M – First of all, I want you to sign me up for whatever class you overheard and secondly, how in the heck do you get aroused from riding a bicycle? I usually dismount feeling chafed and sore as hell. Am I doing something wrong? But I digress.  Are you saying that they were simultaneously developing “tools” to help us get aroused at the same time that they were developing “toys” to make sure we didn’t get aroused?

J – Yes, they were both in the same, revolutionary Sears and Roebuck catalog, the go-to place for everything from wedding gowns to windmills.

M – Apparently we females, and whatever does or doesn’t turn us on, have been a mystery since the dawn of man. Plato’s “Timaeus” compares a woman’s uterus to a living creature that wanders throughout a woman’s body, “blocking passages, obstructing breathing and causing disease.” This in turn led to the idea of women contracting a disease called “hysteria,” which they believed was caused by sexual deprivation in particularly passionate women. To “cure” them, doctors would perform “pelvic massage” – manual stimulation of the genitals until the patient experienced “hysterical paroxysm” (orgasm).  Sounds like a happy ending to me.

J – I think that you should adopt a new “position” on the bike. I am very fond of pedaling around on mine. I also think that there must have been quite a few women who were anxious to visit their doctors’ offices every month to be “relieved” of their hysteria. Did you know that back in the early 1900s, there was a doctor named E.H. Clarke, who wrote a very well-received book called “No Sex in Education.” It stated that women should not seek out a higher education (college), because it would thwart reproduction. His theory was that when women thought too hard, the blood flow that would normally go to the uterus got diverted to the brain, causing the ovaries to shrink, thereby making it impossible to produce a healthy infant. Unbelievable. We’ve come a long way, baby!