being so popular that it became the fifth household item to become electrical right after the sewing machine. By the 1920's, the vibrator, which was once
a cure all method, was now shown in many pornographic films and was not only used for medical reasons but also recreational. In the 1950's the vibrator
was not shown as much as before and the word hysteria was dropped by the
American Psychological Association. In the 1980's, the vibrator was reintroduced
and the name of hysteria was changed to Conversion Disorder. [1]
Women were suppressed because they had an arousal and enjoyed sex. The cure to everything in life for a woman back then was basically masturbation and now most women are ashamed to even say that they masturbate. To think that life was so simple a long time ago and that a woman’s best friend was a vibrator. No wonder why so many use vibrators today because our history has told us the solution to having problems is using a vibrator. Personally, for me I don’t think a vibrator actually solved all the women’s problems back then and I definitely don’t think that they solve all the problems now either. And if that’s the case shouldn’t most of us be sane unlike what most men claim that we all aren’t. There is now even a movie about how Mortimer Granville made the vibrator that was actually named Hysteria. [2]
[1] Dusenbery, Maya. Mother Jones,
"Timeline: Female Hysteria and the Sex Toys Used to Treat It." Last
modified June 1, 2012. Accessed March 30, 2014.
http://www.motherjones.com/media/2012/05/hysteria-sex-toy-history-timeline.
[2] IMDb, "Hysteria (2011)-IMDb."
Last modified December 14, 2011. Accessed March 30, 2014.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1435513/.
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