A Curious History of Sex

Buzzkill ^{Vibrators and the Victorians}

I am sure you have heard this one: Victorian doctors invented the vibrator to masturbate women to orgasm because they had been ‘finger-banging’ (1988) so many patients in an effort to cure their hysteria that frankly their arms ached. We love this story. I love this story. Hollywood loved this story so much that both The Road to Wellville (1994) and Hysteria (2011) are based on it. But sadly it really is just a story. Like trickle-down economics and Jamie Lee Curtis’s hermaphroditism, it’s an urban myth. But like all the best stories, there are flashes of truth in it. We love this story because it goes straight to the hysterical heart of the Victorian sexual hypocrisy that we enjoy rolling our eyes at: ‘Did you know Victorian doctors were wanking off their female patients, but considered exposed table legs to be sexually obscene? So glad we’re not like that now!’ (Except the table legs thing is also myth, but that’s another book for another day.)

The root of the diddling doctors theory is Rachel Maines’s book The Technology of Orgasm (1999). Here Maines hypothesises that doctors masturbated women to orgasm for health reasons, and that the vibrator was nothing short of a ‘godsend’ for the physicians suffering from repetitive strain injury in their index fingers. More than this, Maines makes the case that this practice can be traced back to Classical times. However, it has to be said that her evidence for medical vulva massage in the Ancient World has been severely criticised, most notably by Professor Helen King, as well as Hallie Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg, who took apart such claims in the academic equivalent of a Vulcan death grip.^{1} It’s also important to remember that Maines herself refers to her argument as a hypothesis; and, to be fair, it’s a damn interesting one. In an online interview in 2010, Maines said:

So, let’s unpack this hypothesis a little further. Make no mistake, Victorian doctors were obsessed with sex and health, and there were many highly questionable medical theories flying around, from the anti-onanism crew who believed that masturbation was terminal, to Italian criminal anthropologist Cesare Lombroso’s theories that sex workers had no sensation in their clitorises, as they had been rendered ‘insensible’ through ‘overuse’.^{3} But the theory that doctors invented vibrators to cure hysteria is doubtful for several reasons.

British doctor Joseph Mortimer Granville (1833–1900) patented the first electric vibrator in the 1880s, not as a sexual device but as a massager to relieve the aches and pains of men, not women – he was quite clear on that. In his book Nerve-Vibration and Excitation as Agents in the Treatment of Functional Disorder and Organic Disease (1883), he wrote, ‘I have never yet percussed a female patient… I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid the treatment of women by percussion, simply because I do not wish to be hoodwinked, and help to mislead others, by the vagaries of the hysterical state.’^{4} Furthermore, one look at this contraption and I am sure we can all agree that this is not a device you would want anywhere near your clacker without adult supervision and a safe word. This was clearly not designed for internal use. It was designed to strike the body in a hammer-like motion, which was why Granville called it ‘percussing’.

Other vibrating massagers soon followed on a wave of pseudo-scientific theories about electricity, which was touted as a cure-all panacea, along with rectal dilators and radium. Vibrating massage promised to alleviate all manner of mental and physical disorders (including the mysterious ‘hysteria’), but they were not designed for use on the genitals, and were not used by doctors to induce orgasm. Now, that does not mean that people did not figure out that these massage devices could be put to other, less hygienic uses. I like to define a ‘kink blink’ as the insanely short length of time between the introduction of new technology and its adaptation for sexual purposes. And as with the speculum, the nurse’s uniform and Viagra, the vibrator went from medical to mucky in a kink blink. One early pornographic film from the 1930s, The Masseur, shows the vibrator in action as two saucy masseurs vibrate it up and down the happy chap’s bottom. But, crucially, the vibrator is not used internally.

And if we are to believe that vibrators were common knowledge and widely used to induce orgasm, we have to account for the fact that there is not one mention of this in any known Victorian pornography (textual or visual). Not one. However, there are many references to dildos, as well as the occasional cucumber put to good use. Sex toys are not new. And, as these pictures show, the Victorians knew how to fashion a dildo. Unsurprisingly, the design has changed very little since cavemen first started carving ‘dongs’ (1890) out of stone. They tend to be, well, cock-shaped.

Have a look around any modern-day sex shop and we can see that the cock shape for a sex toy is still very much in vogue. Victorian dildos were made from wood, leather and even ivory, and they were certainly a lot of fun, as this extract from The Pearl (1880) demonstrates: ‘As we are five to two you will find I have a stock of fine, soft, firmly made dildos to make up the deficiency in males, which alternated with the real article will enable us to thoroughly enjoy ourselves.’^{5}

Or this jolly song, titled ‘The Old Dildo’:

Not only is there no known mention of doctors and vibrators in Victorian pornography, there is also no mention of them in the work of the early and pioneering sexologists. Iwan Bloch, Havelock Ellis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Freud meticulously catalogued every fetish, paraphilia and known expression of sexual behaviour, but not one of them mention doctors, vibrators and orgasm. Ellis and Bloch even describe some women deriving sexual pleasure from sewing machines and sealing wax, but still there is no mention of a vibrator.[7] Fifty years later, in his seminal Behaviour in the Human Female (1953), Alfred Kinsey does not mention vibrators in his lengthy and comprehensive chapters on female masturbation, and you’d think if doctors were wanking women to wellness, it would have cropped up somewhere in these works.

