Dear Too,
As the old chestnut goes, relationships are about compromise, but if I’m reading your generous interpretation correctly, you’re proposing having fewer orgasms to appease your boyfriend’s—a man who seems to believe his virility is directly related to his exclusive involvement in your pleasure during intercourse—insecurity. This insecurity is leading you to speculate about an addiction to orgasm. If it wasn’t for the fact that women were dispatched regularly to doctors to get jacked off with vibrators at this time in history,
I might make some jocund remark like, “what are we, in the Victorian period?” I have two questions:
(1) Do you think your boyfriend would be willing to suppress his own orgasmic potential to appease your irrational and selfish insecurity?
(2) Would you want him to?
While you’re mulling that over, let’s have a look at the history of women’s orgasm
and its connection to electric stimulation.
Since the time of Hippocrates (450 BC) to the early part of the 20th century, doctors systematically masturbated women to climax with no purported consideration whatsoever to its sexual implication or its relationship to a husband’s manhood. This was simply deemed an effective cure for the various ailments from which women suffered—all given stuffy medical names but all likely just characteristics of sexual ignorance and frustration—and miraculously it seemed to work. Well duh. As every gal knows, nothing brightens you up quite like a rush of blood to the clit. This “treatment,” which sometimes took up to an hour, was made more efficient in the late 1800’s with the advent of the vibrator, which quickly became available for home use. Rachel Maines writes in her book The Technology of Orgasm (which she began as she was researching a history of needlepoint and found ads for these items in the backs of vintage needlepoint magazines) that the vibrator was the fifth electrical appliance to be introduced into the home, “after the sewing machine and long before the electric iron” and that “by 1917, there were more vibrators than toasters in American homes.”
Women’s orgasmic relationships with vibrators existed unfettered for years before men developed any widespread insecurity around them, and this is what is really interesting to me, how it predates it by concept. It seems men really only got uppity about these types of appliances when female pleasure became topical. It was fine for women to be “treated” under professional care in a non-sexual environment, but as soon as it became about sex, it became about the male ego (though you could argue ego was simply transferred from doctor to husband). Since historically men have needed to control female sexuality, suddenly they found themselves with a foe.
In my experience, cultivating rival relationships with sex toys is a sure way to impair sexual communication and growth, and what it also means is your boyfriend will be slow to know the pleasures he can experience with them too. Butt plugs, vibration on testicles, nipple clamps—we use many forms of technology, simple or complex, to enhance our lives. Functioning without them does not necessarily indicate or facilitate a deeper connection and deliberately excluding them can actually have the opposite effect. Because your boyfriend chooses to set these parameters, he’s forcing you to question and curb your desire. As examples of manhood go, that’s a pretty shoddy one.
