Back in the late 1990s, Sex and the City presented the Rampant Rabbit to a worldwide audience. In the following years, it was difficult to find a woman who hadn’t popped down to her local Ann Summers to get her own version of the now-infamous vibrator. Women were talking about sex and what they did and didn’t like. Sex toys, among countless other topics that featured in SATC, were becoming mainstream topics of conversation.
Today sees the UK release of Hysteria, a film that charts the invention of the very first battery operated vibrator and its popularity among Victorian housewives. That’s right: Carrie, Samantha, Charlotte and Miranda were roughly a century late to the sex toy party.
For hundreds of years, pesky women baffled the medical profession with their insistence on being, you know, a bit flighty and difficult to control. Women were diagnosed with “hysteria” for symptoms ranging from excitability to low (or, indeed, high) sexual appetite, fatigue and restlessness. Diagnoses stuck around until the early 1950s but Victorian doctors were particular fans and they had the perfect remedy: a treatment that they delicately referred to as “pelvic massage”. Don’t be misled, now; this treatment was not sexual. Nope. Not sexual at all.
Hysteria introduces us to Joseph Mortimer Granville (played by dreamy Brit actor, Hugh Dancy), a young doctor in Victorian London, who is in the business of administering this in-no-way-sexual treatment to his female patients. Unfortunately, all that pelvic massage takes its toll on poor Granville, who develops a nasty case of carpal tunnel and invents a machine that will do the job for him. Cue the world’s first battery operated vibrator, the alarmingly named “Granville’s Hammer”.
Meanwhile, Granville finds himself in a love triangle with his boss’s two, very different daughters: straight-laced Emily (Felicity Jones) and feisty feminist Charlotte (played by Maggie Gyllenhaal, who was celebrating BDSM on screen in Secretary before any of us had heard of Anastasia Steele and Christian Grey).
It’s a pretty funny premise, right? The filmmakers, including director Tanya Wexler, certainly think so. It would have been easy to take this story and make a po-faced film about sexual politics and gender equality but Hysteria has its tongue firmly in its cheek and comes across as a nothing short of a romp. I’d go so far as to say the trailer matches all the bawdiness of a Carry On… film (Sheridan Smith is clearly channelling Babs Windsor – in a good way) with a smart and modern feminist romantic comedy and a richly drawn costume drama. No, really. Quite some feat, huh?
We might think we’ve come a long way since Granville’s great invention, what with just about every other human being reading 50 Shades of Grey and going on and on about how very open-minded they are about sex now. But the use of vibrators for sexual purposes (as opposed to what, I’m not sure) is still illegal in the US state of Alabama, over one-hundred years later.
The trick that Hysteria pulls off is not to take it all too seriously. Some might be put off by the light heartedness of a film that is essentially all about sexual politics and I don’t disagree that diagnoses of hysteria were appalling acts of sexism. But Hysteria presents us with funny, confident and intelligent women who are more than a match for their male counterparts, who embrace their sexuality and with whom modern women can identify. And that reminds us that we’ve tackled sexual politics before and we’ve been victorious – even if only in part – before. In fact, we might just need to take a leaf out of their book and keep going before we can say we’ve truly moved on.
Hysteria is released in the UK on Friday 21 September
Photo © 2012 Sony Pictures Classics