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voyager-into-the-unknown · 4 years

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This is my December 26 Contribution to the 2019 Pikelavar Winter Event

All I Want for Midwinter is Meklavar: Chapter 1–Gifts

Pike and Meklavar spent the better part of the day shopping in the market district of Talarian City, purchasing little presents for their friends. Block had invited them all to stay at his home for the upcoming Midwinter Festival, where there would be holiday feasts and fireworks, along with an exchange of gifts among their little group of companions in adventure. Pike and Mek had enough gold left from their most recent quest that they could buy gifts for Block, Valayun, Thunder, and Jiro, as well as buying little presents for each other.

As the chilly winter air nipped at their noses, they went towards the magecraft supply store to shop for their best friend, Block. Happy to enter the warm interior of the brightly lit store, Pike shook the snowflakes out of his hair, and followed Mek around as she browsed. Pike decided to get Block a new belt pouch for carrying his magical powders and potions, and Meklavar bought him a beautiful potion flask made of unbreakable crystal. After getting their gifts wrapped, they moved on to an archery shop where Pike purchased a couple of magical summoning and healing arrow heads for Valayun. After that, knowing that Valayun liked sparkly things, Mek insisted that they visit a shop that sold jewelry and other fine accessories for ladies. She admired the rings and necklaces in the display cases, and gazed longingly at a dainty ring with sparking blue and green stones set in a silvery band, but she finally settled upon buying an affordable but festive jeweled comb for Val’s long hair. Pike noted her interest in the expensive ring and began to come up with a plan that he would have to act upon later.

Thunder was harder to shop for than the others, but after much discussion, they agreed that they would buy him a new traveling cloak to replace his threadbare one. They went back out onto the snowy cobblestone street to walk to a shop that sold travelers’ essentials. Pike selected a dark cloak of the finest elven weave, and Mek bought Thunder a sturdy brooch of ornate silver knotwork to hold it in place. For Jiro, they purchased a traveler’s food pouch that was bigger on the inside than the outside, similar to the ones that they had stashed away in their traveling packs. It was expensive, but they both contributed to the purchase and had it tagged “from Pike and Meklavar” when the shopgirl wrapped it for them. Pike grinned as the girl wrote out the words in calligraphy on the gift tag. It made them sound as if they were a couple. If only, Pike thought.

“Pike, I have to get you a present, too. Maybe we should split up. I don’t want you to see what your gift is before Midwinter. It’s bad luck.”

“That’s great idea, Mek. We can meet back at the inn’s common room for supper tonight at the usual time,” he replied.

“See you then!” She waved goodbye and disappeared into the crowd of holiday shoppers, heading off into a part of the market district that they had previously not explored. When he was sure she could no longer see him, Pike backtracked through the snowcovered streets to the jewelers’ shop. He examined his money pouch. There would be just enough coins for his intended purchase, with only enough left for the winter’s traveling expenses. He sighed. It would be worth it though, to see her open such a heartfelt gift.

The days were growing shorter as Midwinter approached, and the innkeeper usually served the evening meal shortly after sundown. When he arrived at the inn, he scanned the common room, which was decorated with evergreen boughs, holly, and real fairy lights, and he noticed that Mek hadn’t returned yet. He darted up the stairs to his room and hid his wrapped presents in his traveling pack. He then went back downstairs to wait for Meklavar at a table in the common room. When she walked in through the front door at last, she was carrying a bulging canvas shopping bag with all of her purchases.

She sat down on the bench opposite him. “Mission accomplished! And I restocked some of our provisions, too.” she said cheerily, brushing the snow from her clothes.

“That’s good thinking. I, um, forgot to do that.” He blushed a little, mainly because he didn’t want to admit that he had spent most of his money on her gift.

“No problem. I bought enough provisions for both of us. In fact, the evening meal is on me. We had better enjoy having a hot, home cooked meal while we can. We are heading out tomorrow.” She took off her helmet, and her tawny hair was in disarray. “Ugh! Helmet hair.” He grinned at her, secretly thinking she looked cute even with her hair sticking up everywhere like that. She picked up her helmet, axe, and shopping bag. “I’m going upstairs for a moment. Order some supper for us, Pike.” She gave him a quick side hug and a smile, then ascended the staircase as the local minstrels began to strike up a lively dance tune. What was she so cheerful about?

He was lost in thought when the buxom serving wench came to his table. Pike noticed her low-cut bodice and how she kept deliberately leaning over while she was taking his order. Pike felt his face heat up. “You know, I get off work in a candlemark. I wouldn’t mind a dance or two with a cutie like you. Or, if you prefer, we could go upstairs...” she said in a seductive voice.

“Um, I’m with someone,” he lied, but secretly wished it were true. “She’ll be back downstairs in a moment, and she wants me to order supper for us both.” Pike wondered what was keeping Meklavar so long. He placed their order, and the serving wench stalked away, seemingly disappointed. Pike exhaled in relief when she was gone.

When Meklavar finally returned, it was nearly time to eat the meal he had ordered for them. Pike’s mouth fell open in shock when he saw her. Not only had she washed up and rearranged her hair in soft waves that framed her face, she had changed out of her armor and exchanged her traveling boots for comfortable indoor slippers, the kind that noble ladies usually wore. She was wearing black leggings and a long, form fitting velvety green tunic embroidered with silver and gold flowering vines at the collar and cuffs. She looked breathtaking. Pike was speechless.

“Cat got your tongue?” she teased.

“Um, you look nice,” he said, not taking his eyes off of her. “So is that what you bought today? New clothes for the festival?” He seemed genuinely surprised by this.

“Well, I don’t wear armor all the time, unless I’m on a quest. I am allowed to like girly things, you know.”

“Right, right. I know you’re a girl—“

“You aren’t allowed to make fun of me for this.”

