yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

Birth of the Vibrator | Original Sin: Sex


2m read
·Nov 11, 2024

[Music] From the turn of the 20th century, sex has been literally electrified by technology. One of the first five electric gadgets, besides the sewing machine, fan, toaster, and tea kettle, was a plug-in sexual stimulator. The vibrator was a cure-all for a series of mysterious complaints collectively called hysteria that plagued Victorian era women.

Any woman who was experiencing stress, any woman frankly who was violating Victorian gender norms, who was too uppity, who was too confident, who was dissatisfied with her husband, she would very likely be diagnosed as hysterical. There was a sort of a philosophy of medicine that hysteria emanated from a block in women's sex organs. These physicians would actually manually stimulate the women.

Crazy initially, the procedure called for a doctor to massage the clitoris to the point of orgasm, thereby relieving the built-up pressure thought to cause hysteria. It was not considered fallacious in any way; it was considered completely modern, fine to the Victorian medicine and the treatment of hysteria. If the doctor did that today, he or she should be arrested and escorted away immediately.

It was so impossible for these Victorian physicians to imagine that women were sexual, that they had a sex drive. But the treatment fails if the doctor doesn't have the right touch or stamina. I actually think the doctors probably weren't that good at bringing women to orgasm. When they were helping women come to orgasm, their hands got tired, like a lot of manual tasks that are difficult and possibly onerous.

It was mechanized, and so was born the vibrator. One early version was a tabletop model designed for the doctor's office and powered by a steam engine. Then, in 1902, Hamilton Beach introduced the first personal vibrator, just the fifth domestic appliance to be electrified. [Music]

More Articles

View All
Applying Einstein velocity addition | Special relativity | Physics | Khan Academy
Now let’s apply the formula we came up in the last video, sometimes known as the Einstein velocity addition formula, and we’ll see that it’s a pretty neat thing. So let’s say, this is once again me floating in space. My frame of reference is just the S f…
Things You Don't Need To Be Successful
All right. So a lot of people aren’t going to agree with this list because honestly, they’re looking for excuses. But reality is, there are things you don’t really need in order to be successful. Even though it might seem that way. We know this from perso…
Warren Buffett's 7 Rules to be a Great Investor
Price people are really strange on that. I mean, they cause most people, most, most, your listeners are savers, and that means they’ll be net buyers, and they should want the stock market to go down. They should want to buy at a lower price, but they’ve g…
Video Game Clichés IN REAL LIFE -- Episode 1
Hey everyone, it’s Lacy, and this is BTW on Vsauce. What’s on the plate for this week? How about some video game clichés? Whether it’s save points, health meters, three lives, or certain things that have shown up through generation after generation of vi…
Improvising in Africa. Warning - GROSS - Smarter Every Day 28
Hey, it’s me, Destin. So, a lot of you may not know, because you’re new to Smarter Every Day, but I have a sister who lives in West Africa as a peace corps volunteer, and I went and helped her teach math and science. Every once in a while, I like to uploa…
Percent from fraction models
So we’re told the square below represents one whole. So, this entire square is a whole. Then they ask us, what percent is represented by the shaded area? So why don’t you pause this video and see if you can figure that out? So, let’s see. The whole is di…