1. How can a book about hypnotism, in which women seem to be orgasming every other page, be so boring?
2. Honestly, did people spend from 1790-1890 making women orgasm in public, but pretending like they didn’t know what they were doing? I swear, if you wrote “A Secret Orgasming Woman History of the 18th and 19th Century” it would be just like regular history but with a “yes, they were orgasming” every time a woman went into a fit, had a small seizure, and then languished around in a state of contentment, which seems to be how women spend the majority of their time outside the house.
Don’t get me wrong. I’d rather live now than in 1790, for sure. But, seriously, if all women were doing is going from one unrecognized orgasm to the next, I may have to rethink that.
Like this:
Filed under: America how can I write a holy litany in your silly moo
Hmm. Maybe corsets and bussels were more than just fashion
You know, I’m starting to understand why women had 12-18 kids back then. No birth control and a lot of men doing weird crap designed to bring you to orgasm.
From my understanding on readings of the period, female orgasm was variously considered unhealthy, sinful, a sign of mental illness or all of the above in certain communities. And of course there were no porn movies or any sort of educational material. So many folks just didn’t even recognize what they were seeing as being part of sexual experience.
Coble, this is one of the ways in which the book sucks, even though it’s about an incredibly interesting phenomenon. He’s got these great big excerpts from primary sources and in those excerpts, it seems to me that the dynamic is that the women do not recognize these as orgasms and that Mesmer clearly does not. But, it also seems to me pretty blatantly obvious that the doctors who are examining the legitimacy of Mesmer’s claims do, indeed, recognize this as orgasm and are trying to say so in their report without coming out and being crude about it. It seems to me obvious that this is immediately why they become concerned about whether Mesmer is spending time alone with his patients.
But I don’t know if I’m reading that dynamic right or just projecting my modern assumptions. One would think this would be the moment when the historian who’s writing the book and who clearly has a shit-ton of knowledge of his subject and who says in the preface that he knows he’s writing this book for the general population and not people who already know about this would offer some context through which I, the reader, could understand what I’m reading.
But no!
And the whole first part of the book (or at least as far as I am in it) continues in this same vein. Was Mesmer paranoid or were people legitimately out to get him? The author leaves it up for me–who knows nothing about the period of the people–to decide. Were the parents of patents who accused Mesmer of improprieties on to something? Was he molesting patients? Is that why they lived with him? Or was it not strange for patents to live with their doctors? I don’t know. Why is it being left up to me to decide?
The book came out in ’99, so I suspect it’s just the fashion at the time–history writing as a recitation of facts. But it’s really frustrating. I feel like anything I’m learning from it, I’m struggling to learn on my own, even though it’s apparent that the author must have very informed opinions he’s just holding back.
he book came out in ’99, so I suspect it’s just the fashion at the time–history writing as a recitation of facts.
I’m beginning to suspect that’s probably true. I’m back on a history-reading jag after taking some time away. It seemed for awhile there that these books I was getting were sort of just “here is all the information I collected on this topic. ”
I love information and I love history but I really prefer my history to come with insights provided by the historian. Even if I disagree it gives me something meatier to chomp on than “so this happened.”
Thank God for the new Chernow biographies and the Charles Mann books. They seem to be bringing history and historical biography back to the place where the author takes all the facts she found and weaves them into a compelling narrative.
I’m glad you’re taking this bullet for me because when you said you were reading this I was thinking I’d give it a shot now that I’m back into history reading. But no thank you.
Part of me also wonders if the book’s author is just really a bit puritannical himself. Because one book I read–I’ll see if I can find the title–about five years ago was really blatant about how Mesmerism was masturbation and that was a key component to its popularity and possibly also the root of a lot of the fashion of spiritualism. Damn. Now I need to find that title. Off to google.
Aha. I think this was it. Reading the snippet on Google books this sounds like the one I was thinking of:
Modern Sex Magick: Secrets of Erotic Spirituality by Donald Michael Kraig
The Mesmerism part is not the whole book obviously, but he addresses it by way of providing a foundation for his work. (I personally found the historical information more interesting, but that’s just me. )
Oh, I also really loved this book. I read it more for its treatment of mesmerism as medical history (which is why I read it) but it goes into great detail about how mesmerism laid the foundation for modern psychiatry.
Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain by Alison Winter
I was just going to skip ahead to the part where he addresses spiritualism, but I’m apparently going to have to know what somnambulism is and how it is like and differs from what Spiritualists do and that’s in the chapters standing between me and the information I need.
I don’t even think this guy’s a bad writer or anything. It’s just like “God, TELL ME SOMETHING!!!! Interpret this crap for me!!”