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supergay-supergirl · 4 years

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why supergirl season 5 was actually good: sort of an essay

This has been sitting in my sticky notes for months and I figured now that I have a Supergirl blog, I can actually post it.

People love hating on Supergirl Season 5. And I get it. I admit that it had a lot of problems. But I did like the season overall, and there's enough out there about Season 5’s problems, so here is a post about some things that were great about Season 5!

1. Lena’s Arc

Apparently everyone hates how this was executed, but I really liked it. I like how 5A allows her to scheme and lie and altogether explore the darker (Luthor) side of herself, because only after experiencing what she’s been afraid of becoming can she fully come to know herself. I like how in 5x07, she gets to scream and cry, to express to Supergirl how much she’s hurting, and how betrayed she feels. I like how in 5x13, Kara finally accepts that Lena joining Lex was not her fault, and that she didn’t deserve to be manipulated (“From now on, you’re accountable for your own actions.”). I like Lena’s growing obsession with erasing human pain through 5B and the fact that we know exactly where her motivations come from, and we feel for her because we’ve seen how much pain she’s in herself -- but at the same time, we can still oppose her ultimately villainous actions, which leads us to hope for her redemption. (A lot of this is due to Katie McGrath’s stellar acting as well.)

I love how the season shows just how much Lex’s continual abuse and manipulation affects her, and shows her standing up to him at the end. I wish they had focused more on Lena instead of pushing her aside in favor of Lex in 5B, but overall I liked how they expanded on the Luthor sibling relationship from Season 4, even if it was missing some of the complexity of the previous season. And finally, I love the way Lena fights so hard to regain Kara’s trust in 5x19 (and succeeds!). It felt like there was more of a balance between the two starting from 5x13, where previously it had always been Kara apologizing and trying to gain Lena’s trust.

2. Supergirl’s New Look

PANTS. PANTS. PANTS. PANTS.

For Season 4, Kara the Reporter got a more professional wardrobe as she began to mentor Nia, and the switch to pants feels like the same thing for Supergirl. It completes the transition from “young adult” to just “adult.” It may have been reasonable to call Kara a “girl” in Season 1, but by now, she is an adult woman, and I’m glad that her wardrobe reflects that.

I was opposed to Kara’s bangs at the beginning of the season, but they have definitely grown on me. Like the pants, I think they mark an important change in Supergirl’s character, one that is better appreciated by the audience than the characters. Now, when I rewatch previous seasons, I think, “Wow, Kara looks so different now.” I didn’t think that when I rewatched episodes after Season 4. The bangs are a way to identify Adult Kara as having changed a lot from how she was at the beginning, and like the pants, I feel like they complete her transition into adulthood.

(But are the writers expecting us to believe that nobody who knows Kara would be suspicious that Kara and Supergirl got bangs on the exact same day? Seriously.)

3. Eve Teschmacher

In Season 4, Eve Teschmacher was a brilliant, eager-to-please young woman who (whoops) turned out to be evil. And she was great. But I was dissatisfied with her betrayal because it came so out of the blue, and it was a complete 180 without much buildup at all. Season 5 gave her the humanity that she was lacking, first with her mom, then with her desperation not to have to kill. Not to mention, some pretty badass fight scenes.

4. J’onn’s Swagger

J’onn’s storyline in Season 5 is not nearly as deep as in Season 4, and I see that as a good thing. Season 4 J’onn was wonderful and necessary, but in a season that has a lot of strong development for Kara and Lena, it was nice to have a relatively static character who’s at a good place in his life. Season 4 let J’onn discover the man he wanted to be, and David Harewood brings a new confidence to Season 5 as a result of that. It’s fun to watch him strut around in his supersuit and say normal things as if they’re great proclamations. It’s nice to see the happy, healthy adult relationship between him and M’gann. The easy trust they have with each other causes them to act more like they’re married than dating, as opposed to the younger characters who are often caught up in relationship drama.

5. Kelly Therapy Face

All the characters need a therapist, and they finally got one! Well, Kelly is technically a psychologist, which I believe means she could be a therapist but is not necessarily? I don’t know things. Anyway, it’s nice to have a calm, supportive presence in the group, and this effect is helped by Kelly Therapy Face. Kelly Therapy Face is the face Kelly makes when she’s listening to you talk about your problems. Kelly Therapy Face and her generally calm presence bring down the interpersonal drama of the group and solidify the idea that all these people are growing into full adults, with adult relationships and adult responses to issues. Their emotions are stabilizing, they’re building stronger support systems, and they’re gaining a better understanding of how the world works and their places in it.