But what about the Victorian medical texts themselves? Surely there must be some mention of doctors conducting ‘pelvic massage’ of female patients? Well, yes! Yes, there is, and lots of it. The medical craze for pelvic massage came from the work of Swedish obstetrician and gynaecologist Thure Brandt (1819–1895), who began treating women in 1861. The ‘Thure Brandt method’ of pelvic massage and ‘manipulating the womb’ proved very popular and was widely reported at the time. The New York Medical Journal (1876) was one of many journals that described the technique in some detail.

As you can see, the technique is largely performed externally and with a noticeable lack of a vibrator or an orgasm.^{8} And if you were still unsure of how to perform this massage, the 1895 book by Dr A. Jentzer, Physiotherapy in Gynaecology and the Mechanical Treatment of Diseases of the Uterus and its Appendages by Thure Brandt, illustrates the procedure, and contains possibly the most disturbing images of gynaecological examination ever produced.

Once you have moved past the fact that the doctor and patient strongly resemble escapees from Area 51, you will notice that the technique is about applying pressure to the pelvic area in a variety of odd positions. Here we do see that some of the massage was internal (he is a gynaecologist, after all), and involved inserting a finger and applying the other hand on top of the abdomen and pushing downwards. But at no point is an orgasm mentioned or a vibrator required.

Brandt’s theories were celebrated and expanded on three years after his death by Dr Robert Ziegenspeck (1856–1918) in his Massage Treatment (Thure Brandt) in Diseases of Women: for Practitioners (1898). Ziegenspeck gives considerable detail about the internal part of the pelvic floor massage. The good doctor strongly emphasises that this ‘localised’ treatment requires plenty of ‘massage and stretching’ with one finger in the vagina and the spare hand pushing down on the abdomen. And if you were still unsure of what you were doing, Ziegenspeck supplied a handy seven-point guide:

It’s very difficult to read through that little lot and not arrive at the conclusion that this is just fancy fingering, and it seems that this ‘treatment’ drew similar criticism in the nineteenth century. Ziegenspeck claims that the ‘massage has been unjustly reproached’ as causing ‘sexual irritation’ (read, ‘sexual stimulation’).^{10}

Clearly, for Ziegenspeck at least, sexual stimulation during pelvic massage was to be avoided. Should any patient experience ‘sexual irritation’, he recommended ‘increasing the pressure a little, so that real pain is caused’.^{11}

The theories behind ‘pelvic massage’ and the techniques are frankly bizarre, and although I am cautious of judging this ‘treatment’ by modern standards, there is something undeniably sexual going on here. I know it, you know it, and clearly people at the time knew it. But there is no vibrator, there is no orgasm, there is no hysteria, and its practitioners emphatically deny this is medical masturbating. However, it seems that it is here, in the confusing practice of pelvic massage, that the myth that Victorian doctors collectively drained the national grid as they buzzed their patients into post-orgasmic delirium developed.

The other persistent part of the medical vibrator story is that of ‘hysterical paroxysm’, which Maines understands as being ‘the female orgasm under clinical conditions’.^{12} But when we start to investigate the medical texts of the era, a hysterical paroxysm doesn’t sound like any orgasm I’ve ever had. Hysterical and Nervous Affections of Women. Read Before the Harveian Society describes a hysterical paroxysm as ‘an uncontrollable attack of alternate sobbing and laughter’.^{13} Andrew Whyte Barclay’s A Manual of Medical Diagnosis (1864) describes it as a ‘fit’ and ‘a simulation of epilepsy’.^{14} John Henry Walsh describes the hysterical paroxysm as beginning with uncontrollable giggling, and lasting ‘for at least an hour, and often for five or six’.^{15} William Potts Dewees claims that ‘It is very common for the stomach to eructate a great deal of “gas,” at the termination of an hysterical paroxysm, from which the patient finds much relief.’^{16} I’m sorry, but a farting, giggling fit that lasts an afternoon is not an orgasm. Whatever this is, it is described in terms very similar to a fit, or a nervous, uncontrollable episode. Medical theories of the time do link this strange phenomenon to a gynaecological cause. Walsh wrote that a ‘copious secretion of pale urine accompanies the disease’.^{17} George Bacon Wood wrote that hysterical paroxysm was ‘apt to be worse around the menstrual period’, and W. W. Bliss was certain that ‘hysterical paroxysms are usually an accompaniment of painful menstruation’.^{18} But this should not be surprising as the word ‘hysteria’ comes from Latin hystericus, meaning ‘of the womb’, and from the Greek hysterikos, meaning ‘suffering in the womb’.

