What a wonderful Christmas this has been! I picked up Jae from the airport last Tuesday, and she and Grace got along famously; as I tweeted on Boxing Day, it’s a good thing I had cooking to do because once they started talking about motorcycles it was essentially a foreign language to me. Everything for the Christmas feast came out perfectly, and I received such lovely presents, including two vintage nightgowns and a vintage vibrator (yes, whores really do give each other presents like that, at least sometimes) and from Gumdeo, a copy of The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft (thank you!) As those of you who follow me on Twitter have probably already noticed, I’ve been as good as my word about taking more time off; I stayed offline for most of Wednesday & Thursday, and even after that I haven’t been working nearly as hard as usual. I really am trying to lighten up and enjoy myself more; you may call that a New Year’s resolution if you like, but since I first made the shift in November I hardly think it counts. That’s probably for the best, though; New Year’s resolutions rarely survive January, and I hope this shift in my life is a permanent one.
Diary #235
December 30, 2014 by Maggie McNeill
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A vintage one?
Please describe it.
I’m imagining something in brass attached by a system of gears and pulleys to a steam boiler the size of a refrigerator with a 50 kg flywheel on the side.
Come to think of it, weren’t the first vibrators used by Victorian era doctors?
So is this thing some really creepy looking gothic medical instrument like something out of a Frankenstein movie or a 1930s asylum?
No, it’s a Wahl model from the ’50s or ’60s; it looks like a cousin to the electric hair clippers for which Wahl is best known. I’ll post a picture of it later today. It’s incredibly quiet for the level of vibration, which is similar to and only slightly weaker than the Hitachi I was also given (though on a different frequency). I know you probably don’t appreciate this info, but my female readers will. 😉
Hmm, a half century old electrical appliance. Be careful, the insulation might be worn. Or at least work on a good story for the folks at ER (“Well, I was cooking hotdogs in the nude when I slipped over on some mustard and …”).
A friend of mine used to work in ER at King Faisal Military Hospital in Saudi Arabia. One night a senior officer in the Saudi army was brought in with a life threatening gunshot injury. The exit wound was just below his solar plexus. There was no entry wound. True story.
I guess the moral is that if you see a report reading “The patient was unconscious, prostate on the floor”, it may not be a typo.
Nope; it’s in perfect working order. I got Jae to snap a pic in the style these things used to be advertised in magazines:
And yes, that is a snakeskin print nightgown.
“Come to think of it, weren’t the first vibrators used by Victorian era doctors?”
Yes. Massage used to be the standard treatment of “hysteria” and other “illnesses”. The docs weren’t always very good at their jobs, and resented the hour it might take them to achieve a result—when they could otherwise have earned more $$$. Sometimes the got the midwife to give the treatment.
The first vibrators were enormous machines, a permanent fixture. It’s said that the first electrical ‘home’ device to market was a portable massager; and this before the end of the 19th century.
I wrote a chapter where a class of high school girl experiment with various sex toys and write a one-page report on which she liked best. Included the teacher playing a clip from the 1968 movie Barbarella.