1. The Job Nobody Wanted. The Androcentric Model of Sexuality. Hysteria as a Disease Paradigm. The Evolution of the Technology -- 2. Female Sexuality as Hysterical Pathology. Hysteria in Antiquity and the Middle Ages. Hysteria in Renaissance Medicine. The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. The Freudian Revolution and Its Aftermath -- 3. "My God, What Does She Want?" Physicians and the Female Orgasm. Masturbation. "Frigidity" and Anorgasmia. Female Orgasm in the Post-Freudian World. What Ought to Be, and What We'd Like to Believe -- 4. "Inviting the Juices Downward" Hydropathy and Hydrotherapy. Electrotherapeutics. Mechanical Massagers and Vibrators. Instrumental Prestige in the Vibratory Operating Room. Consumer Purchase of Vibrators after 1900 -- 5. Revising the Androcentric Model. Orgasmic Treatment in the Practice of Western Medicine. The Androcentric Model in Heterosexual Relationships. The Vibrator as Technology and Totem
Summary
The author explores hysteria in Western medicine throughout the ages and examines the characterization of female sexuality as a disease requiring treatment. Medical authorities, she writes, were able to defend and justify the clinical production of orgasm in women as necessary to maintain the dominant view of sexuality, which defined sex as penetration to male orgasm - a practice that consistently fails to produce orgasm in a majority of the female population. This male-centered definition of satisfying and healthy coitus shaped not only the development of concepts of female sexual pathology but also the instrumentation designed to cope with them
Analysis
Women--Sexual behavior--History
Female orgasm--History
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 125-169) and index
