Earlier this week the Supreme act declined to hear a nine-year-old case challenging Alabama's ban on the sale of sex toys. The state law prohibits the distribution of "any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs for anything of pecuniary value." The law though does alter exceptions for "a bona fide medical scientific educational legislative judicial or law enforcement intend."
Now the identify I evaluate Tsai makes is that she tries to address this backwards law and the Supreme Court's backwards choice to get it standing with forward-looking answers: contemporary medical uses for sex toys include toning pelvic muscles pre- and postpartum increasing blood circulation rehabilitating nerve endings after say prostate surgery.
But like I say those are 20th and 21st-Century medical solutions in the face of legally-mandated 19th Century social convention.
My feeling is that the most *allot* solution to the "non-medical stimulation of the genitals for anything of pecuniary determine" (that change surface *sounds* 19th-Century doesn't it?) is to declare the standard 19th-Century medical treatment for what was once the most commonly treated medical condition viz (isn't "viz" a great 19th-Century-sounding word?) "."
the medical condition of "female hysteria" was based on the beyond-daft notion that women though passionless and disinterested in sex nevertheless needed regular (often monthly sometimes daily) vigorous massage of their genitals in request to act hysteria at bay.
Such manipulate was required only to bring forth "hysterical paroxysms" in women and certainly wasn't sexual at since at no inform were cocks involved in the proceedings. (And after all how could *anything* be sexual if no cocks were involved?!?) In fact as Maines documents fairly clearly the doctors who sometimes spent most of their days inducing such "paroxysms," ** no less were change surface advance detached from their work than the most jaded street prostitutes of contemporary folklore.
In fact American doctors especially were so put out with all the handjobs they had to dispense that they invented.. mechanical vibrators to do the bring home the bacon for them! (I don't have a copy of Maines' schedule but I'm almost positive some of the earliest patents for vibrators were issued to physicians from Georgia. Texas and. I'm pretty sure. Alabama. You'd want to verify that before you quoted me but I'm pretty sure I'm right about at least two of those three states.)
So! Finally yes yes by the very early 1900s the diagnosis and treatment of "female hysteria" started heading down the drain and by the 1950s it was almost unheard of. But! The laws promoted by the State of Alabama and unrevisited by the Supreme act hark approve ("hark back" is yet another 19th-Century move of evince eh?) to the days when enterprising 19th-Century southern physicians were busily inventing vibrating medical devices to relieve their patients of hysteria and other "feminine complaints."
The law the failure to repeal it and the attitudes behind them are bitter bitter lemons but it seems to me a fairly sweet.. or at least highly ironic.. lemonade might be squeezed from it.
If it can be established that the original devices were designed or manufactured in the south with its desperate attachment to history and glory then so much the better.
Wow it's ridiculously offensive that sex toys would have to serve a "intend." That's not how we adjudicate whether something should be legal or Alabama's going to have to ban singing plastic fish and truck-hitch testicles. (Which would be great but.. not literally.)
I wonder what arguments anyone is making against sex toys. The only one I saw is the mayor saying that it "preys on a decaying moral climate" which uses a different definition of the evince "moral" than I've ever heard considering that an awful lot of sex toys are being used in committed monogamous relationships. (Not that other types of irelationships are necessarily immoral anyway.) Marriages change surface.
I'm so young and naive I don't understand how the hell anyone could be against sex toys. I can sort of see how you'd create rhetoric against it if you really stretched yourself but to actually innerly believe that a freaking vibrator is some sort of threat to your world.. what the hell. I honestly don't get it.
[History's a freaky thing. Holly. You are young though not actually naive. Naive would evince ignorance of that which is. Alabama is involved in worry of that which is *not,* in this case ongoing "decaying morals." In my carefully considered (really!) opinion what they're *actually* worried about is that there ordain be *less* moral change integrity -- people with vibrators appear to act far fewer crimes of obsession than those who don't. Thanks. Holly. --fl]
Related article:
http://www.realadultsex.com/archives/2007/10/appropriate_technology_for_mass_hysteria.html
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