This is more of a Season 4 thing -- this season really didn’t give Kelly the screentime she deserved -- but I also love how even though Kelly acts as a source of support for others, her own fear and trauma are rarely glossed over (see: the end of 5x05). This gives Kelly a humanity and realistic quality that many emotional-support characters don’t get. It also shows the key difference between Dansen and Sanvers: whenever Alex and Maggie had conflict, they swept it aside rather than working through it, leading to their eventual breakup, but when Alex and Kelly have conflict, they listen to each other and try to fix it. In accordance with their adult-ness, Alex and Kelly also seem to be in agreement that it’s okay to have conflict in their relationship (“And I might not know every little detail about you yet, but I know you,” 5x02).

6. Reality Bytes

Calling attention to violence against trans folk, exploring Dreamer’s dark side, and showing the strength of Kara and Nia’s mentor-student relationship in one episode? Just. Yes. Either Nicole Maines was projecting a lot or she’s a really good actor (probably both), but either way, as a trans person, I felt this episode on a personal level: the anger, fear, and frustration at knowing that your community is being targeted and the people you’re supposed to trust (i.e. the police) are probably not going to do anything about it. Additionally, Kara and Nia’s conflict in 5x15, and the fact that Kara compares Nia’s experience to her own, is a great marker of how far Kara has come. In Season 1, Supergirl felt a similar anger and hurt when villains sought her out, but by now, she’s more at peace and can offer Dreamer reassurance and comfort.

7. Brainy’s Plot

Brainy’s storyline in Season 5 is nice because it manages to remain stable as an important, but secondary, plot. It enhances the sense that there’s more going on than we realize and gives us a view into the scheming of the villains, while not taking over too much screentime or audience brainspace.

8. Jon Cryer

As annoying as it is that the writers gave up a lot of Lena’s screentime to Lex, Jon Cryer’s performance in Season 5 is just wonderful. He can go from acting totally in control to screaming in a matter of seconds. Lex Luthor is witty, assured, and charming in a weird way. On the other side of his personality, he is a madman who cares about no one’s interests but his own. Jon Cryer’s acting manages to package all this great but conflicting writing into a brilliant, awful, occasionally sympathetic villain who has more than his share of awesome (and terrifying) scenes.

9. Alex’s Grief

I like that Alex gets to let go of her emotions a little this season and express herself. Especially when Jeremiah dies before 5x16, Alex has a really tough time (and a mention of her possibly drinking problem! Expand, please!). She tries to escape from the pain of real life through virtual reality, but eventually realizes that she has to face her pain rather than avoid it, which is a major theme of the season. What’s great about 5x16 and the next couple episodes is that the other characters allow her to grieve. They could have told her to get over it and see all the happiness in the real world — it would have fit with the theme — but instead, they support Alex as she grieves. They listen without judgement when she expresses her anger that Jeremiah left and forced her to take care of Kara. Kara and Kelly are (mostly) understanding when Alex doesn’t want to go to Jeremiah’s funeral, and when Alex arrives late at the end of the episode, Kara lets her know how much she appreciates that Alex came at all. Throughout her life, Alex hasn’t had much opportunity to be herself and express her emotions, an idea that’s repeated over and over again starting from her coming-out arc in Season 2 or even earlier. Now that Kara can for the most part take care of herself and Alex has a good support system, she finally gets the opportunity to be vulnerable.

10. Andrea Rojas’s Moral Ambiguity

Is Andrea good or bad? Neither. She’s a person who wants love, success, and money, who does sketchy things to promote her company but also fights fiercely for her father and cares about the safety of her technology. Before Andrea, Lena was the main morally ambiguous character, and she could be categorized as “playing for her own team.” However, Andrea goes a step further, crossing into a territory I would call “not playing a game at all.” She’s just a human being trying to have a good life, and that causes her to do good things, bad things, and everything in between. In a show that often accentuates the difference between heroes and villains (“Don’t let them down by stooping to his level,” 5x15), Andrea is a reminder that most people aren’t good or bad -- they’re just living their lives.

TL;DR: They’re all adults now and Lena needs a hug.

