"It wasn't sexual at all."

Rachel Maines' book on the history of the vibrator won the American Historical Association's Herbert Feis Prize a few years ago. Just in case you missed it:

Maines' highly original book discusses a forgotten chapter in late 19th- and early 20th-century medical history, when an assortment of women's maladies were commonly diagnosed by the male medical profession as "hysteria" or "pelvic hyperemia" -- congestion of the genitalia. Maines documents how doctors of that era routinely employed an assortment of vibrators to treat the so-called ailment, regularly performing "vulvular massage" on their female patients to "relieve tension." They performed the task in their offices as a standard medical procedure and considered it a chore. Initially they inherited the job because of 19th-century religious proscriptions against self-masturbation. "Most of them did it because they felt it was their duty," said Maines. "It wasn't sexual at all."

Uh huh.

As I recall, somebody invented the vibrator because the poor long-suffering doctors were getting repetitive motion injuries from treating all their regulars.