By the 1800s women were increasingly diagnosed with hysteria, the treatment for which was a hysterical paroxysm. Today, we call that an orgasm

By the 1800s women were increasingly diagnosed with hysteria, the treatment for which was a hysterical paroxysm. Today, we call that an orgasm.

Doctors eventually got tired of stimulating genitals manually, hence the "need" for alternative ways, and the sex toy was invented. 

Take a fascinating visual history tour of “female hysteria” and the sex toys used to treat it by clicking the link in our bio.

To put it simply, female hysteria was an umbrella diagnosis doctors used to label women they considered, in any way, psychologically "unstable."

The idea of female hysteria was around for centuries, but it reached the height of its diagnostic popularity at the turn of the 19th century, and it was only in 1952 the term was finally declassified as a legitimate psychological disorder. In the end, of course, it turned out to be complete and utter horse sh*t.

It goes all the way back to ancient Greece in the fifth and fourth centuries BC.

Plato (yeah, that Plato) blamed it on women's uteruses. He wrote that a woman's uterus "is like an animal within an animal,” and that it is constantly "blocking passages, obstructing breathing and causing disease." And this notion of the "wandering uterus" remained a part of western medicine and philosophy for centuries.

Basically, people thought the uterus behaved like Will Smith and Martin Lawrence in the movie “Bad Boys” — they meant well and you needed them when the time came, but they were dangerously unpredictable and caused tremendous and random property damage.

In fact, the term “hysteria” is derived from the greek word for uterus (or: hystera).

So, when those Victorian doctors used their super-serious-doctor-voices to explain to some lady who was really sad about essentially being sold into marital slavery at 18 that she had “female hysteria,” they were actually saying: “Sorry lady, but you have an acute case of Uterus Brain.”

Oh, and by the way, if a woman had an actual disorder -- such as schizophrenia, or even epilepsy -- that was also just labeled as hysteria and would therefore be treated the exact same way (meaning: so, so f*cking terribly).

Yeah, there were over 2,000 years of this insanity.

Treatments for hysteria varied over the years, but in "extreme" cases women were sent to insane asylums or forced to have surgical hysterectomies (having their uteruses cut out).

The fact that for thousands of years men just labeled a woman with this ridiculous umbrella diagnosis if she had the guile to be anything but constantly cheerful, staggeringly beautiful, more fertile than the Nile river, and 100 percent DTF all the time is so tragically indicative of how psychotically spoiled and willfully ignorant men have been throughout history.

This pseudo-disorder's primary accomplishment was that it made misogyny clinical. It classified the very act of being a woman as a disease. It's heartbreaking, and we need to talk about it way more.

OK, now that you are all sufficiently depressed and are searching for a pillow to furiously stab, let's discuss masturbation.

Masturbation, guys! Fun! Don't be sad! Jizzing is fun! OK, are you back with me?

Until the early 20th century, women were told (by men who knew way better than they did) that it was simply impossible for them to have orgasms.

Yeah, the female orgasm apparently just was not a thing.

So basically a woman was expected to have sex with her husband whenever he wanted to (or else she'd be hysteric), but she couldn't act like she enjoyed it (or else she'd be hysteric) or even expect to enjoy it (because orgasms weren't a thing). Lovely.

Even though hysteria had been around forever, near the turn of the 19th century it was suddenly rampant. It was trending hard. Remember beanie babies? Hysteria was like that.

Around this point, people surmised three quarters of ALL WOMEN displayed hysteric symptoms — which seems absurd, but really shouldn't, considering it was pretty much impossible not to.

And it was during this period of hysteria-mania one old treatment for the disorder got hugely popular.