I find it rather delightful that someone made an entertaining romantic comedy based on the feminist critique of the “hysteria” diagnosis and the invention of the vibrator. The quote above is what Rupert Everett’s character, Edmund St. John-Smythe, says when the first woman they test the contraption asks him what the machine is named. Heh.

Perhaps you remember that in old movies, a woman would be screaming and crying in rage or anguish, and oftentimes, a nearby man would say, “She’s hysterical!” And he might slap her, or, if it were available, inject her with a sedative. Hysteria used to be a medical diagnosis, and it was thought that the only cure for the women who suffered its most extreme forms was a full hysterectomy – the surgical removal of the uterus. What hysteria actually was a diagnosis for was not terribly exact, but it was terribly sexist. In the words of Charlotte Dalrymple – Maggie Gyllenhaal’s character in the charming period comedy about the invention of the vibrator Hysteria – hysteria is “a catch-all diagnosis for women without opportunity forced to spend their lives tending to domestic chores and selfish, prudish husbands who are unwilling or unable to make love to them properly or often enough.” Continue…