The mysterious medical phenomenon known as hysteria has attracted considerable research in modern scholarship, precisely because no one really knows what it is. The word covers a multitude of psychological and physical ailments and, until Freud’s work, was predominantly a woman’s malady. At the risk of oversimplification, hysteria meant the physical or behavioural manifestations of physiological distress in women. This could be aggression, fainting, nymphomania or a farting fit. The theory that the womb caused emotional instability can be traced back to Ancient Greece and the ‘wandering womb’ theory. Aretaeus, a physician contemporary with Galen in the second century AD, describes how the womb moves around the abdomen, causing madness:

By the nineteenth century, the wandering womb theory had fallen out of favour, though the link between the womb and hysteria clearly enjoyed a last hurrah in theories of pelvic massage and womb manipulation. A hysterical paroxysm was simply another ill-defined category of hysteria that can be found in nineteenth-century medical manuals, along with the hysterical coma, hysterical headaches, hysterical excitement, hysterical convulsive affections and (of course) hysterical flatulence.

But more than this: the Victorians knew what an orgasm was! There was no need to dress it up in euphemistic language. Even a cursory glance at the erotic literature of the time will tell you that the Victorians were well aware of orgasms. The Pearl (1879–80) is crammed full of women orgasming: ‘I felt her crack deluged with a warm, creamy spend whilst my own juice spurted over her hand and dress in loving sympathy.’^{20} The Romance of Lust (1873) is also pretty clued up as to what women want: ‘She rapidly came to the ecstatic ending, nearly thrusting my whole face into her vast orbit, and spurting out a very torrent of sperm, all over my face and neck.’^{21} And Jack Saul conducts a concerto of orgasms in Sins of the Cities of the Plain (1881): ‘How many times I made her spend it would be impossible to say.’^{22} As Fern Riddell, one of the leading academics in Victorian sexuality, argues, ‘Victorian doctors knew exactly what the female orgasm was; in fact, it’s one of the reasons they thought masturbation was a bad idea.’^{23}

Not only did Victorian doctors know what an orgasm was, but nineteenth-century medical theories largely taught that orgasms were potentially dangerous and needed to be limited. Masturbation in women was thought to cause hysteria, not cure it. In The Generative System and Its Functions in Health and Disease (1883), James George Beaney claimed that a disease ‘associated with, and very often closely depending on, female masturbation is hysteria’.^{24} Edward John Tilt (1815–1893) wrote that ‘habitual masturbation lowers the tone of the whole system, causes an irritable condition of the temper, [and] the milder manifestations of hysteria’.^{25} In 1852, Samuel La’mert drew a clear distinction between hysterical paroxysm and masturbation when he wrote ‘females devoted to libidinous and solitary pollutions, are more particularly exposed to hysterical paroxysm’.^{26} In 1894, Dr A. J. Block of New Orleans in an article entitled ‘Sexual Perversion in the Female’ referred to female masturbation as a ‘moral leprosy’.^{27} So dangerous was female masturbation thought to be that it was cited on numerous patient admission forms to Victorian lunatic asylums, and led to quack doctor Isaac Baker Brown routinely carrying out clitoridectomies.[23] Now, I ask you, does this sound like a group of people likely to prescribe a session of ‘fingerblasting’ (2003)?

But it’s not all doom and gloom. Although orgasms were not administered by Victorian doctors, they were generally encouraged between husband and wife, and an absence of orgasm when paying the conjugal debt was recognised as a bad thing. An article published by Dr W. Tyler Smith in The Lancet in 1842 defined impotence in women as ‘failure to produce the sexual orgasm’.^{28} One school of medical thought had it that orgasms helped a woman to conceive. For example, in 1872, Dr J. R. Beck argued that an orgasm allowed the cervix to contract and helped the sperm to reach the egg.^{29} Others, like Dr John S. Parry, didn’t discount the possibility that an orgasm may help things along, but was quite sure that ‘an orgasm is not essential to conception’.^{30} But whatever the medical profession had to say on the subject of blowing one’s lady lumps, Victorian pornography provides substantial evidence that the orgasm was also understood as a very important, and fun, part of sex.

So, what can we salvage from this much-loved and widespread myth? It is true that Victorian doctors were fascinated with the female reproductive system, and, like their medical predecessors, linked madness to the womb. To cure hysteria, in all its weird manifestations, they prescribed all manner of kinky-sounding treatments, including pelvic massage, which is really just fancy fingering. Doctors also had some very strange ideas about orgasm and masturbation damaging health and causing hysteria. There really was such a thing as a ‘hysterical paroxysm’, which is not an orgasm, but is described as a giggly, farting fit that could last for hours. It’s also true that vibrating massagers became popular in the late nineteenth century and were recommended to cure all manner of ills.[24] But here is the crucial thing: doctors may have been manipulating, sedating, institutionalising and pummelling the pussies of their poor patients – but they were not masturbating them to ‘hysterical paroxysm’ with steam-powered vibrators to cure them of hysteria. Sorry to be such a buzzkill.

On Your Bike ^{Sex and Cycling}

What is the most important invention in the fight for sexual equality? The Pill? The self-cleaning vibrator? Kleenex Mansize? How about the humble bicycle?

Before you panic, this is not a chapter about people having sex with bicycles, although if you are interested in that then both the Erotic Museum in Amsterdam and the Sex Museum in New York have examples of ‘dildo bikes’.^{1} But there is something quite sexy about bikes. Perhaps it is the saddle rubbing against the genitals, or maybe it is the bent over, arse-up posture that must be assumed to ride one. Maybe it’s just the word ‘ride’. But whatever it is, bicycles have long had an air of cheeky ‘Carry On’ fun about them. Freddie Mercury knew it when he sang about fat-bottomed girls riding their bicycles. Queen even featured just such a fat-bottomed girl riding a bicycle on the picture sleeve of their album Jazz (1978).