#supergirl #supergirl season 5 #kara danvers #lena luthor #j'onn j'onzz #kelly olsen #dansen #nia nal #dreamer #brainiac 5 #alex danvers #andrea rojas

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chriscdcase95 · 5 years

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Why people like Luaggie and odd couples

The following is based off my opinions and observations.

This is the only gif I could find of them by the way. I haven’t figured out how to upload pictures from desktop.

So I haven’t really been vocal about being a Loud House fan on here, mainly because I want to avoid (often manufactured) fandom drama that often comes up in my circle of friends and acquaintances; but some of the few discussions I’m willing to engage in these the fandom are shipping’s and alleged shipping wars. Shipping’s are a funny thing - they are a small thing all things considered, and yet people make these big deals about them as if they are the center of the fandom as a whole.

Because this is Luaggie Week in The Loud House fandom at the time I am writing this, I decided to use Luaggie, and other Loud House" ships - both canon or non canon, and both romantic and non romantic - as examples. But Luaggie is the primary example here.

“So what is Luaggie ?” It is a popular non canonical ship in the Loud House fandom, and is a good example of a “Fanfic Ship” - This means a ship that can only work in fanfiction and is very, very, very unlikely to work in canon. And why is that ? Because Luan has a canonical lover interest in Benny and in the actual show Maggie only appears in one episode, and doesn’t remotely interact with Luan in the actual episode. Maggie’s mother appears in the show more than Maggie herself, and that is as a background character.

This is because Maggie is an Ensemble Darkhorse, which TV Tropes defines as “A secondary or minor character in a work who becomes popular among the works fandom”. What Maggie made popular ? Arguably because she was a teenage version of Haiku (an Ensemble Darkhorse in her own right) or was an emo girl who was the opposite of Luan in terms of personality, but close to her age that it would be believable they’d know eachother. From such, fanfics and/or fan art did one or two things to Maggie; they either pair her up with Luan, or more rarely make Maggie a big sister to Haiku. It should be noted that Maggie is hardly the only example of the Ensemble Darkhorse trope in the Loud House, and is hardly the only secondary/minor character to be shipped with one of the main characters.

“So what makes Luaggie so special ?” Nothing canonically, there’s two short and simple answers to this; some fans write fanfics and art, in turn other fans grew to like them. And so Luaggie spread, but what made them appeal ? Others answer with “opposites attract”; Luan is a clown girl for lack of a better word, and Maggie is a near stoic goth. But my answer is a little more lenient and applicable to other ships both in and out of The Loud House; canon or romantic or no. This is a little something called the Odd Couple and the appeals to these couples are not what they have in common, but what they don’t. They have differences that can play off eachother, and I think that’s what people like to see in polar opposite relationships. This dynamic is also applicable to non romantic relationships and family bonds.

And to demonstrate this, I present to you Loud House examples. The biggest familial and platonic example of this in the Loud House can be seen in Lola and Lana’s dynamic; as twins they are arguably the closest pair of sisters among the Loud siblings, and yet their entire characters revolve around how they are polar opposites of eachother. And for a romantic example, there was Lucy having a crush on Rocky, despite them being seeming opposites with Lucy being a total goth and Rocky…pretty much being your average nerdish kid. Other canon or non canon relationships apply to this dynamic; Lynn and Clyde -or Clynn- are a popular non canon pairing (a jock girl with a nerdish boy); Lincoln and Ronnie Anne - Ronnincoln - is considered one of the biggest pairings in the fandom and it also somewhat falls into the same category of a tough girl and not so nerdish boy. I bring these up because these “Tough Girl and Nerd Guy” kind of relationships have a special appeal to me for some reason. Both Lincoln and Clyde are also popularly paired up with Haiku, which can fall under the same category as Lucy and Rocky above.

Why is contrasting characters appealing to fans ? Because pairing someone up with someone who is the exact same as they are can get boring, if there is nothing to play off with. Let’s take the episode L is For Love for example; besides Benny, Sam, and Chaz, the love interests introduced for the sisters in this episode are basically male, two dimensional, carbon copies of the sisters that serve as plot devices to segway into the reveal that Luna is Bi; Sam was initially popular because she was a confirmed love interest for a major female character, and even then the episode where they go on a date has a plot about what they don’t have in common, which saves Sam from being a total copy cat of Luna; Chaz became popular because he was (physically at least) the opposite of Leni; Benny was initially popular because he wasn’t Maggie (more on that below) and even in his and Luan’s spotlight episode we see a slight difference between them in that Benny was more of a theatre lover than Luan, who was more of a comedian.

