All The Hysteria About Female Pleasure

I’ve men­tioned pre­vi­ously my new fas­ci­na­tion with the upcom­ing movie, Hysteria. It debuted this week, I believe, at the Toronto Independent Film Festival, and is cre­at­ing a lot of…yes, buzz…about female sex­u­al­ity, orgasms, and the his­tory of the vibra­tor. You must watch the video below. It’s, well…hysterical. (Yes, I know that was a cheap pun – but I enjoyed it, darling!)

Hysteria has cer­tainly got­ten tongues, er…wag­ging about female orgasms and sex­u­al­ity in gen­eral. USA Today said yes­ter­day that it was one of sev­eral films this fall cre­at­ing a trend of female sexuality-​themed movies.

The fes­ti­val acts as a pre­view of what’s to come, and female sex­u­al­ity is def­i­nitely in the fore­front among the film selec­tions play­ing here this year.

When asked if it was fair to say that erotic mat­ters of the wom­anly kind were being explored in more than a few titles, TIFF co-​director Cameron Bailey says, “Oh, you noticed that, did you?” Indeed.

And ABC News Health even weighed in on the ori­gins of the vibra­tor as a med­ical device used by doc­tors to plea­sure treat their female patients who suf­fered from “hys­te­ria” (aka sex­ual frus­tra­tion caused by a male dom­i­nated soci­ety who didn’t under­stand that women have NEEDS too!)

Back then, sex had lit­tle to do with women — in terms of plea­sure, any­way. The act, con­sid­ered one of pro­cre­ation rather than recre­ation, con­sisted of pen­e­tra­tion and male orgasm. If the woman hap­pened to enjoy it, well that was a bonus. As a result, women suf­fer­ing from hys­te­ria — a now aban­doned med­ical diag­no­sis related to sex­ual dis­sat­is­fac­tion — would seek the help of doc­tors and devices.

“It turns out to be phys­i­cally healthy and men­tally healthy for peo­ple to have an orgasm,” said Susan Heilter, a psy­chol­o­gist and cou­ples ther­a­pist in Denver. “People do become more emo­tion­ally brit­tle with­out that sex­ual release.”

Emotional brit­tle­ness, anx­i­ety, depres­sion were all symp­toms of female hys­te­ria. The treat­ment: pelvic mas­sage until “hys­ter­i­cal parox­ysm” or, in other words, a doctor-​delivered orgasm.

The quote that really made me chuckle, and wince a lit­tle, was this gem:

All this to say the pur­pose of female orgasm, unlike the sperm-​spreading pur­pose of male orgasm, is a mystery.

I under­stand they are speak­ing from an evo­lu­tion­ary biol­ogy per­spec­tive where the only pur­pose to all liv­ing things is to sur­vive and pro­cre­ate. But is life really that util­i­tar­ian? Must there be a pur­pose to female orgasm other than our own plea­sure? Must it be a mystery? I don’t think so.

What I love about this movie – and the true story behind it, if it is, indeed, accu­rately por­trayed – is what began as a con­ve­nient device for misog­y­nist male doc­tors to “treat” their female patients in an assembly-​line fash­ion was soon taken over by the female pop­u­la­tion for noth­ing more than their own plea­sure. And accord­ing to Rachel P. Maines, author of The Technology of Orgasm, the male doc­tors weren’t happy to have women take con­trol of their own bod­ies that way.

But as we con­tinue the fight to change thou­sands of years of male-​domination (and this is not to say I am anti-​man, because I’m not – I love men very much), we women have to take back con­trol and charge of our own bod­ies. Without point­ing to polit­i­cally obvi­ous issues, even in our mod­ern soci­ety, it’s clear that this fight is not yet over.

Maybe it will seem too dra­matic to say this, but I think one of the pur­poses of female orgasm (other than feel­ing GREAT) is to remind our­selves and to remind men that our bod­ies are not util­i­tar­ian baby machines. Nor do they exist merely for the sex­ual plea­sure of men. And even as much as I enjoy fash­ion, women are not objects that must be shaped into a form that will most flat­ter the cre­ative whims of a fash­ion designer.

Women are indi­vid­u­als unto them­selves, and our bod­ies exist first and fore­most for our own enjoy­ment and use – whether that is run­ning, danc­ing, eat­ing, cre­at­ing, writ­ing, act­ing, hold­ing, and yes…even hav­ing orgasms. So when Hysteria comes out, why don’t you take your­self out to see it, and go enjoy some cham­pagne and a good vibra­tor afterwards!