The role of the bicycle in the sexual emancipation of women is often overlooked, but it allowed them a freedom they had never experienced before. And not only the freedom to travel – the bicycle also liberated women’s bodies from cumbersome skirts and the tit-crushing corset. The bicycle changed attitudes to health, fitness and exercise and proved women were not desperately delicate little flowers. The popularity of the bicycle forced a medical debate on the stimulating effects of the saddle on the reproductive organs, and the nature of female sexuality.[25] American suffragette Susan B. Anthony claimed that the bicycle had ‘done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world’.^{2} For some Victorian moralists, this was all too much, and the bicycle came to be associated with sexual promiscuity, so much so that bicycles feature heavily in nineteenth-century pornographic photographs. Not only because they provide a convenient excuse for bending over, legs akimbo, but because the bicycle signified a sexually liberated woman, who enjoyed pleasure.

The Victorians did not invent the bicycle, but they did refine the design so it could be used without rupturing internal organs and endangering life. One of the earliest designs for a two-wheeled apparatus dates to 1534 and is attributed to Gian Giacomo Caprotti (a pupil of Leonardo da Vinci), but the first usable bicycle was designed by German Baron Karl von Drais in 1817, and was called a ‘running machine’. There were no pedals, brakes or suspension, but the device allowed the rider to propel themselves forward in a half run, half cycle motion. Soon, British designer Denis Johnson brought out an improved, more streamlined version called the ‘pedestrian curricle’ or the ‘velocipede’, but it would take another fifty years for the bicycle to become popular.

Four-wheelers, push-bikes, penny-farthings and the 1860 ‘Boneshaker’ were all important points in the evolution of the modern bicycle, but they were dangerous.[26] They didn’t have suspension, brakes or pneumatic tyres, and were notoriously unstable. Falling at speed from the height of a penny-farthing caused horrible injuries and numerous fatalities. The open spokes and precariously placed saddle meant that ladies couldn’t ride them in skirts and bustles without their petticoats getting tangled up and their bloomers torn off. As a result, bicycles were associated with thrill-seeking young men who cruised Victorian cobbles on a pimped-up penny-farthing.

Thankfully, the 1880s saw the invention of the ‘safety bicycle’, which featured steering, brakes, pedals, suspension and, eventually, pneumatic tyres. Finally, the bicycle could be used by anyone. Historians often refer to the 1890s as ‘the golden age of the bicycle’, and with good reason. The bicycle was suddenly the must-have item, and women started cycling in droves.

As exciting as all this was, the lady cyclist was regarded with suspicion from the get-go. As the bicycle cannot be ridden side-saddle, doctors worried about the potentially stimulating effects all that bouncing about on a saddle would have on a lady’s well-being. Men were regarded as robust and physically able to withstand the potentially stimulating dangers of the bike, but women were regarded as constitutionally weaker. As the South Wales Echo reported in 1897, ‘the cycle was invented by the male creature and is still a male creature’s vehicle’; women, it reported, ‘should beware of the dangers of cycling’.

The dangers of cycling being alluded to were far greater than taking a tumble over the handlebars. Because the saddle rubbed up against the genitals, the dangers a woman faced related to her sexual and reproductive health. One French physician warned that ‘the unusual physical exertion, combined with the perilous lack of corsetry, would damage the feminine organs of matrimonial necessity and shake them loose’.^{4} Although bicycle anxiety was felt around the world in the 1890s, American and Canadian doctors seemed to be particularly concerned about women cycling and their ‘organs of matrimonial necessity’, and it’s here that the loudest anti-cycling voices were heard.

In 1895, the St Louis Medical Review not only stated that cycling was an ‘exceedingly ungraceful and unbecoming occupation for young ladies’, but it might lead to ‘ovarian inflammation, bleeding from the kidney or womb, displacement, and miscarriage’.^{5} An article in the Iowa State Register warned that cycling ‘may suppress or render irregular and fearfully painful the menses, and perhaps sow the seeds for future ill health’.^{6} The Cincinnati Lancet-Clinic (1895) broadly supported cycling, but had concerns about the saddle acting as a ‘frictional agent’ and sending a lady into a ‘dangerous condition’.^{7}

Indeed, it was the ‘frictional agent’ the saddle provided that concerned most of these medical texts. All the blustering around saddle-induced ‘uterine disorders’ and ‘ovarian inflammation’ was little more than a sublimated anxiety that a woman might experience sexual pleasure riding over the cobbles with a wad of leather between her legs. Other doctors were far more direct in voicing their concerns. In 1896, the editor of the Canadian journal the Dominion Medical Monthly was widely quoted as saying that ‘the consensus of opinion is increasing overwhelmingly day by day that bicycle riding produces in the female a distinct orgasm’.^{8} Outraged at the suggestion that Canadian women were putting their bicycles to less than wholesome purposes, a flurry of articles soon followed denouncing the claim, like this one in the Canadian Medical Practioner (1896):

It continues, ‘the filthy rubbish to which the Record refers is in itself essentially nasty, while the direct charges against the women and girls of Toronto are simply infamous’.^{9} It’s doubtful that the idea women regularly orgasmed on their bicycles was widely held within the medical community, but the very fact that a public debate was needed to address this is testament to the fact that some people regarded it as a possibility.