It should go without saying contrasts don’t always work for compelling positive relationships. Many of fictions greatest rivalries stem from how two rivals contrast eachother.

But didn’t Luaggie start a fan war ? Hardly. There was a pretty one sided fan war going on around the time Stage Plight aired. Because this was Luan and Benny’s episode, fans of them - Lunny’s -were getting all hyped that their ship was going to be made official, and spent a good amount of their time bragging about it to Luaggie fans. Now as I mentioned above one of the reasons why Benny became popular with fans in the first place was because he was a Luan love interest that wasn’t Maggie, and Luaggie detractors tend to hate it with a burning passion. Now I can see where they are coming from, considering Luaggie’s popularity in fanfics and art, and some fans have a problem when it comes to compartmentalizing fanon and canon. It gotten to the point that when Luaggie art used to get shared, Lunny fan’s would get all up and arms about how Benny was Luan’s love interest. What people call ship policing.

Trust me, I can understand their frustrations I’ve been on the receiving end of such things, so I can certainly put myself in their shoes, albeit with different ships.

Anyways, Stage Plight airs and Luan and Benny are an official couple. Did Luaggie’s complain ? Cry ? Leave the fandom ? Have a total social media meltdown ? No. For the most part, Luaggie’s I’ve seen and talked too generally took the episode in stride, said they liked the episode and went on with their lives. The episode certainly didn’t stop Luaggie fan works from being made, as the Lunny fans predicted. Because Luaggie was always a fanfic based ship, and I don’t think anyone seriously thought or expected them to be an actual couple in the show. Lunny fans on the other hand spent their time showboating and singing sweet victories over the “defeat” of the Luaggie fans, celebrating a war they made up in their own hands.

I have seen some go as far as to say Luaggie is a toxic ship, which I don’t see. I think people have different ideas over what a toxic ship is. A friend and I talked about two different ideas of what a toxic ship is; to him a toxic relationship was reflected by their fans and bullying behaviour they do in the name of their ship; to me a toxic ship would be a relationship that promotes or romanticizes abusive ideals such as rape, incest, pedophilia, victimization, etc. As such I don’t see how Luaggie falls into that category - although a non Loud House ship called Jemma from Every Witch Way, might fall into that category, but that an analytical rant for another day.

That being said, it does bring to mind the concept of Ship Policing, which means telling people who they are allowed to ship or not to ship and bullying others over them. Again, I think this might have to do with a failure to differentiate between popular fanon and canon, and I have been on the receiving end of this so I gotta vent.

Stress Induced Rant incoming

I once got into a shipping debate earlier this year regarding two non Loud House related ships in a Facebook group I’m in where the non canon Kigo ship of the Kim Possible fandom was brought up. I mentioned that Kigo didn’t really appeal to me due to re-watching the show and coming to the conclusion that Kigo would be canonically problematic, and their canon pairings (Kim x Ron, and Drakken x Shego) grew on me. At no point did I say Kigo doesn’t work as a fanfic couple, but canon wise, I saw too many problems that goes against Kigo’s favour in comparison to their canon boyfriends.

I am going to use this as an example of what shipping police are and how not to debate other fans. So when I mentioned I wasn’t into Kigo in comparison to KiRon and Drakgo, this one Kigo fan went ballistic and kept badgering me. So I explain myself, answer all her questions, and bring up some of my points and reasonings. In turn, she answers my points with Double Standards and Non Sequiturs; either dodging my questions or saying my answers don’t apply when they don’t go against her arguments. She then resorts to using fanfics as “proof” that Kigo would work in canon, and when that fails she starts making Ad Hominem attacks and personal insults - notably calling me retarded when my autism was briefly mentioned in the discussion - and went on about it well past midnight. Rule of thumb, when you resort to personal insults and attacking someone over an opinion that won’t budge, you kind of forfeit your argument. Luckily, this was only one Kigo fan, who doesn’t represent its fandom as a whole

Venting over.

Like I mentioned, ships are a funny - they actually mean very little in the grand scheme of things, but to fandoms, they are the center of the world.

