SOCIAL STEALTH

Published in slightly different form in Tomorrowsf (http://www.tomorrowsf.com), No. 14 (March-April 1999).

One thinks of technology as being pretty straightforward stuff. A car is a car. A computer is a computer. A hammer is a hammer.
Except when it isn't, and I have been playing around with the idea of technological gizmos whose ostensible and actual purposes differ, as in a science fiction story (whose author and title I can't recall) that comes to mind. It appeared years ago, I think in Analog or Astounding, and concerned an inventor who had come up with a device that had a weak antigravity effect. Unable to get anyone to take it seriously, he built a toy that "levitated" with the aid of a thread just strong enough to lift the toy with the anti-gravity effect helping. Run the batteries down, and it would break. He then put his toy in stores in a town with a large engineer population, figuring that it would not take long for them to become intrigued, realize what was going on, and maybe even figure out how to improve his gadget.
When I asked my fellow writers for nominations, they promptly came up with several much less benign examples. Brenda Clough said, "Many garment types carry this double meaning. High heels, corsets, leather. It's like the handkerchief trick -- the hidden meaning is only for those who know. To outsiders it looks innocent."
Deb Houdek Rule insisted that laser pointers are really cat toys. If you follow the news, you may have noticed that to some people they are fake gunsights and should be banned as if they were handguns; the problem seems to be that drivers shine them on other drivers to say something like "Gotcha!" and kids shine them on cops to watch them jump. Perhaps both are just inspired by that old game of laser tag, but to a nervous cop, "Jump!" can mean "Shoot!" If we ban the pointers, the cops won't be forced to kill any goofy brats and then feel bad about it. Of course, there might be some reduction in the number of goofy brats, but you can't have everything.
Several writers noted that you can cook vegetables and tenderize octopus in washing machines and poach salmon in dishwashers. (No soap, please.)
My daughter Joellen pointed out that many women's magazines "present themselves as wholesome, fashion, feminine-advice type 'zines. In many cases, though, especially lately, there's a good deal of border-line porn ... right there, marketed as a wholesome product most parents would allow their teen-age daughters to subscribe to."
Now these aren't all gizmos, and the double meaning is sometimes more in the line of a side-effect, but the women's magazines (and the men's mags--the guys read Playboy for the articles, right?) are very much the sort of thing I want to play with in this column. They're presented as one thing but intended and even bought as something else. They are a product in disguise, camouflaged to slip past our social radar and dodge the anti-aircraft fire just the way military "stealth" technology shields the latest fighters and bombers.
And it's astonishing what else we can find. Would you believe makeup? It's peddled as something to make a woman look pretty. It's considered proper--even essential--in the office as well as on social occasions, so it is supposed to make a woman look professional. But makeup is a perfect example of social stealth.
Research has shown that when one person is interested in another, their pupils dilate. This is why our favorite spots for romantic rendezvous have subdued lighting. It is also why women have worn eye shadow since the days of ancient Egypt--it makes the eyes look larger, and every woman knows, even if the man doesn't, that the most effective way to entice him is to be interested in him. Big eyes are much more important than big anything else.
Except maybe lips. That's what lipstick is for, and it is worth noting that sexual excitement engorges a number of tissues, including the lips. Look at him with big eyes and big lips, and he starts breathing heavy.
Makeup makes you look pretty? What's pretty? Turned on.
It makes you look like a professional? Really?
Want to change your image, then? Just change your diet. A century and a half ago, a few people were pushing very strange beliefs about food. Sylvester Graham, for instance, thought a plain, boring, vegetarian diet starring whole-wheat flour would help keep people from feeling randy. That's what smores (two graham crackers sandwiching toasted marshmallow and Hershey bar, for which the Girl Scout Samoas version is an entirely inadequate substitute) are really good for!
Corn flakes, too. At Battle Creek, Michigan, the Seventh Day Adventists ran the Medical and Surgical Sanitarium where John Harvey Kellogg, nutritionist and sexual adviser, invented this famous breakfast cereal to prevent sex ("the ultimate abomination") and masturbation ("the vilest, the basest, and the most degrading act that a human being can commit"). He couldn't sell the stuff to anyone but his patients, but in 1891 one of those patients was a fellow named Charles William Post, who turned out to be a marketing whiz. He soon had his own sanatorium in Battle Creek, his own product line, beginning with the Postum coffee substitute, and a spiel that said there was "no limit to the number of physical and moral ills (even divorce or juvenile delinquency) caused by coffee, but it could all be improved with Postum." Then came Grape Nuts, and by 1902, there were dozens of breakfast cereals on the market, every one of them a well-hyped cure-all.
Perhaps you don't think cereals offer a real good example of camouflage. After all, it is reasonable to say the change in product identity was more a matter of realizing what it was really good for, not covering up some secret agenda. So how about condoms? They appeared in Egypt as linen sheaths about 1000 BC, for protection against disease. By the 1500s, they were known to be useful as birth control devices as well, but when the Comstock Law was passed in the U.S. in 1873, they could no longer be sold or used in the U.S. for that purpose. Henceforth "legitimate" only as armor against infection, they wore the label of "prophylactic." Of course, users knew what they were good for and did not let the label mislead. Indeed, in World War II, the mere rumor that WAACs (Women's Army Air Corps members) were being issued prophylactics before going overseas "outraged and humiliated" WAAC relatives.