The American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children featured an article by Dr Robert Dickinson on ‘Bicycling for Women’ that addressed the issue of sexual excitement. ‘A very grave objection has been made to the use of the bicycle among women, which, if true, would induce us to be exceedingly cautious in ever suggesting this exercise. It has been said to beget or foster the habit of masturbation.’ Dickinson continued:

Thankfully, common sense seems to have prevailed, and although Dickinson knew of some women who arranged their saddles to maintain ‘constant friction over the clitoris and labia’, he did not believe this was commonplace. He argued that there was only a slight ‘danger of the habit being started or fostered’ when a woman took up cycling.^{11}

Despite several prominent doctors reassuring the public that women were not using bikes to masturbate, the mere suggestion they were was enough for cycling to be condemned by many as indecent.

In 1889, Canada’s first woman’s page editor, Kit Coleman, wrote:

In 1896, Charlotte Smith, the president of the American Rescue League, claimed that ‘bicycling by young women has helped swell the ranks of reckless girls who finally drift into the standing army of outcast women of the United States more than any other medium’. She went as far as to call the bicycle ‘the Devil’s advance agent’.^{13}

In order to try and maintain modesty, some companies issued ‘hygiene saddles’ with holes in to try and relieve ‘harmful pressure’ on a lady’s undercarriage. Some bikes came equipped with screens to conceal a lady’s ankles. But it wasn’t just the indelicate fact that a saddle must be sat upon that was cause for concern.

The bicycle also offered men and women the opportunity for romance and sexual adventure, which no doubt added to their erotic quality. Cycling meant couples could get away from home unchaperoned and easily overcome geographical restrictions to meet up. The freedom the bicycle offered made some suspicious that cycling was being used for ‘impure purposes’.^{14} Certainly, cycling romances were a hot topic in the late nineteenth century. The English periodical The Wheelwoman, for example, reported that fifteen engagements were announced in the days following a cycling club picnic, and declared ‘surely no one could possibly desire a better recommendation for cycling than this?’^{15}

It is hard to understand how anyone fell in love during a bike ride when doctors started to warn cyclists about a devastating condition called ‘bicycle face’. This terrible affliction affected men and women equally, but it was considered particularly upsetting for women. In 1897, Dr A. Shadwell described the symptoms of bicycle face thus: ‘set faces, eyes fixed before them, and an expression either anxious, irritable, or at best stony’.^{16} In 1897, the editor of Harper’s Magazine suggested ladies chew gum when riding as ‘chewing gum keeps the face mobile and prevents the form of that expression of anxiety that doctors tell us may grow in time to be an essential part of a lady bicyclist’s features’.^{17}

Thankfully, not all Victorians took this seriously and bicycle face became a long-running joke. Newspapers of the time are full of humorous poems and jokes about bicycle face, such as this one featured in the Derry Journal in 1895.

Those women who were prepared to risk bicycle face, damaging their ‘matrimonial organs of necessity’, cumming on a saddle and being accused of sneaking off for a quick ride, had another ‘indecent’ obstacle to overcome. It very quickly became apparent that if women wanted to ride a bike, then their dress had to change. The Victorian corset was not compatible with cycling. Victorian corsets restricted women’s waists to an ‘ideal’ circumference of 17–22 inches, which precluded anything more strenuous than embroidering doilies and fainting. In an effort to prevent women freeboobing it on their bikes, corset companies tried to sell ‘bicycle corsets’ that allowed the wearer to ‘ride with grace’. They didn’t catch on.

As well as ditching the corset, women started to view the miles of skirted crinoline, bustles and petticoats that they donned each day as a pain in the padded arse. In order to cycle safely, some women took to wearing knickerbockers and loose clothing. The knickerbockers were deeply shocking to the conservative Victorians as they forced a recognition that women had two legs and that they opened. The image of a woman sitting astride her bicycle, calves on show, her breasts unrestricted by a corset, and a saddle nestled between her legs was an undeniably sexual image. This presented a challenge to women who wanted to cycle comfortably and to avoid accusations of indecency.

In response to this, in 1881 the Rational Dress Society was formed in London, and opposing women’s restrictive clothing and cycling was right at the heart of it. Similar groups sprang up all over the world. Rather than viewing cycling outfits as indecent dress, these groups pushed for them to be accepted as ‘rational dress’. They emphasised the health and safety aspects of cycle wear, as well as pointing to the immoral and impractical nature of mainstream women’s fashions.

The feminist figure of the ‘new woman’ rose in the late nineteenth century. The new woman was independent, educated and outspoken. She challenged traditional notions of dress, marriage, gender and equality, and, of course, she rode a bike. The new woman positioned herself against the Victorian ‘Angel in the House’ version of femininity that was idealised throughout much of the nineteenth century. As a result, the new woman was frequently accused of wanting to be a man, and labelled a ‘grown-up tomboy’, or an ‘adult hoyden’.^{18}

Bicycling was held responsible for encouraging all manner of ‘masculine’ behaviours in women, such as smoking, drinking, swearing and (of course) promiscuity.^{19} The new woman also demanded entrance into traditionally male-dominated spaces, such as universities. When Cambridge University proposed granting women full admission to university in 1897, male students protested by dangling an effigy of a woman on a bicycle out of a window in Market Square.