I should also say there a third or fourth reason non canon ships become popular; a lot of fans either take note on onscreen chemistry a paring may have, or project some where there is none, and that is because fans tend to project themselves or their ideas onto characters they like, including what their ideal relationships would be like. It’s hardly exclusive to The Loud House fandom. Me for example, in stories I wrote but never posted, I paired a young adult version of Steven Lloyd from the Halloween series and Edith Sawyer from the Texas Chainsaw Massacre series; I design them to have an obvious contrast between them and show how it would play off between the two, but these are two characters that never met in canon (especially since the two series never crossover). Had I wrote a legitimate Halloween/Texas Chainsaw crossover, chances are I’d implement that pairing into the story.

As far as Luaggie goes, I don’t see it as any different than another Leather and Lace relationship applied to fanfiction and fan art. What’s my opinion of them ? Really that depends on the fic or the artwork. I’m not gonna delude myself into thinking it’s gonna become canon or have some power over canon. Nor do I think it’s worth getting all hyped and excited for a non existant ship war.

#the loud house #Luaggie Week #luaggie #Luan Loud #Maggie #Benny #Lunny #lincoln loud #clyde mcbride #lynn loud #haiku #lucy loud #rocky spokes #ronnie anne santiago #ronnincoln

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zielenna · 7 years

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hello I have come to invade your inbox again: 1, 2, 6, 9 for books!

1. a book you loved?

i struggled here - there are books i read & enjoyed a lot, a lot - but i’ve mentioned it here? i mean, winterson’s lighthousekeeping, carson’s autobiography of red, and atwood’s cat’s eye.

so i’ll go with the mill on the floss by george eliot. it’s a very - proper - novel, a bildungsroman with an instructive streak which is apparent, but not obnoxious, i wouldn’t say. the heart of the book is a conflict between a sister and a brother - to put it crudely, he doesn’t approve of her & she needs his approval. what made it work for me is that maggie is intensely relatable but tom - whom my subject mates hated rather easily - is a character i would admire if he were more self-aware. i spent some time here, writing and writing on characters who are hard-working & disciplined - & tom is, but he’s also horrible. still, i couldn’t just dismiss him & i was following it closely - will they or will they not reconcile? (will he or will he not stay a horrible person?) & it was new, because we are now - i think? - more used to caring intensely about…well, romantic dynamics / relationships more than platonic / familial, so it felt new, to be so invested in a conflict between siblings.

there are more things there - this book, despite its focus on maggie’s mostly unhappy life, is terribly funny at times. & it’s very skilfull where maggie’s bad choice love interest comes on to scene: you know stephen doesn’t work, you’re conflicted? it uses funny relatable scenes to attach you and then it kicks you in the gut. & finally, as i said, it’s a very moral novel - & i’m still interested in the characters who’re trying to do the right thing.

2. a book you hated?

i’ve mentioned this, but penelopiad by margaret atwood. i…usually like atwood? i would say so. but penelopiad is the disappointment of this year (well, trk is another but i gave up after 140 pages so). it’s, as the name would suggest, a re-telling of odyssey from penelope’s point of view. & although atwood gave a good lecture on how you should not screw female characters for the sake of other female characters (among other things) she does…the same thing? any sentence she writes on helen is…wrong. also she almost hints that telemachus is somehow queer, only for it to be revealed that he didn’t praise helen’s beauty because he didn’t want to hurt his mum’s delicate feelings. jesus. i deserve - i don’t know, a cup of hot chocolate or whatever we do to comfort people - for every time an author makes me thing a character is queer and then does - this. i like this quote though.

6. a book that was super frustrating?

ha…this has to be far from the madding crowd by thomas hardy. i was…reading it just after i finished jane eyre & the difference was…apparent. i hated it intensely when i read it, also because i messed up my reading schedule & had to plow through 280 pages on a single day with a pack of stale biscuits as my only comfort. this was the book i texted in capslock about. but, i came around. i still find the descriptions of sheep breeding / caring excessive, but what bothered me most, which is, misogyny i feel would be more appropriately read as free indirect speech, so the male characters’ views rather than the narrator’s? because at some point, it doesn’t work anymore. you can’t think hardy genuinely means this, considering that he wrote bathsheba, too. so, not only he doesn’t think this, but he also ridicules it? he’s easy to rip on, but i don’t feel it’s fair to take sentence-long quotes out of context & treat it as evidence for his views (which is what i did, ofc. but i needed to cope somehow). i’m still not sold on the romance - i like the, what - the mission statement, but it’s not…engaging? at all. & oak and bathsheba’s dynamic is mostly oak lecturing her, which i’m not too excited about. anyway - an awful read, a bearable book & i loved the secondary reading, so i’m not unhappy i had to read it.

