The Changing Face of Sex. Wayne P. Anderson PhD
good sexual standard as a basis for laws was also supported by many in the medical profession. One major player in this game was John Harvey Kellogg, who ran the Adventist Battle Creek Sanitarium and Health Spa established to promote holistic health. He had some very progressive ideas about diet and exercise along with a very negative attitude toward sexual behavior.
He and his brother William invented the process for making cornflakes with the goal of lowering sex drive. John Harvey believed that the eating of meat increased one’s sexual desires and cornflakes was a good substitute. William, on the other hand, saw the commercial potential of cornflakes especially with a little sugar added, and he and John Harvey split up over this.
John Harvey went on to write Plain Facts for Young and Old (1881), a book that is loaded with myths about the terrible effects of masturbation, birth control and too-frequent intercourse.
A fictionalized story of his life is given in the book and movie The Road to Wellsville. He believed many diseases were caused by sexual intercourse and claimed that in their 40 years of marriage he and his wife had never had sexual intercourse. He advocated putting carbolic acid on the clitoris of girls to prevent “harmful” female masturbation.
Similar information is given in William Walling’s Sexology (1904). The last paragraph on female masturbation begins, “We could give facts almost without number in reported cases, to show the prevalence and destructive nature of this vice among girls in our own country,but we forbear; the subject is painful and revolting even to contemplate. We believe we have said enough to terrify parents into the needful precautions against it.”
Physicians providing masturbation to treat hysteria
What I find really mind twisting about this extremely negative attitude is that masturbation was used as a treatment for the common problem of female hysteria by physicians of the time. What in the world did they think they were doing?
In the last half of the 19th century many women suffered from “female hysteria,” a condition that involved a number of vague, but chronic complaints probably related to the society’s heavy repression of normal sexual desires.
Sleeplessness, nervousness, and irritability were the main symptoms and were found to be successfully treated by the physician massaging the woman’s clitoris.With the massage the woman would have a sudden seizure and sense of relief of the symptoms. Since women were not supposed to have sexual feelings, the doctors did not believe it was an orgasm.
Again it is hard to understand how doctors could be so strongly against masturbation but fail to recognize that was what they were doing. It also leaves the question that since it was such a simple treatment, why did doctors not train the husband to do it at home? Or even why did not the woman suggest to the husband that he could do the treatment? Go figure. For hysteria unrelieved by husbandly lust, and for widows, single and unhappily married women, doctors advised horseback riding, which in some cases provided enough clitoral stimulation to trigger orgasm.
An interesting aside is that performing the manipulation of the clitoris was often a stressful procedure for the physician and his fingers got tired, thus the invention of the electric vibrator as a labor saving treatment aid. Vibrators became an immediate hit. Their use produced the seizure quickly, and in the early 20th century women found they could treat themselves; ads appeared in the Sears & Roebuck catalogue offering a neat compact vibrator with three applicators that was useful and satisfactory for home service for $5.95.
As I write this there is an ad on television where the bride-to-be is very happy because she received three vibrators as shower presents. (For more on the history of vibrators, see Maines, The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ The Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction, 1999).
Sexual acts leading to pathology
When I took my first internship in a psychiatric hospital in 1954, most of the psychiatrists had a copy of Psychopathia Sexualis (1886) by Krafft-Ebing on their desks or in their bookshelves. Besides information from his own patients and those of colleagues he did forensic work for the courts that brought him into contact with a wider variety of pathologies. One of his goals was to show the court that these were medical (that is, psychiatric problems) and not legal problems.
Krafft-Ebing had a number of concepts we would consider very up-to-date today. For example, he saw normal men as attracted to certain features of a woman that he called fetishes that we have reconceptualized as being part of their love maps that attract them to one woman rather than another. He was also very aware of the influence of odors on passion and sexual arousal, treating these individual’s reactions as if they were normal. We have the same concept today except we label the odors pheromones.
Despite the fact his background in sexual aberrations was deep and that he had written the book primarily for physicians, Psychopathia Sexualis was one of the main vehicles for spreading the doctrine of sex as a disease.
Krafft-Ebing took the stance that it was normal for a young couple to fall in love,get married and in the early days of the marriage have occasional sex, mainly to have children. The sex he expects in a normal marriage is penis in vagina in missionary position. In his works he does not indicate any other sexual behavior that he has any sympathy for.
His book is loaded with case studies of fetishes, homosexuality, sadism and masochism. Although his work is treated as scientific, it is filled with examples of hereditary factors and moral degeneracy as precursors of abnormal behavior. The descriptions of the various sexual aberrations are detailed, and I suspect for many of us repugnant. On the other hand, it is certainly a great introduction and desensitization for therapists in training who may have to work with sadists and sexual torturers.
He is another of the “experts” of the period pushing masturbation as the beginning of abnormal sexual behavior and various health problems. He espouses certain behaviors as facts, such as masturbation, and where many pathologies start—similar to what was told to us by the coach in my seventh grade gym class as a warning against doing it. In Krafft-Ebing’s view, even energetic love play may lead to dire consequences. The simple tussling and the gentle love bite, if not contained, could lead to lust murder.
Even clothing was anti-sexual.
Along with the culture’s choosing ignorance as the best policy in dealing with women’s sexuality was the clothing of the time that was restraining, giving a false image of what an uncovered female body looked like and preventing any exposure of body parts, even the ankle. The central item was a tight corset that caused some women to faint easily and gave pregnant women problems. The corset was combined with a high neckline and many layers of undergarments and skirts that dragged on the floor.They certainly were not the kind of clothes that made for casual sex.
All of this is not to say that some couples had not discovered how to have a satisfying sex life for both members of the couple. There were women who were orgasmic and enjoyed sex; forms of birth control were available and used particularly by the upper classes. But fear and ignorance were the reining forces of the day for a large number of women.
The over-control of information about birth control contributed to the fears of women about pregnancy, particularly lower class women who did not have access to this information. Having one child after another led many to resist or resent sex. Pregnancy was dangerous with a high death rate, especially if the woman went to the hospital to deliver, and even more dangerous if she attempted an abortion.
Given the level of ignorance about sex and women’s orgasms or lack thereof and the support of this ignorance by those who formed and supported cultural norms, what happened that finally allowed most women to discover their sexuality?
Henry Havelock Ellis steps into the melee.
It turns out it was a long battle with strong legal action being taken against those who joined the battle on the side of open information about sexual matters.One of the first of these was a British physician, Henry Havelock Ellis. He states that at the age of 16 he decided his lifework