And now we come to what I've been working up to: the vibrator. I have in hand an utterly fascinating little book that reads, said Library Journal's review, "like twisted science fiction." It's Rachel P. Maines's The Technology of Orgasm: "Hysteria," the Vibrator, and Women's Sexual Satisfaction (Johns Hopkins University Press, $22, 184 + xx pp.; ISBN: 0-8018-5941-7).
The book's preface is a hoot and a half, for the author displays a very nice sense of humor as she recounts the receptions her talks and papers on her topic have received. But the book itself is quite serious and extraordinarily illuminating and thought-provoking. Maines tells us that "hysteria" is an ancient ailment whose symptoms have occasionally been recognized as those of sexual excitement unrelieved by orgasm. Our culture has long focused on the "androgenic model" of sexuality, meaning penile penetration and male orgasm, and assumed that what satisfies him should certainly satisfy her, despite data showing that "androgenic" sex leaves most women high and dry. Her resulting condition has been defined by male doctors as an illness, and those same "doctors performed the 'routine chore' of relieving hysterical patients' symptoms with manual genital massage until the women reached orgasm, or, as it was known under clinical conditions, the 'hysterical paroxysm.'" The procedure was an office-visit cash cow for physicians, and despite the prurient giggle the idea may arouse in us today, few of those physicians seemed to find much thrill in it. Indeed, stimulating female patients to relief of their symptoms of orgasmic deprivation was "the job nobody wanted"; physicians palmed it off on interns and midwives, and when technology--whose purpose has been defined as making it possible to do things more easily, rapidly, and cheaply--produced substitutes for the hand, they welcomed it. What the doctor took an hour to do, technology could do in minutes, without requiring great skill or effort, and the doctor could "treat" many more patients in a typical day at the office.
In the nineteenth century, one popular technology was hydrotherapy, meaning the use of water under pressure--douches and hoses--to vibrate the pelvic tissues. The major problem with it was apparently keeping the patients from overindulging.
Other techniques included steam-powered massagers and electrically powered vibrators, some of which were Rube Goldberg constructions with enough belts, gears, cords, and struts to scare a modern into orgasmic incapability. The mechanisms quickly shrank in size, and when they appeared in stag films such as "Widow's Delight" in the 1920s, they stopped appearing in physicians' offices. Instead, they went home, with even Sears, Roebuck advertising "Aids That Every Woman Appreciates," though the stress did tend to be on the wonderful effects these devices had on the complexion.
Maines has a good deal to say about the "medicalization" of women's sexuality, male blindness or obtuseness (which by her account is quite phenomenal) and selfishness, and "social camouflage," which means the immense unconscious effort we can go to to keep from calling a spade a spade, or a vibrator an orgasm-producer. In the twenties, she says, the camouflage was ruptured. Advertising to both the medical and home markets largely vanished, for the undisguised vibrator was no longer respectable. By the sixties, however, "the modern vibrator [had] resurfaced ... as a frankly sexual toy... [and] few efforts were made to camouflage its sexual benefits." Click here, if you dare.
End of story? One might like to think so, but even as Maines's book was in press in 1998, Alabama was busily banning the sale of "sex toys," notably including vibrators, as part of its effort to eliminate sex shops and "romance boutiques" (the penalty if caught is a $10,000 fine and a year at hard labor). As I was reading Maines's book, the news that week was that the American Civil Liberties Union and a number of local women were asking a federal court to strike the state law down as unconstitutional.
The complaint was originally filed in July 1998; The ACLU's press release at the time said: "Because a great number of Alabama residents face serious legal consequences, the ACLU is asking the court to immediately block enforcement of the law. ... 'If a doctor recommends the use of a vibrator or sex aid to assist an individual or a couple in improving their sex lives, I don't see where the government has an interest in preventing them from following that advice,' said Olivia Turner, Executive Director of the ACLU of Alabama. Even the Food and Drug Administration has said such devices are medically necessary, she added."
According to the state's spokesperson, Courtney Tarver, the law bans only the sale, not the use, of vibrators and the state legislature was acting entirely within its powers.
And the camouflage remains intact: Even in Alabama, you can pop down to Wal-Mart and pick one up--the label says it's for massage and muscle relaxation, and the picture on the box shows it held against the side of a lovely lady's neck.
But everyone still knows what it's really for. If you remain in any doubt, click here.


Dr. Thomas A. Easton is Professor of Life Sciences at Thomas College in Waterville, Maine. He has been the Analog book columnist for the last twenty years. His latest novel, Unto the Last Generation, is available only on-line, from Mind's Eye Fiction. Last year's Silicon Karma (White Wolf, 1997) was well received; copies are now available from the author (teaston@acadia.net). His latest nonfiction books are Taking Sides: Clashing Views on Controversial Issues in Science, Technology, and Society (Dushkin Publishing Group, 1995, 2nd ed., 1997, 3rd ed., 1998) and Periodic Stars: An Overview of Recent Science Fiction (Borgo Books, 1997).

Previous columns are available here