9. a book you learned from?

so, an unobvious answer would be four quartets by t.s. eliot. i didn’t learn so much from reading but from studying it / writing the essay afterwards. mostly, i learned how much work i can take. 40h in four days is my limit & the week afterward (last week of the term) i spent numb, achieving the absolute minimum & speed-writing a shitty essay because i just didn’t care anymore. eliot though. i felt i didn’t understand him at all? so i needed to do so much more critical reading & close reading & close rereading. he references an awful lot of obscure texts (like, st john of the cross’ ascent of mount carmel. who knows this? i didn’t). i focused on getting the references down first & then went from there. what i also learnt was that i could write, if spiteful enough, an essay with no semi-colons in it. my supervisor, giving me the feedback on the previous one, counted the semi-colons i used by hand (it was thirty seven so. i get it’s a problem. still) so i limited my punctuation to commas and periods. & finally, even though this was the essay i sweated blood over, it was still not great? it was good as an analysis / explanation of what eliot does, but not of how he does it, which. was the point. but, as with every camb essay, i learned ‘good enough’ is…really, really great. also, i think four quartets is a great piece of - can’t say writing because i wouldn’t be able to substantiate that, but - a great piece of thinking? i liked the stuff i wrote about, i mean.

an obvious answer is how to read a poem by terry eagleton. i - didn��t learn how to read a poem, no - but i liked the chapter on the carnation theory / fallacy & it made me think differently. so, the high school mode of analysing poetry, when we did this, was to find as many links between vaguely understood form & content. as in, the speaker says forest leaves grass and the repetition of s gives an impression of a murmur one would hear in the forest, as the leaves and grass move on the wind. and so on. so terry eagleton takes this and says - this is a fallacy. words aren’t their meanings (sign signifier blah). which forced me to look more critically at my responses to poetry - because i used to do that, i used to look for these links, so it felt counterintuitive - not to? also, the fact it’s carnation theory, like incarnation, gives such a religious taste to it - is the word the body? & i can’t say much more than that, because i read the book half a year ago, but i remember intensely enjoying this.

#& writing this AGAIN would be - yeah #amplesand #i was afraid for one terrible moment i ended up deleting this / answering privately / closing the tab in a wrong way somehow #meme #thanks!#readings

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nancygduarteus · 6 years

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Historians’ Favorite Anecdote About Victorian-Era Orgasms Is Probably a Myth

It’s among the most delectably scandalous stories in the history of medicine: At the height of the Victorian era, doctors regularly treated their female patients by stimulating them to orgasm. This mass treatment—a cure for the now-defunct medical condition of “hysteria”— was made possible by a new technology: the vibrator. Vibrators allowed physicians to massage women’s clitorises quickly and efficiently, without exhausting their hand and wrist.

It’s an intoxicating insight, implying that vibrators succeeded not because they advanced female pleasure, but because they saved labor for male physicians. And in the last few years, it has careened around popular culture. It’s given rise to a Tony-nominated play, a romcom starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, and even a line of branded vibrators. Samantha Bee did a skit about it in March. A seemingly endless march of quirky news stories have instructed readers in its surprising-but-true quality, including in Vice, Mother Jones, and Psychology Today.

In short, the tale has become a commonplace how people think about Victorian sex. And according to a contentious new paper, it may also be almost totally false.

There is absolutely no evidence that Victorian doctors used vibrators to stimulate orgasm in women as a medical technique, asserts the paper, written by two historians at Georgia Tech. “Manual massage of female genitals,” they write, “was never a routine medical treatment for hysteria.”

“There’s no evidence for it,” says Hallie Lieberman, an author of both the new paper and Buzz, a popular history of sex toys. “It’s inaccurate.”

It’s not hard to see how the idea spread. The entire hypothesis of Victorian vibrators originates from the work of one scholar: Rachel Maines, a historian and visiting scientist at Cornell. Her 1999 book, The Technology of Orgasm—described at the time as a “secret history of female sexual arousal”—argued that clitoral massage was used as a medical technique for centuries, from the time of Hippocrates to the modern day.

