Hysteria is in Theaters!

Remember that movie about Hysteria that I mentioned?

It’s in theaters!

Go see it and let me know what you think.  My friend Spring will convince you:

Hysteria, as many of you probably know, was commonly recognized by Western medical professionals as a legitimate disease up until 1952. Women were diagnosed with hysteria if they displayed any of a wide array of symptoms including irritability, fluid retention, trouble-making, having too much or too little sexual desire, being too hungry, and on. Like me, pretty much every day. The common treatment became genital massage, and such was prescribed in early gynecological literature dating back to Hippocrates’ work around 330 B.C. Women would go to doctors, get rubbed off by the physician or his (physicians were most always male up until the 19^th century) nurse or assistant. And women went religiously. It was a cycle, of course: repress, pay doctor to orgasm, repeat. The problem for doctors was, as Rachel P. Maines explains in an excellent piece of scientific history, manually stimulating the clitoris of a female hysteric was hard work and could take quite some time. Doctors had other patients to see and money to make, so when the invention of the electric vibrator came along, doctors were, physically and financially, relieved.

Don’t forget to visit Spring’s blog and click on her Rachel P. Maines link.

Lady Irony Strikes

…The irony for me being that not having to look for a job constantly anymore has actually left me with less time to update than before.  If only someone would pay me to post.