At the heart of the hostility towards women cycling was a thinly veiled fear that traditional gender roles were being rejected. As women discarded demure dress, laughed at absurd medical quackery and embraced the independence the bike offered, they cycled out of the domestic and into the public world. As to the fears cycling could led to ‘sexual excitement’, women were able to disprove this themselves, simply by persisting. The subject of masturbation was shrouded in shame and embarrassment, and was not one your average woman would have voiced their opinion on publicly. But it was the women themselves who provided the evidence that they were not peaking while pedaling. The more women cycled without orgasming, the dafter alarmist doctors looked. It may have been a small victory, but it wrested control of the narrative around female sexuality away from the doctors, and allowed women to challenge it. Of course, there was some truth in the panic that cycling encouraged promiscuity, because it did allow men and women far greater freedom to sneak off, meet up and ring each other’s bells, but to that I can only say hurrah.

It was the First World War that really forced a change in attitudes towards women’s equality (sexual and otherwise), but the lady cyclists had paved the way in the preceding years. They risked ridicule and even violence to do so, but it was clearly worth it. As British writer Louise Jeye wrote in 1895:

Boys’ Toys ^{A History of the Sex Doll}

Humans are damn clever things, aren’t they? I am typing this chapter on a laptop that is streaming a podcast, my smartphone is within reach and it’s reasonable to assume that the coffee I am swigging is blessedly free from cholera. If I were writing this a few hundred years ago, it would be an entirely different scene. Not only would I have no computer, coffee or smartphone, but I might well have cholera, and what the hell am I doing thinking with my lady brain anyway? We have advanced enormously, and technology has been at the heart of that all the way along.

Technological advancements do not create new ideas so much as offer new ways to fulfil pretty basic human needs. Take, for example, sex robots. We are finally at a point where we have the technology to create a sex robot. They do not have artificial intelligence just yet, but they do have artificial tits and artificial vulvas. What’s more, they can stream your favourite playlist from Spotify out of their orifices while you get down to do the robot-nasty. They aren’t cheap though. An average model will set you back about £15,000, and that’s without including the cost of all the batteries and wet wipes you’ll be getting through.

The prospect of the sex robot has understandably rattled a few cages. An article published in the British Medical Journal of Sexual and Reproductive Health in 2018 painted a fairly bleak picture, pointing out that:

In early 2018, two hundred sex workers in Amsterdam protested the opening of more sex doll brothels, understandably pissed off at the threat such self-service poses to their livelihood. Feminist groups have protested against sex robot brothels in Paris, putting pressure on the city council to ban the hire of so-called Xdolls, on the grounds that they objectify and degrade women. And to be sure, the use of sex robots does raise some complex moral issues, but not new ones.

The sex doll is not a new phenomenon. Nor are fears that ‘real’ women are being replaced, or the concern that something deeply perverse and misogynistic is going on. Of course, dildos are ancient as well. In 2009, researchers in France excavated a 36,000-year-old bison horn penial carving now called ‘the Blanchard phallus’.^{2} And in 2015, archaeologists found a 28,000-year-old stone phallus in Germany.^{3} Generally, archaeologists are reluctant to call these objects ‘sex toys’ because for all we know they may be Palaeolithic door knockers. But we certainly can’t discount the possibility.

Agalmatophilia is a sexual attraction to a statue, doll or mannequin, and examples of this can be found throughout ancient literature. Even in the earliest records of agalmatophilia, we see the anxieties around objectifying and hating women that frame the sex robot debate today. The Roman poet Ovid (43 BC – AD 17), for example, tells the story of a sculptor called Pygmalion who ‘loathes women as wantons and vows never to marry’. Instead, Pygmalion devotes all his energy to sculpting the perfect woman from ivory and then falls desperately in love with his creation.

Pygmalion takes his lady to bed, buys her presents, decorates her with precious jewellery and begs the gods to make her real. Aphrodite eventually takes pity on him and grants his wish.

The statue of ‘Aphrodite of Knidos’ (or Cnidus) was sculpted by Praxiteles of Athens around the fourth century BC. She is said to be modelled on the courtesan Phryne and is one of the earliest representations of the female body in Greek history. Like the sex robots today, the statue was designed to be the perfect woman. According to Pliny the Elder, ‘a certain individual, it is said, became enamoured of this statue, and, concealing himself in the temple during the night, gratified his lustful passion upon it, traces of which are to be seen in a stain left upon the marble’.^{5}

The Pygmalion story of trying to create the perfect woman continues to inspire numerous cinematic parallels: My Fair Lady, Pretty Woman, The Stepford Wives, Mannequin, Weird Science, Miss Congeniality, etc. But one of the most important Pygmalion stories is E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann (1816), where the protagonist Nathaniel falls in love with Olympia, who is a doll-like automaton. Not only is the story one of the first depictions of a humanoid machine (robot), but it also caught the attention of several psychiatrists, most notably Sigmund Freud, who set about trying to understand why dolls are so damn creepy. Freud didn’t use the term ‘creepy’, he said the dolls were ‘uncanny’, arguing that the ‘uncanny’ is a ‘class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once very familiar’.^{6} Anything that provokes a sense of unease or fear because it distorts something that was once comforting or everyday is uncanny: monstrous mothers, slutty teddy bears, Children of the Corn, etc.

