Most Synergy Explorers are familiar with the suggestion that orgasm is not an unqualified, empowering boon. Rather, the Big O can fuel sexual satiety, dissatisfaction and even speed the transition to a novel partner.
Alas, the mainstream press has been slow to catch on to the concept that post-orgasm distress is toxic for loving relationships. In part, that’s because most of us are ignorant of an approach to sex that eases sexual frustration without climax.
Another reason for mainstream ignorance about the hidden costs of climax arises from widespread misinformation about orgasm. This post spotlights a sexologist’s particularly entertaining and absurd myth. It had (has?) enormous influence on the field of sexology.
Hook, line and sinker
In an academic article entitled “A Failure of Academic Quality Control: The Technology of Orgasm,” (see bottom of this page) scholars Lieberman and Schatzberg point out that Rachel Maines’s The Technology of Orgasm is a canard, a deliberately misleading story. Yet it is one of the most widely cited works on the history of sex and technology.
Maines insisted that Victorian physicians routinely used electromechanical vibrators as a labour-saving technology to stimulate female patients to orgasm. Supposedly they were treating hysteria. Her claim was then repeated almost verbatim in dozens of scholarly works. In popular books and articles. In a Broadway play. And in a feature-length film no less!
Lieberman and Schatzberg, however, “found no evidence…that physicians ever used electromechanical vibrators to induce orgasms in female patients as a medical treatment.” They warn that the wildfire “success of Technology of Orgasm serves as a cautionary tale for how easily falsehoods can become embedded in the humanities.” (Emphasis supplied)
Not just a problem for the humanities
The pressure to publish producing flawed research is not confined to the humanities. According to Lieberman and Schatzberg, flawed research also shows up in the natural sciences, quantitative social sciences and qualitative social sciences. Such pressure encourages sloppy empirical research, as well as “irrelevant, narrow, banal research” and “vapid theorizing”.
Worse yet, safeguards are surprisingly few and ineffective. In fact, Lieberman and Schatzberg point out that “scholarly publishing rarely involves any sort of fact checking”. “Far more fact-checking occurs in a typical magazine article than in a scholarly publication, despite complaints from journalists about a decline in the practice”.
The public wrongly views “peer-review” as rigorous, a stamp of responsible scholarship. It’s not. Lieberman and Schatzberg explain:
Because fact-checking is not a routine practice in scholarly publication, factual challenges to scholarship…are rare, and can be perceived as personal attacks rather than part of the scholarly process. Therefore, scholars have few incentives to question established research. Tellingly, the most forceful criticisms of Maines are found in the popular press and blogs, not in scholarly journals.
“Outlandish propaganda”
Consider these parting words of Lieberman and Schatzberg:
What results from all this is something akin to Noelle-Neumann’s “spiral of silence,” that process by which outlandish propaganda can spread despite widespread doubts about its validity (Noelle-Neumann, 1993). Silence lends support to false claims, especially when experts fail to challenge the falsehoods in the scholarly press. Academics end up engaging in groupthink, accepting something as true because everybody else seems to think so, rather than questioning what John Kenneth Galbraith derisively termed “the conventional wisdom” (Galbraith, 1958, pp. 6–17).
In short, consult your personal experience, common sense and sources you trust, both scientific and otherwise, rather than relying blindly on sexology (or any) publications.
