Abstract
This chapter traces the circulation of products in the governance of sexual appetite in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. It examines the commodification of sexual appetite through the advertisements of aphrodisiacs, elixirs and mechanical devices in manuals, pamphlets, tracts and newspapers. The subject who emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century was not simply a patient, but a customer who needed both a product and knowledge to manage and control their sexuality. The chapter considers how the marketing of aphrodisiacs, elixirs and mechanical devices for sexual imbalances was used for managing sexual appetite. The different products promoted in this era functioned as techniques for actively encouraging individuals to autonomously and independently manage their sexual lives.
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Notes
- 1.
See Elizabeth Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), Eltjo Buringh and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Charting the ‘Rise of the West’: Manuscript and Printed Books in Europe, a Long-Term Perspective from the Sixth through Eighteenth Centuries,” The Journal of Economic History 69, no. 2 (2009): 409–445, and William G. Gabler, “The Evolution of American Advertising in the Nineteenth Century,” The Journal of Popular Culture XI, no. 4 (1978): 763–771.
- 2.
Gabler, “Evolution of American Advertising,” 767.
- 3.
Jane Marcellus, “Nervous Women and Noble Savages: The Romanticized ‘Other’ in Nineteenth Century US Patent Medicine Advertising,” The Journal of Popular Culture 41, no. 5 (2008): 787.
- 4.
See Arthur Wrobel, ed., Pseudo-Science and Society in 19th-Century America (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2015).
- 5.
Kathleen L. Endres, “From ‘Lost Manhood’ to ‘Erectile Dysfunction’: The Commercialization of Impotence” in We Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life…and Always Has, Volume 2: Advertising at the Center of Popular Culture: 1930s–1975, eds. Danielle Sarver Coombs and Bob Batchelor (Santa Barbara, CA: Praeger, 2014), 85.
- 6.
M. E. Melody and Linda M. Peterson, Teaching America about Sex: Marriage Guides and Sex Manuals from the Late Victorians to Dr. Ruth (New York: New York University Press, 1999), 21.
- 7.
I borrow the term “marital sex manual” from Jessamyn Neuhaus as it encompasses the conjugal couple and the proper management of sexuality more broadly. Jessamyn Neuhaus, “The Importance of Being Orgasmic: Sexuality, Gender, and Marital Sex Manuals in the United States, 1920–1963,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, no. 4 (2000): 447–473.
- 8.
See Michael Gordon and M. Charles Bernstein, “Mate Choice and Domestic Life in the Nineteenth-Century Marriage Manual,” Journal of Marriage and Family 32, no. 4 (1970): 666–667.
- 9.
Ronald G. Walters, Primers for Prudery: Sexual Advice to Victorian America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 11.
- 10.
Michael Gordon, “The Ideal Husband as Depicted in the Nineteenth Century Marriage Manual,” The Family Coordinator 18, no. 3 (1969): 226.
- 11.
Walters, Primers for Prudery, 11.
- 12.
Claude-François Lallemand, A Practical Treatise on the Causes, Symptoms and Treatment of Spermatorrhoea, trans. Henry J. McDougall (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1861 [1840]). See also Ellen Bayuk Rosenman, “Body Doubles: The Spermatorrhea Panic,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 12, no. 3 (2003): 365–399, and Elizabeth Stephens, “Pathologizing Leaky Male Bodies: Spermatorrhea in Nineteenth-Century British Medicine and Popular Anatomical Museums,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 17, no. 3 (2008): 421–438.
- 13.
See Peter Cryle and Alison Moore, Frigidity: An Intellectual History (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), and Angus McLaren, Impotence: A Cultural History (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
- 14.
Kevin J. Mumford, “‘Lost Manhood’ Found: Male Sexual Impotence and Victorian Culture in the United States,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 3, no. 1 (1992): 37.
- 15.
This paradigm would shift to repressed instincts in the early-twentieth century with the rise of psychoanalysis. Note that competing medical theories of the era also harnessed physical constitution. Phrenology, for example, discussed the perversions of “amativeness,” where a protruding skull would reveal a stronger need for amorous activities, but a smaller “organ” would make “the person less susceptible to the emotions of love.” L. N. Fowler, Marriage: Its History and Ceremonies; with a Phrenological and Physiological Exposition of the Functions and Qualifications for Happy Marriages (New York: Fowler & Wells, 1848), 78.
- 16.
See the works of the American physician and neurologist George Miller Beard, who extensively wrote on neurasthenia, the disorder of enfeebled nerves: American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences, a Supplement to Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1881) and Sexual Neurasthenia: Its Hygiene, Causes, Symptoms, and Treatment with a Chapter on Diet for the Nervous (New York: E. B. Treat, 1884).