But that’s just not true, according to Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg, the chair of the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech. There is scant evidence that orgasms were widely understood as a cure for female hysteria, and there’s even less evidence that Victorians used vibrators to induce orgasm as a medical technique, they say. “Maines fails to cite a single source that openly describes use of the vibrator to massage the clitoral area,” their paper says. “None of her English-language sources even mentions production of ‘paroxysms’ by massage or anything else that could remotely suggest an orgasm.”

Instead, they argue, Maines conceals this lack of support by relying on a “wink and nod” approach to primary sourcing and by “padding her argument with a mass of tangential citations.”

In an interview, Maines said that she has heard variations of the paper’s criticism before—and that her argument in The Technology of Orgasm was really only a “hypothesis,” anyway. “I never claimed to have evidence that this was really the case,” she said. “What I said was that this was an interesting hypothesis, and as [Lieberman] points out—correctly, I think—people fell all over it. It was ripe to be turned into mythology somehow. I didn’t intend it that way, but boy, people sure took it, ran with it.”

Maines added that she was a little surprised it took so long for other scholars to question her argument, given how admittedly “slender” the evidence she gave in The Technology of Orgasm was. “I thought people were going to attack it right away. But it’s taken 20 years for people to even—people didn’t want to question it. They liked it so much they didn’t want to attack it.”

Even though Maines now calls her argument a “hypothesis,” her writing in The Technology of Orgasm does not take the same provisional tone. “In the Western medical tradition, genital massage to orgasm by a physician or a midwife was a standard treatment for hysteria,” she wrote in that book’s first pages. “When the vibrator emerged as an electromechanical medical instrument at the end of the 19th century, it evolved from previous massage technologies in response to demand from physicians for more rapid and efficient physical therapies, particularly for hysteria.”

“I intended it as a hypothesis. Perhaps the way I expressed it didn’t communicate that,” Maines said when asked about the book’s declarative tone. “Interpretations of historical data are open to interpretation.”

“In the book, she doesn’t refer to it as a hypothesis at all. She makes the claim that this is a fact, and it happened,” says Schatzberg. “To me, it suggests that Maines was aware of the weakness of her claim, and later, after it was taken up so widely, tried to backtrack.”

Certainly Lieberman did not imagine Technology of Orgasm to be hypothetical when she first encountered it. Her new paper with Schatzberg originated from a classroom aside in 2010, when Lieberman was working on a dissertation about the history of sex toys. Her adviser mentioned that he sometimes found it useful to understand other scholars’ work by checking their citations. “I started doing that on this book, and I found that nothing added up,” said Lieberman.

She brought the book to Schatzberg, who was a professor at Wisconsin at the time, for a second opinion. They began going through the book citation-by-citation—and found what they believe to be significant errors. In one passage, Maines alludes to a technique described in 1660 by the British surgeon Nathaniel Highmore. The original quote, translated from Latin, describes a movement that “is not unlike that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.” Maines says this is a reference to the difficulty of producing orgasm through “vulvular massage.”

Not so fast, say Lieberman and Schatzberg. “The quote about the boys game occurs in a discussion of complex motions of the fingers, especially when playing stringed instruments,” they write. “Nowhere does this discussion even hint at massage of the vulva.” (When asked, Maines continued to insist Highmore was referring to genital massage.)

In another passage, Maines quotes a 19th-century physician describing how a vibrator can speed up the massage process. A doctor without a vibrator “consumes a painstaking hour to accomplish much less profound results than are easily effected by the [the vibrator] in a short five or ten minutes,” reads the quote.

But this does not describe genital massage, Lieberman says. “Vibrators were patent medicine,” she told me, and they were used as a labor-saving device for many different types of less titillating massage. This physician was actually advocating for vibrator massage of “the intestines, kidneys, lungs and skin,” she says.

Even once Lieberman and Schatzberg had made these discoveries, publishing them was not a given. At first, Lieberman hoped to publish an article that combined her own research into the history of sex toys that with a refutation of Maines’ thesis. But she found that anonymous peer reviewers resisted her framing of The Technology of Orgasm. Eventually, Lieberman removed all her critique of Maines from her article, and it was accepted for publication.

