Hysteria (movie rec) [View all]

Watched this earlier today, and it is terrific, and having it be a romcom instead of a drama or biopic makes it more interesting in a way. It stars Felicity Jones, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Rupert Everett and Hugh Dancy.

It is about the invention of the vibrator, which was a medical device.

For those who don't know about this: basically everything "wrong" with a women was caused by "hysteria," an ailment of her uterus, EVERYTHING. One way to help treat and cure women of this was to have them go to a doctor and, to be blunt about it, have their clitoris rubbed until they had an orgasm, which was not recognized as the same as a male orgasm (ie sexual in nature), but was medically referred to as a Paroxysmal Convulsion.

Now, all of these (male) doctors got exhausted by doing this all day long. For real, It was considered a chore, and very physical, because basically that's how they treated most of their female patients. So... a medical device was invented, to relieve the doctor of some of his exhaustion and boredom of doing this day in... day out.....

And, that medical device was the vibrator!

When I first learned this about 20 years ago, I was

On edit: the APA considered Hysteria a legit psychological diagnosis until 1952.


The film is funny, and I loved the cast. It is also not as "blue" as you would think, because this was considered MEDICAL (at least by most doctors), not sexual.

The movie:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hysteria_%282011_film%29

The trailer: