Edinburgh International Science Festival - History of the Vibrator

Down with the evil penis! End the vile tyranny of the phallus! You may have been tempted to run screaming into the streets and begin your own private uprising had you attended Vivienne Parry’s lecture on the history of the vibrator, which began not so much as the life story of one of humanity's most cherished and secretive inventions but as a damning condemnation of male privilege and mistreatment of women.

The former Tomorrow's World presenter was once asked by Good Housekeeping to review forty vibrators and in the course of researching the article came across some startling facts about vibrators in days of yore and the social and political ideology behind them.

Far from the fairly harmless sex toy we might think of today, they stemmed from the era of “hysteria”; that dreadful malady thought to afflict 75% of all women until it was finally done away with by the medical community in (shockingly) 1952. The general consensus from the male thinkers of the time was that hysteria, a catchall for just about any deviation from the wifely norm but including symptoms like breathlessness, fainting spells and other generalities, was caused by a “wandering womb”. This bizarre if not frankly miraculous occurrence would rather understandably cause all kinds of problems and discomfort to the lady in question. And it was a serious issue at the time too: a woman could be diagnosed with hysteria by a medical expert and find herself institutionalized.

Key to Parry’s research is the notion that the “cure”, essentially masturbation, was totally in the hands of the male medical establishment and not something that any respectable woman would even consider herself. The early vibrator was born as a medical tool used in what was popularly viewed as a joyless routine procedure in much the same way as a plumber might unclog a drain. It wasn’t until the advent of electrification towards the turn of the last century that women could take matters into their own hands and the modern vibrator was born.

Having dealt with this fascinating backstory and the entertaining and lunatic quackery surrounding hysteria ‘cures’, she went on to run through the steady evolution of vibrator design and it was there the argument seemed to lose focus.

Parry posits that the traditional phallus shape popular in the sexual explosion of the 1960s and 70s equates male sublimation of women and, rather shakily, as more women became involved in the medical community and research the design was eventually perfected into a “penis free” form. In a sense finally freeing women from male tyranny. But in emphasizing the vibrators political origin, she bypassed the significance of the traditional design to less heteronormative groups in society who were also part of the great sexual revolution, and their continuing influence in modern designs enjoyed by men and women. In fact the focus of the lecture was strictly on the impact of the vibrator to women who like men.

Limiting the scope is not in itself a crime, but after such an entertaining and informative beginning from the highly skilled presenter, it was hard not to feel that she was still under the sway of the family-orientated Aunty Beeb, and the one-sided political reading at the end a somewhat shallow headline grabber for the likes of OK and Take a Break.