Lieberman, working with Schatzberg, turned that criticism of Maines into a full journal article—and they again struggled to find a journal that would publish it. According to emails reviewed by The Atlantic, editors now felt their criticism should focus on more than one book and that it should be more generous to Maines’ political context. One editor said that they should treat Maines’ claims not as erroneous facts, but as outdated historical interpretation. “You are letting ‘facts’ slide over into what might fairly be called interpretation,” that reviewer wrote. “Don’t we, as example, continually revisit what the ‘facts’ of the industrial revolution were and how it happened?”

The article was published in The Journal of Positive Sexuality in August.

“Some people have said, ‘Oh, you’re attacking [Maines].’ But my life would have been so much easier if her work had been accurate,” Lieberman said. “I did not want to critique her, I do not want to attack her, I have no problem with her. I just want to build on someone else’s work, and when that work is incorrect, it creates problems for scholars in the field of history of sexuality.”

“It’s a real problem if you’re a grad student writing a dissertation, and in what seems to be the widely accepted work in your field, you can’t find any justification for,” said Schatzberg.

Other historians have previously identified problems with Maines’ work. Fern Riddell, a popular historian who studies Victorian sex, attacked the idea that “Victorians invented the vibrator” in a 2014 Guardian article. (Riddell did not respond to an email sent through her publisher.)

And Helen King, a classics professor at the Open University in the U.K., wrote a lengthy scholarly rebuttal of Maines’ use of Greek and Latin sources in 2011. Maines “deliberately skewed” translations of the ancient texts she cited, like interpreting a medical text “in which the lower back is massaged as ‘masturbation,’” King said in an email. “She played just as fast and loose with the secondary material; for example she cited a general article on Roman baths to support her hypothesis that piped water in the baths was used for masturbation, even though that article says nothing about water pressure or women, let alone masturbation!”

Reading the new paper, King said she had one thought: “What comes as a surprise is that Maines’ book is even more flawed than I’d thought. ... I do wonder if anyone at all looked at it for the press.”

That press was the Johns Hopkins University Press, which published The Technology of Orgasm 19 years ago. “As most senior scholars know, university presses peer-review their books by relying on other senior scholars to comment on the quality of the work,” said Greg Britton, its editorial director. “Before it was accepted for publication two decades ago, this book would have been selected by the editor, undergone a rigorous round of single-blind peer review, and then approved by a faculty editorial board.”

He added: “Presses do not, however, fact-check their books as Lieberman and Schatzberg acknowledge. More to the point, Professor Maines has always maintained that her assertions were hypothesis open to further exploration.”

Maines nodded to King’s work as a precedent for the Lieberman and Schatzberg paper. She maintains that she never set out to pass off the notion of vibrators as a Victorian treatment for hysteria as historical fact; rather, she simply wanted to present the possibility as a way to get people thinking and talking about “orgasmic mutuality,” or female orgasms in addition to the traditionally more familiar male orgasm. And given its outsize impact in popular culture, especially through works like Ruhl’s play, “I think I succeeded in that,” she says.

This kind of symbolic victory is exactly what Schatzberg worries about. “In this post-fact era, the one bastion where facts should still be loved, and honored, and respected, and relentlessly pursued is academia,” Schatzberg said.

In the last few years, the social sciences have been rocked by a “reproducibility crisis,” in which once-bedrock findings in psychology, nutrition science, and other disciplines have failed to replicate when tested. Lieberman and Schatzberg believe the same “publish-or-perish” incentives which drove that crisis also explain the vibrator story: Its success, they write, “serves as a cautionary tale for how easily falsehoods can become embedded in the humanities.”

“People are not rewarded for checking previous work,” Schatzberg said. “They’re rewarded for coming up with a sexy new research finding. That’s true in the sciences, but it’s also true in the humanities.”

Lieberman said the entire episode seemed to illustrate the academy’s tendency to confirmation bias. “It was salacious. It was sexy. It sounded like a porn,” she said.“It fit into our belief that the Victorians weren’t as educated or knowledgable as we are about sex—and this idea that we progressively get more enlightened about sex, and that history follows this narrative from progression to progression. It fits so well into this. It fits into ideas that people had that women’s sexuality wasn’t understood.”

“One of the big takeaways for me is that the peer-reviewed process is flawed. Peer review is no substitute for fact-checking,” she added. “We need to fix this, and we need to start checking other people’s work especially in history.”

To King, the takeaway was clear: “People wanted to hear this story,” she said. “Vibrator stories sell.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/09/victorian-vibrators-orgasms-doctors/569446/?utm_source=feed

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