Perhaps it is this sense of uncanny that has provoked a backlash against the sex robots. The grossly exaggerated body of a woman, glassy-eyed and open-mouthed, caught somewhere between being alive and not alive, programmed to gratify the sexual whims of he who wields the remote control is an uncomfortable, nay uncanny, prospect. But things have been ‘uncanny’ long before anyone thought to hide a USB port in a rubber nipple.

English sexologist Havelock Ellis (1859–1939) also refers to Pygmalionism in volume four of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex (1905):

Pioneering psychiatrist and sexologist Iwan Bloch (1872–1922) also briefly explored sexual attraction to dolls in his work The Sexual Life of Our Time in its Relations to Modern Civilization (1905). He argued that the Pygmalion fantasy, or ‘Venus statuaria’, was closely linked to fantasies of necrophilia, and describes a how the ‘Pygmalionists’ flocked to brothels to masturbate over young women posed as statues, or even just statues of young women.^{8} Indeed, in his exposé of Parisian brothels, Les Maisons De Tolerance (1892), Louis Fiaux described how one elderly man visited a brothel ‘every week to worship, dressed in the costume of Pygmalion’ to masturbate over statues of Greek goddesses at a cost of 100 francs.^{9}

As well as some gentlemen seeking out some light granite relief, Bloch describes rubber and plastic ‘fornicatory dolls’ being sold in various catalogues as ‘Parisian rubber articles’. Though none survive today, Bloch describes these early sex dolls as being complete with extremely lifelike genitals: ‘Even the secretion of Bartholin’s glands is imitated, by means of a pneumatic tube filled with oil.’^{10} Bloch refers to two ‘erotic romances’ about rubber dolls to further illustrate how widespread this particular kink was at the turn of the twentieth century: Madame B’s La Femme Endormie (1899), and René Schwaeblé’s Les Détraquées de Paris (1904).^{11} Both texts fetishise the passive pliability of a doll when compared to the complexity of human women, offering some support for Bloch’s theories around necrophilia.

In La Femme Endormie, Paul Molaus is a middle-aged man who has sworn off romance, but still wants to have sex with women. Paul reasons that a doll will ‘always be compliant and silent, no matter how lewd the act he chose to perform’.^{12} The story has a very clever twist as even when Paul gets his doll (named Mea), he cannot control his jealousy and rages at the knowledge that the male creator of Mea was there before him. Paul feels humiliated by his own desire for the doll and angrily abuses her after he has orgasmed.

The moral of the story seems to be that Paul’s misogyny is not a response to being treated poorly by real women, but is a result of his own sense of inadequacy.

René Schwaeblé’s short story ‘Homunculus’ in Les Détraquées de Paris is less sophisticated but also eroticises the lifelessness of the dolls. ‘Homunculus’ tells the story of Doctor P., who builds artificial women for ‘those who do not like women’. The good doctor explains: ‘with my dolls there is never any blackmail, or jealousy, argument or illness… They are always ready, always compliant, no blackmail, no scenes of jealousy, no arguments, no discomfort! They are always ready, always docile.’^{14}

Despite sex dolls having a long history, there have been hardly any scientific studies into sex dolls and their owners. A quick keyword search through the leading scientific literature databases for ‘sex/love doll’ results in only one paper, and that one is about how little scientific research there is on sex dolls.^{15} Sex robots have garnered slightly more attention, but it remains a very under-researched subject.^{16} Most research on sex dolls and sex robots comes from the humanities, and is concerned with the moral, legal and social implications.^{17} There is next to no primary research data with which to try and understand the use of sex dolls.

The early sexologists were convinced having sex with dolls was a type of necrophilia, but the limited research we have suggests otherwise. In her (as yet) unpublished Masters thesis, Sarah Valverde interviewed sixty-one sex-doll users, recruited via various online forums.^{18} This piece of research revealed that the majority of doll owners were white, educated, middle-aged males, who did not experience sexual dysfunction with human partners. ‘The majority of doll-owners report above average to excellent satisfaction levels for sexual stimulation when using their dolls, which indicates sex doll use is an enjoyable experience.’^{19} Obviously, more research is needed, but it seems sex-doll use is not a paraphilia, like necrophilia – it’s just a bit of fun.[27] But, speaking of necrophilia. There have been some unsettling examples of people turning human women into dolls after they had died, which is a whole other level of uncanny.

