Skip to content
Guest Thinkers

A Stimulating History

Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

Rarely has so much buzz surrounded a Big Think guest. It was our pleasure today to have historian of technology Dr. Rachel Maines in to discuss her bestselling 1999 volume, “The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ Vibrators and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction,” as well as her participation in a recent New York Psychoanalytic Institute roundtable on “Love and Pleasure in the Age of Electricity.”


Upbeat and good-humored, Dr. Maines also discussed her new book on “Hedonizing Technologies”—that is, the technologies that have turned formerly productive tasks like hunting and gardening into leisure activities. Her interview will be posted in January.

Sign up for Big Think on Substack
The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free.

Related
One reason I can’t buy the claim that conservative intellectual has become an oxymoron is that on our campuses it’s so often the conservatives who defend “liberal education.”  I’m going […]

Up Next
After President Obama’s recent speeches—one at West Point proposing sending more troops to Afghanistan and one accepting the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo—commentators have been quick to articulate the “Obama […]