The Technology of Orgasm: “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction by Rachel P. Maines Baltimore, MD:  Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999,  180 pp.

Signs of the times! Rachel Maines's delightful and clever book, subtitled “Hysteria,” the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction, was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in its Studies in the History of Technology series, and has received wide praise in the popular press, including two reviews in The New York Times. So what? So here we are at the intersection, once again, of what is knowable and what is told to us, not necessarily the same thing. Good popular science writing is ultimately revisionist history of revisionist history. What is noteworthy about Maines's book (apart from its angry feminist charm and its rich supply of anecdotes and illustrations) is that it is published at this particular time in our cultural evolution, a marker of where we have been and where we may now be ready to go.

It is within easy memory of readers of this review that a psychoanalytic shibboleth held (until the recent sea-change of revisions and expansions of earlier analytic beliefs) that women who were psychosexually mature had moved from (mere) clitoral orgasms, if any at all, to vaginal orgasms. Indeed, one marker of successful analysis for a hysterical woman used to be her “growth” beyond her simple sensate pleasure, using her clitoris as if it were a penis,