A fascinating history of a pseudo-medical term used to mark overly sexual women as abnormal, diseased or deviant. The author is professor of history at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

She examines the evolution of this term from the mid-nineteenth century to the present ( The book was published in 2000 ) and discusses the medical and legal issues surrounding the term and the women diagnosed with it.

Male nymphomaniacs ( having a condition called satyriasis or Don Juanism) are treated briefly mainly because it was not given a lot of attention until recently because males are expected to be promiscuous and highly sexed. The more recent term, sex-addiction, is applied to males and females. Ironically, males are now diagnosed with it more than women. An interesting historical flip-flop.

Although the term has taken on either a joking or positive connotation in the 21st century, even in our so-called 'enlightened' age, the negative effects of the term linger on. There is still a double standard concerning women who want more sex than their partners or want to engage in sex outside of a 'monogamous committed relationship.' Women are still punished if they 'disobey' their 'natural' inclination toward a stifled libido. All the bull-crap spewed out by popular science books on evolutionary psychology has only served to reinforce this double standard ( see Sex at Dawn for a rebuttal of this. ).

If you are interested in this subject, it is worth a read.

It is well to remember that there are still places in the United States where it is illegal to sell sex toys. A comedic movie dealing with the history of the vibrator and female orgasm is Hysteria or see the book The Technology of Orgasm. The Job Nobody Wanted to learn how the vibrator was originally developed to relieve doctors from having to manually masturbate their female patients to orgasm to relieve them of their hysterical symptoms. Also Passion and Power. ( )