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tedious and exhausting. Because clitoral stimulation requires some skill and the level of dexterity among doctors varied widely, some sessions took as long as an hour. Long-suffering medics delegated the job to mid-wives or assistants whenever possible.
    Then American technological ingenuity came to the rescue. Not long after the invention of electricity, the electromechanical vibrator was introduced in the 1880s, and doctors were quick to see its potential.
    Using a vibrator, a doctor could bring a woman to orgasm in only five to ten minutes, eliminating the fatigue factor and making it possible to see more patients every day. For a period of about thirty years, vibrators were a staple in many doctors’ offices, and countless women received regular treatments.
    But just after the turn of the twentieth century, two developments put a stop to this lucrative business. First, several American companies started producing low-cost vibrators for home use and advertised them in mainstream women’s magazines. (It was in these magazines that Rachel Maines first stumbled upon this phenomenon, leading her to uncover the rest of the story.) Spotting these ads, lots of women must have said to W h a m , B a m , T h a n k Yo u , M a ’ a m 3 9
    themselves, “Why pay for visits to my doctor when I can administer the same treatment in the privacy of my own home?”
    Second, around 1920, a number of stag movies were released that featured the vibrator in raunchy sex scenes.
    The stag movies stripped away the social camouflage and revealed that what all those doctors were doing to their patients (and what some women were doing at home) was sexual . Doctors stopped using vibrators to treat women for hysteria and didn’t go back to the more laborious procedure they had used before, because obviously that was sexual, too. Women who were using vibrators realized that they had purchased a sex toy and were (gasp!) masturbating . Women brought up to believe that masturbation was harmful and wrong threw away their machines with considerable embarrassment, and advertisements for vibrators disappeared from women’s magazines.
    At this point in the early 1920s, when the medical
    “treatment” of orgasm-deprived women was brought to a halt, Americans had arrived at a sexual crossroads.
    Would the sorry state of Wham, Bam, Thank You, Ma’am lovemaking change? Would people find ways to improve lovemaking techniques now that they knew more about the role of the clitoris and the importance of regular orgasms to women’s health and happiness?
    Would men stop defining women’s sexual unhappiness 4 0
    T h e G r e a t S e x S e c r e t as an illness? And would women speak up more force-fully for equal satisfaction in the bedroom?
    No, no, no, and no. The evidence is that few people integrated the new insights into their sex lives and few women were willing and able to be more assertive about their sexual needs. Continued problems with open and honest communication about sex—and the stubborn-ness of the old paradigms in people’s heads—prevented this from happening. How long did this state of affairs continue? Here are three pieces of evidence that give us some indication:
    • In 1935, a feisty Viennese woman wrote to Sigmund Freud complaining about men’s unsatisfactory lovemaking techniques. Freud’s response was very telling; he blamed the asymmetrical designs of human sexual anatomy and threw up his hands about what men (or women) might do to rectify the situation:
    Dear Madam,
    I think that you are right that most men are egotistical and ignorant in their sexual life and don’t care enough for the sexual satisfaction of the female. The main fault, however, is yet not on the side of man. Much more of it seems there is a neglect on the side of nature, which is interested only that the purpose of the sexual act is W h a m , B a m , T h a n k Yo u , M a ’ a m 4 1
    being attained while it shows indifference as to whether the woman gets full