- 17.
Mumford, “‘Lost Manhood’ Found,” 35.
- 18.
Ibid. 57.
- 19.
Michael Gordon, “From an Unfortunate Necessity to a Cult of Mutual Orgasm: Sex in American Marital Education Literature 1830–1940,” in Studies in the Sociology of Sex, ed. James M. Henslin (New York: Meredith Corporation, 1971), 56.
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
R.T. Trall, Sexual Physiology and Hygiene: An Exposition Practical, Scientific, Moral, and Popular, of Some of the Fundamental Problems in Sociology (New York: M. L. Holbrook & Co., 1891), 233.
- 22.
Mumford, “‘Lost Manhood’ Found,” 40.
- 23.
Gordon, “From an Unfortunate Necessity to a Cult of Mutual Orgasm,” 55.
- 24.
McLaren, Impotence, 133.
- 25.
B.G. Jefferis and J.L. Nichols, Search Lights on Health: Light on Dark Corners, A Guide to Purity and Physical Manhood. Advice to Maiden, Wife and Mother. Love, Courtship and Marriage (Canada: The J L Nichols Company, 1894), 211.
- 26.
McLaren, Impotence, 134.
- 27.
Nancy F. Cott, “Passionlessness: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 4, no. 2 (1978): 220.
- 28.
See Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 197–216.
- 29.
Cott, “Passionlessness,” 221 (emphasis original).
- 30.
Ibid., 233.
- 31.
Carolyn J. Dean, Sexuality and Modern Western Culture (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 6.
- 32.
Ibid.
- 33.
On the temperance movement and sexuality in the United States, John D’Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, 3rd ed (New York: Harper & Row, 2012 [1988]).
- 34.
Stephen Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America: Sylvester Graham and Health Reform (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980), 107.
- 35.
Michael Ryan, The Philosophy of Marriage, in its Social, Moral, and Physical Relations (London: John Churchill, 1837), 149.
- 36.
Jennifer Evans, Aphrodisiacs, Fertility and Medicine in Early Modern England (Suffolk: The Boydell Press, 2014), 25.
- 37.
Ibid., 11.
- 38.
Beard, Sexual Neurasthenia, 248.
- 39.
See “Marrying and Not Marrying” in Sexual Neurasthenia, 130–132.
- 40.
John Harvey Kellogg, Plain Facts about Sexual Life (Battle Creek, MI: Office of the Health Reformer, 1877), 340. Alice B. Stockham issued similar advice to women: “To live continent lives, avoid food containing aphrodisiac stimulants, such as coffee, eggs, oysters, and animal food. Omit the evening meal; for the purpose desired this stands paramount to all other means. Let the life be temperate in every respect, and with a strong will the victory can be won.” Alice B. Stockham, Tokology: A Book for Every Woman (New York: R. F. Fenno & Company, 1893), 160 (emphasis original).
- 41.
Rosalyn M. Meadow and Lillie Weiss, Women’s Conflicts about Eating and Sexuality: The Relationship Between Food and Sex (New York and London: Routledge, 2012), 113.
- 42.
Trall, Sexual Physiology and Hygiene, 266.
- 43.
Frederick Hollick, The Marriage Guide, or Natural History of Generation; A Private Instructor for Married Persons and Those about to Marry Both Male and Female; in Every Thing Concerning the Physiology and Relations of the Sexual System and the Production or Prevention of Offspring—Including All the New Discoveries, Never Before Given in the English Language (New York: T W Strong, 1860), 149.
- 44.
Ibid., 150–157.
- 45.
Hollick, The Marriage Guide, 30.
- 46.
Henry J. Jordan and Samuel Beck, The Philosophy of Marriage Being Four Important Lectures, on the Function and Disorders of the Nervous System, and Reproductive Organs, Illustrated with Cases (New York: Bloom & Smith, 1862), 113.
- 47.
Ibid., 115.
- 48.
Ibid., 173–174.
- 49.
The Omaha Daily Bee, “30 Days’ Trial: Dr. Sanden’s Electric Belt,” The Omaha Daily Bee, January 13, 1900, 6.
- 50.
Carolyn Thomas de la Peña, “Designing the Electric Body: Sexuality, Masculinity and the Electric Belt in America, 1880–1920,” Journal of Design History 14, no. 4 (2001): 279. On harnessing electricity as a therapeutic tool, see Iwan Rhys Morus, “The Measure of Man: Technologizing the Victorian Body,” History of Science 37, no. 3 (1999): 249–282.
- 51.
Thomas de la Peña, “Designing the Electric Body,” 279. It is also worth noting that an “electric corset” emerged around the same time. The device claimed to treat issues such as women’s weak nerves and hysteria. See Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001), 80–83.