Martin van Butchell (1735–1814) was an English dentist who decided the best way to mourn his wife’s death in 1775 was to embalm her and set up a pay-per-view enterprise. Dr William Hunter and Dr William Cruikshank injected the body with various preservatives and dyes to give colour to her dead cheeks. Her eyes were replaced with glass ones and she was dressed in a very expensive gown. The poor woman was then propped up in the window of Butchell’s dental practice to be gawked over by the paying public, where she remained until his second wife objected.^{20}

One of the most famous courtesans of the nineteenth century was La Païva (1819–1884). At the height of her powers she held influence over some of the most powerful men in Europe. Her final and richest husband, Count Henckel von Donnersmarck, was so devastated by her death that he had La Païva’s body embalmed and kept it in his attic, much to the surprise of his second wife, who had been unaware of her husband’s little memento stashed upstairs.^{21} All of which makes having sex with a rubber doll look rather tame.

About the same time as Freud was thrashing out his essay on uncanny dolls, Austrian artist Oskar Kokoschka (1886–1980) put the theory into practice. When Alma Mahler ended her relationship with Kokoschka, he did what any stable, well-adjusted adult would do, and commissioned doll-maker Hermine Moos to make a life-sized replica of his ex-lover. Kokoschka gave very detailed instructions for Moos to follow.

Sadly, Kokoschka did not get his Pygmalion ending, as the resulting doll more closely resembled the Gruffalo than it did Alma Mahler. Moos deviated from the instructions and covered the doll’s body in fur and feathers. Devastated, Kokoschka took several photographs, immortalised his doll in a painting, and then decapitated her in the garden.

One urban legend you may have heard is that the Nazis manufactured sex dolls to try and staunch the epidemic of syphilis that was decimating their troops, the so-called ‘Model Borghild’ project. As much fun as this story is, there is very little corroborating evidence to support it. In fact, the only evidence we have for this story is an enthusiastic exposé by a journalist calling himself Norbert Lenz.^{23} Sadly, none of his claims can be verified and no one has heard anything from Norbert since he posted his extraordinary claims. The Nazi sex doll is a historical hoax. But the Germans did give us one enduring super-sexualised dolly: Barbie.

I know that Barbie isn’t a sex doll, per se. But with her enormous boobs, kissy face, tiny waist and feet bent to take a stiletto heel, there can be little doubt that she is a sexual doll. What’s more, Barbie is based on a German cartoon character called Bild Lilli, created in the late 1940s by Reinhard Beuthien for the Hamburg-based tabloid Bild-Zeitung. If you were feeling euphemistic, you could describe Lilli as a ‘good-time girl’, but it’s pretty clear she is a high-class call girl. Lilli is a woman on the make and determined to use her considerable charms to relieve rich men of their assets. Lilli became so popular that she was immortalised as a saucy, novelty doll. As Barbie historian Robin Gerber wrote, ‘Men got Lilli dolls as gag gifts at bachelor parties, put them on their car dashboard, dangled them from the rearview mirror, or gave them to girlfriends as a suggestive keepsake.’^{24}

Although marketed to adults, the Lilli dolls were very popular with children as well. When Ruth Handler, a co-founder of the Mattel toy company, was on holiday in Switzerland in 1956, her fifteen-year-old daughter, Barbie, fell in love with the Lilli doll and bought three. Three years later Handler unveiled the Barbie doll at the American International Toy Fair in New York. Since her debut, Barbie has had over 150 careers, but sadly she has never returned to her roots, and ‘Sex Work Barbie’ has yet to hit the shops.

According to Anthony Ferguson there are three types of contemporary sex doll: vinyl, latex and silicon.^{25} Your bog-standard, blow-up vinyl doll, beloved by stag parties around the world, started being mass-produced and advertised in American pornographic magazines in the 1960s.^{26} Until 1987, it was illegal to import obscene or indecent items into the UK. But when Conegate Ltd attempted to import blow-up dolls from Germany in 1984, they found themselves caught up in a lengthy legal battle that went all the way to the European Court of Justice. Finally, the Treaty of Rome was evoked, and the British courts had to relent and allow the sex dolls in.

Latex dolls are more expensive than the inflatable vinyl, though arguably not as portable. Latex dolls are more realistic, with glass eyes, wigs, and moulded faces, genitals and extremities. These dolls will set you back a couple of hundred pounds.

The top-of-the-range sex dolls are made from silicon and will set you back anywhere between £5,000 and £20,000, depending on which accessories you opt for. They have flexible joints, very detailed faces, breasts, pubic hair, etc., and detachable genitals to make washing them easier. Many of them are built around a metal skeleton that gives the doll a weight of a ‘real woman’.

Silicon-covered sex robots are currently being manufactured by a range of companies in the US and Japan, including California-based Realbotix, who are leading the race with their Harmony 3.0. Harmony is still in development, but at the time of writing, she can talk, move and answer basic questions. She can’t yet respond to touch, but that is the long-term goal of Harmony’s creator and Realbotix founder Matt McMullen – that and a self-lubricating vagina.^{27}

Sex robots like Harmony have certainly caught the public imagination, and have inspired a host of debate around the ethics, practicalities and feasibility of humans having sex with robots. But these are not new debates. Humans have been having sex with machinery for some time now – the only difference is that vibrators don’t ask how your day was, or require their own wardrobe. Sex robots will not replace real people. They are a novelty and no doubt an interesting experience, but sex toys are as old as sex itself, and haven’t yet replaced human touch, connection and intimacy. Toys are fun, but they are no substitute for the real deal – for a one thing, no human woman has ever started buffering during a blow-job.