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 o