- 52.
Samuel Hopkins Adams, The Great American Fraud: Articles on the Nostrum Evil and Quacks (P. F. Collier & Sons, 1905). For a discussion on the components of patent medicines, see J. Worth Estes, “The Pharmacology of Nineteenth-Century Patent Medicines,” Pharmacy in History 30, no. 1 (1988): 3–18. “Muckraker” is a term coined by President Theodore Roosevelt to refer to writers who exposed the corruption of businesses or government to the public in the early-twentieth century. See Elizabeth Fee, “Samuel Hopkins Adams (1871–1958): Journalist and Muckraker,” American Journal of Public Health 100, no. 8 (2010): 1390–1391.
- 53.
Marcellus, “Nervous Women and Noble Savages,” 787.
- 54.
For a discussion on competition between quacks and physicians, and the deployment of the medical model of low sexual appetite, see chapter six in McLaren, Impotence, and James Harvey Young, “Patent Medicines: An Early Example of Competitive Marketing,” The Journal of Economic History 20, no. 4 (1960): 648–656.
- 55.
Endres, “From ‘Lost Manhood’ to ‘Erectile Dysfunction,’” 87.
- 56.
The Milwaukee Journal, “Weak Men in the Country,” The Milwaukee Journal, December 10, 1904, 9.
- 57.
See chapter three in Michael S. Kimmel, History of Men: Essays on the History of American and British Masculinities (Ithaca, NY: State University of New York Press, 2005). Brett A. Berliner makes a similar point about France in “Mephistopheles and Monkeys: Rejuvenation, Race, and Sexuality in Popular Culture in Interwar France,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 13, no. 3 (2004): 317.
- 58.
The Milwaukee Journal, “Weak Men in the Country,” 9.
- 59.
Ibid.
- 60.
Worth Estes, “The Pharmacology of Nineteenth-Century Patent Medicines,” 4.
- 61.
Charles E. Rosenberg, “The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 20, no. 4 (1977): 495.
- 62.
Gail Pat Parsons, “Equal Treatment for All: American Medical Remedies for Male Sexual Problems: 1850–1900,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32, no. 1 (1977): 59.
- 63.
See Chandak Sengoopta, “‘Dr Steinach coming to make old young!’: Sex Glands, Vasectomy and the Quest for Rejuvenation in the Roaring Twenties,” Endeavour 27, no. 3 (2003): 122–126, also by Sengoopta, “Glandular Politics: Experimental Biology, Clinical Medicine, and Homosexual Emancipation in Fin-de-Siècle Central Europe,” Isis 89, no. 3 (1998): 445–473, and Brett A. Berliner, “Mephistopheles and Monkeys.” See also chapter five in Nikolai Krementsov, Revolutionary Experiments: The Quest for Immortality in Bolshevik Science and Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 64.
Elizabeth Siegel Watkins, The Estrogen Elixir: A History of Hormone Replacement Therapy in America (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007).
- 65.
Lewiston Evening Journal, “Manly Vigor,” Lewiston Evening Journal, October 12, 1897, 6.
- 66.
Kimmel, History of Men, 43.
- 67.
T.J. Jackson Lears, “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930,” in The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980, eds. Richard Wightman Fox and T.J. Jackson Lears (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983), 28.
- 68.
Ibid., 27 (emphasis original).
- 69.
Young, “Patent Medicines,” 654.
- 70.
The Montreal Gazette, “Dr. Williams’ Pink Pills,” The Montreal Gazette, March 16, 1904, 2.
- 71.
Ibid.
- 72.
The Pittsburgh Press, “Reliable Cures by True Specialists,” The Pittsburgh Press, October 17, 1903, 4.
- 73.
Judith Knelman, “Nervous Debility: A Disorder Made to Order,” Victorian Review 22, no. 1 (1996): 35.
- 74.
Ibid., 39.
- 75.
The Pittsburgh Press, “Weak Diseased Men,” The Pittsburgh Press, May 31, 1903, 18.
- 76.
Kimmel, History of Men, 49.
- 77.
The St Paul Globe, “Lost Manhood,” The St Paul Globe, August 18, 1903, 6.
- 78.
Nissenbaum, Sex, Diet, and Debility in Jacksonian America, 33–34.
- 79.
See Pedanius Dioscorides, De Materia Medica: Being an Herbal with Many Other Medicinal Materials Written in Greek in the First Century of the Common Era, trans. Tess Anne Osbaldeston (Johannesburg: Ibidis, 2000).
- 80.
Kimmel, The History of Men, 39.
- 81.
Ibid., 40.
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Flore, J. (2020). Elixirs of Vigour. In: A Genealogy of Appetite in the Sexual Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39423-3_3
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