In The Next Room (or the vibrator play)

I saw this beautiful play by Sarah Ruhl last year at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company in DC.  Side note: if you love live theater Woolly Mammoth is the place to go.  They are always putting on these wonderfully funny, tragic, poignant, raw, and electric plays that make your brain buzz for days afterwards.

I know it was a while ago that I saw this gem, but I just had to write about it.  It had me crying for hours afterwards.  Plus, the whole concept around it is fascinating.  It follows a few Victorian families and their relationship with this new-found contraption called the vibrator.

Here's the thing that's so wild about the vibrator in the Victorian Age: it wasn't used for sexual pleasure.  It was used to cure this illness called "hysteria."  300 BC, Hippocrates defines hysteria, from the Greek word hystera for uterus, as suffocation of the womb.  Second century, Greek philosopher Galen asserts that hysteria can be cured by coaxing the uterus back into the normal pelvic position and expelling fluids (aka the orgasm).  In a world dominated by men, no connection between the "symptoms" of this hysteria and the ideas of sexual pleasure, sexual desire, and sexual dissatisfaction was ever made.  There's no way a man could be an unsatisfactory lover!  It must be the woman sick from all those fluids building up in her uterus.  It wasn't until the 70s that the vibrator became a sexual object.

The play is just fabulous.  It explores this idea of sex and human connection.  In one particularly poignant scene, the wife of the doctor who has been treating his patients with the new vibrator confronts her husband about their passionless marriage.  She says something along the lines of "how much of you married me because you wanted to make me feel better?  And how much because you loved me?"  I guess what I took away from this is that I don't want to just feel better.  I'm sure going out and losing it to some guy at a bar would in many ways make me feel better.  But don't I want my first time to come from a place of pure, electric, and direct human connection?  I live in a world where I don't have to repress my sexuality.  I know that I want to do it with a man who loves me and has my needs and desires in mind.  And I just know it's going to be awesome...