health&fitness
by Brian Alexander
Sex on the Brain…
Sex Through the Ages
(and a little bit about Honda, but that’s not too important)
By Brian Alexander
Brian Alexander is the author of America Unzipped
You’d think that since the technology of vibrators is now approaching that of NASA rockets — you can now plug them into your computer and cede control to a partner in Moldova, or program them to buzz along with, say, the William Tell Overture like that damn Honda Civic Musical Road — that we’d know pretty much all there is to know about the science and psychology of getting off.
No, Ma’am. Hardly. A hundred years from now, some schlub of a sex column writer will look back and get a good giggle at the myths we propagated.
There’s a long history of this sort of thing, one I explore in my MSNBC Sexploration column of April 23. A fellow by the name of Wilhelm Fliess stars, because he was a man of science, a medical doctor, what we would call an ear, nose, and throat man today. Which explains a lot, because Fliess was a friend and intimate confidant of Sigmund Freud who helped convince Freud that our genitals, especially female genitals, were linked to the nose.
In 1897 he published a monograph called “The Relations between the Nose and the Female Sexual Organs from the Biological Aspect” that elaborated on his theory of “nasal reflex neurosis.” The nuances of that idea are too complex to go into here, but suffice to say that if nasal congestion had half the impact on sex as Fliess said it did, we’d all be addicted to Flonase.
While the theory makes for a funny story now, it had disastrous results when Fliess and Freud actually put it into practice on Emma Eckstein. Fliess operated on poor Emma’s nose, very nearly killing her and leaving her mutilated for the rest of her life.
It was no accident that Emma was a woman. Female sexuality has long intrigued male doctors and scientists partly because men have long been both fearful and excited by the idea of female desire and orgasm. Men have come in for their share of goofy medical advice when it comes to sex, and I explore that in the same column, but more often it’s been women who have borne the brunt of medicine’s misadventures through the ages.
Even so, a lot of bad advice had beneficial fallout. Though Victorian-era “marriage” advisors got a lot of the medicine wrong, they actually helped women gain more control over their bodies. Whether programmable vibrators are a step in the same direction remains to be seen. Either way, at least we’ll be entertained.
Besides writing the Sexploration column for MSNBC.com, Brian Alexander is the author of America Unzipped.
What Musical Road?
Really, what’s most important here is Brian Alexander’s MSNBC Sexploration column of April 23. Obviously. But we know many of you may end up curious about the Honda Musical Road mentioned above. In case you missed it, this was a quarter-mile section of Avenue K in Lancaster, CA (about an hour from L.A.’s San Fernando Valley). The inventive people at Honda cut grooves into this section of desert highway so that the reverberations from driving over it sounded like The William Tell Overture. Although it was said that the musical road was in the middle of nowhere it must’ve been somewhere because there were locals. And these locals complained about the noise –err music. The Musical Road was paved over in 2008. But, of course, the project is fully documented on Utube:
Full Honda behind the scenes utube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRiJlEte9l0
Looking for Brian Alexander’s America Unzipped? Great! Exurb supports independent bookstores. To find one (hopefully) near you check out the American Booksellers Association store directory.
Tags: brian alexander, msnbc, sex, unzipped
Sex Through the Ages
(and a little bit about Honda, but that’s not too important)
By Brian Alexander
Brian Alexander is the author of America Unzipped
You’d think that since the technology of vibrators is now approaching that of NASA rockets — you can now plug them into your computer and cede control to a partner in Moldova, or program them to buzz along with, say, the William Tell Overture like that damn Honda Civic Musical Road — that we’d know pretty much all there is to know about the science and psychology of getting off.
No, Ma’am. Hardly. A hundred years from now, some schlub of a sex column writer will look back and get a good giggle at the myths we propagated.
There’s a long history of this sort of thing, one I explore in my MSNBC Sexploration column of April 23. A fellow by the name of Wilhelm Fliess stars, because he was a man of science, a medical doctor, what we would call an ear, nose, and throat man today. Which explains a lot, because Fliess was a friend and intimate confidant of Sigmund Freud who helped convince Freud that our genitals, especially female genitals, were linked to the nose.
In 1897 he published a monograph called “The Relations between the Nose and the Female Sexual Organs from the Biological Aspect” that elaborated on his theory of “nasal reflex neurosis.” The nuances of that idea are too complex to go into here, but suffice to say that if nasal congestion had half the impact on sex as Fliess said it did, we’d all be addicted to Flonase.
While the theory makes for a funny story now, it had disastrous results when Fliess and Freud actually put it into practice on Emma Eckstein. Fliess operated on poor Emma’s nose, very nearly killing her and leaving her mutilated for the rest of her life.
It was no accident that Emma was a woman. Female sexuality has long intrigued male doctors and scientists partly because men have long been both fearful and excited by the idea of female desire and orgasm. Men have come in for their share of goofy medical advice when it comes to sex, and I explore that in the same column, but more often it’s been women who have borne the brunt of medicine’s misadventures through the ages.
Even so, a lot of bad advice had beneficial fallout. Though Victorian-era “marriage” advisors got a lot of the medicine wrong, they actually helped women gain more control over their bodies. Whether programmable vibrators are a step in the same direction remains to be seen. Either way, at least we’ll be entertained.
Besides writing the Sexploration column for MSNBC.com, Brian Alexander is the author of America Unzipped.What Musical Road?
Really, what’s most important here is Brian Alexander’s MSNBC Sexploration column of April 23. Obviously. But we know many of you may end up curious about the Honda Musical Road mentioned above. In case you missed it, this was a quarter-mile section of Avenue K in Lancaster, CA (about an hour from L.A.’s San Fernando Valley). The inventive people at Honda cut grooves into this section of desert highway so that the reverberations from driving over it sounded like The William Tell Overture. Although it was said that the musical road was in the middle of nowhere it must’ve been somewhere because there were locals. And these locals complained about the noise –err music. The Musical Road was paved over in 2008. But, of course, the project is fully documented on Utube:
Full Honda behind the scenes utube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRiJlEte9l0
Looking for Brian Alexander’s America Unzipped? Great! Exurb supports independent bookstores. To find one (hopefully) near you check out the American Booksellers Association store directory.
Tags: brian alexander, msnbc, sex, unzipped