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For 50+ years I've been hearing that a woman is raped every few minutes somewhere in the United States. That's millions every year...millions. How can that not be a national emergency? How can this epidemic of rape go on for 50 years? Why are women so vulnerable? Why are so many men so sick and vile? Why are good men so apathetic? The whole thing is a national disgrace.

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Just - wow. A whole subculture of rape involving police, DAs, coaches, parents, and teens. It boggles my mind, and makes me wonder where you grew up. And how many places are there like that.

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Female Hysteria:

Female hysteria was a once-common medical diagnosis, made exclusively in women, which is today no longer recognized by modern medical authorities as a medical disorder. Its diagnosis and treatment were routine for many hundreds of years in Western Europe. Hysteria was widely discussed in the medical literature of the 19th century. Women considered to be suffering from it exhibited a wide array of symptoms including faintness, nervousness, sexual desire, insomnia, fluid retention, heaviness in abdomen, muscle spasm, shortness of breath, irritability, loss of appetite for food or sex, and "a tendency to cause trouble".

The history of the notion of hysteria can be traced to ancient times; in ancient Greece it was described in the gynecological treatises of the Hippocratic corpus, which date from the 5th and 4th centuries BC. Plato's dialogue Timaeus compares a woman's uterus to a living creature that wanders throughout a woman’s body, "blocking passages, obstructing breathing, and causing disease."[2] The concept of a pathological, wandering womb was later viewed as the source of the term hysteria,[2] which stems from the Greek cognate of uterus (hystera).

Another cause was thought to be the retention of female semen, thought to mingle with male semen during intercourse. This was believed to be stored in the womb. Hysteria was referred to as "the widows disease", since the female semen was believed to turn venomous if not released through regular climax or intercourse.Wiki

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...bland food, bed rest, seclusion, and sensory deprivation. Physicians noticed the number of women who complained of hysteria were disproportionately single, nuns, and unhappily married women. Another prescription was marriage for single women, intercourse if married, or vaginal massage to reach hysterical paroxysm (orgasm) as a last resort.

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Although there were hysterical males, attributing the condition to the female nature fit the social model of women, and validated the medical integrity of psychiatry by providing a suitable diagnosis. For hysterical women and their families, the asylum offered a convenient and socially acceptable excuse for inappropriate, and potentially scandalous behaviour. Rather than being viewed as a bad and immoral woman, honour and reputation could be maintained by the diagnosis of a medical condition and commitment to an asylum.

At the London Asylum, Dr. R. Maurice Bucke adopted the popular Victorian idea that the female reproductive organs were connected to emotional and physical well-being, and were thus the most likely cause of mental illness. Combined with the accepted theory that curing the body would cure the mind, treatments for female insanity at the London Asylum were grounded in the belief that removal or correction of the afflicted organ would restore sanity. Gynaecological surgery, such as hysterectomies became a regular procedure until the end of the nineteenth century, when advances in mental health care began to turn against it. Despite criticism that referred to his procedures as "meddlesome" and the "mutilation of helpless lunatics," Dr. Bucke continued the practice at the London Asylum until his death in 1902. http://www.lib.uwo.ca/archives/virtualexhibits/londonasylum/hysteria.h
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... vaginal massage could take hours. After massage devices were invented, it became much easier for vaginal massage to obtain the intended result. Until vibrators became used in offices (or even the home since this was during a time when house calls were made), massage was done by hand and later by the use of water. The 1870's brought about the invention of the vibrator and soon doctors used it instead. By the 1890's, this invention was available for home usage and the number of women being treated in that manner at the physician's office drastically declined.

While physicians realized a connection between hysteria and an unhappy sex life, they remained distant enough for the connection between what they were doing and sex to keep this as a practice until fairly modern times (one source that began me on the road to writing about this idea said the 1950's).

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A physician in 1859 claimed that a quarter of all women suffered from hysteria. One physician cataloged seventy-five pages of possible symptoms of hysteria and called the list incomplete;[4] almost any ailment could fit the diagnosis. Physicians thought that the stresses associated with modern life caused civilized women to be both more susceptible to nervous disorders and to develop faulty reproductive tracts.[5] In the United States, such disorders in women reaffirmed that the U.S. was on par with Europe; one American physician expressed pleasure that the country was ”catching up” to Europe in the prevalence of hysteria.[4]

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The 2nd century Roman physician Galen's technique would be cited by physicians for centuries to come: "Following the remedies and arising from the touch of the genital organs required by the treatment, there followed twitchings accompanied at the same time by pain and pleasure after which she emitted turbid and abundant sperm. From that time on she was free of all the evil she felt.”

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