“I wasn’t going to. I was going to say—“ Pike saw the flirty serving wench approaching. He reached across the table to clasp one of Meklavar’s hands in his own. “—you look beautiful.” Her mouth fell open a little and he heard her gasp softly. Pike tried to remain calm, but his flushed face gave him away.

“Two house specials, for you and your lady friend, cutie,” the serving girl said with a wink. “You’re one lucky dwarf maiden, you know that?” she said to Mek, as she served them their supper. “He’s quite a catch.”

Meklavar blushed adorably, but said nothing until the server was gone. “What was that about?”

Pike averted his gaze. “I may have, ah, led her to believe that you’re my girlfriend or something like that.” He nervously chewed his bottom lip.

“What?!” Meklavar was genuinely shocked. “Why?”

“She was coming on to me, and that was the first thing I could think of that would make her back off.”

“The first thing you could think of?” She lifted her eyebrows gleefully and then smirked at him. She looked quite pleased with herself for some reason he couldn’t fathom. “Well, it wouldn’t be so bad if only it were true.” She sighed wistfully and began eating her meal, which consisted of roast chicken, seasoned roasted potatoes, peas, carrots, and a hot loaf of brown bread with honey butter. There was also a mug of hot herbal tea to wash it all down. Pike’s Heart was hammering in his chest. Did she just say that she wished it were true? When he sat there staring at her in a panicked silence for several moments, she began to get annoyed. “Eat your supper. It’s getting cold.” She looked down at her plate and toyed with her food to avoid meeting his eyes. The minstrels were playing another set of cheery dance tunes and lively holiday songs. Several of the patrons got up to dance with their significant others, and Pike noticed that Meklavar watched the dancers with a faraway look in her eyes, which were a little watery. She sighed and returned to her meal.

Pike reached across the table, grabbing her hand once again. She looked up at him in surprise. “It will still be early when we finish eating. We could dance for a bit, if you’d like.”

She smiled shyly at him, and nodded. “I’d like that very much.” There was an adoring look in her eyes that made Pike think that his heart was going to beat right out of his chest.

When they were done eating, they talked for a bit about their most recent quest and what they thought their friends might be up to right now. Mek paid for their meal, and Pike thanked her. The minstrels were taking a short break for a moment, but when they returned to start playing another set, Pike grabbed her hand once more. “Come on, Mek, let’s dance!” He pulled her onto the dance floor. Several of the younger patrons got up to dance as well, and they all whirled around to a series of jigs and reels and old fiddle tunes that had everyone in the room tapping their toes or clapping along with the beat of the music. Meklavar beamed up at him as he spun her around, and he found himself laughing and exclaiming with little nonsensical shouts of joy along with the other dancers. For a moment, time stopped for them. There were no more dangerous quests or fearsome foes to combat, no more battles or endless journeys over rough terrain. There was only Pike and Meklavar, and it seemed they were the only two people in the room, or even in the world, and nothing else mattered. He wished they could remain like this for an eternity, lost in each other’s eyes.

The minstrels stopped after the last spritely number to receive thunderous applause from all of the patrons. Pike and Meklavar clapped enthusiastically for them along with everyone else, and the spell was broken. Just as Mek was about to lead him from the dance floor, Pike stopped her, not releasing the hand he still held, and gently tugging her back towards him. The minstrels began another set, this time with a romantic number that had all of the remaining couples holding each other close. Mek allowed Pike to pull her in against his broad chest, and she closed her eyes as they swayed gently to the slower tempo of the music. He stroked her soft hair with one hand, and rubbed her back gently with the other. Maybe it was the soap that she washed with, but Pike thought she smelled like wildflowers of some long-ago springtime, and when he closed his eyes, the bitter chill of winter was temporarily forgotten. He wanted to hold her like this forever.

They danced until the minstrels were ready to call it a night. The harpist was already putting her instrument in its case, and the flute player stifled a yawn as Pike led Meklavar away from the common room and up the staircase to their rooms, holding her hand the entire time. When they reached the landing, she stopped him, stood on tiptoe, pulled his face down towards hers, and did something she had never done before: she kissed him on the cheek. Then, all at once, his face reddened, his tail bristled, and his fur stood on end. “I had a wonderful time today, Pike. Thank you.”

He gazed upon her with a soft expression. “Thank you, too, for supper, and the dancing, and—“ he was going to say the kiss, but he stopped himself. “—everything.”

“Goodnight,” said, burying her face in his chest as she hugged him.

“Goodnight, Mek,” he said as he released her. She disappeared into her room and closed the door. He just stood there for a moment in the empty hallway, thinking that of all of the presents she could have given him for Midwinter, a day like today was one of the best gifts of all.

@pikelavarforest @defendersofaurita

#pikelavar #plance #pike #meklavar #pidge #lance #katie holt #pikelavarwinterevent #pikelavar event #pikelavarwinter2019

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thisdaynews · 5 years

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The Idiot’s Guide to the Roger Stone trial

New Post has been published on https://thebiafrastar.com/the-idiots-guide-to-the-roger-stone-trial/

The Idiot’s Guide to the Roger Stone trial

Stone’s case will also be argued in front of a jury at the same time House Democrats escalate their own impeachment investigation into Trump by collecting evidence suggesting the president pressured Ukraine to assist his 2020 reelection bid. While the issues at the center of Stone’s trial are unrelated to the emerging Ukraine controversy, documents that circulated during the period since the GOP operative’s indictment actually fed some of the unfounded, Trump-boosted theories about Ukrainian involvement in the 2016 U.S. election.

When it’s all said and done, the four-decade-old Stone-Trump relationship could be tested like never before should Stone be convicted and the president faces pressure from his base to issue an election-year pardon.

Yeah, it’s enough to make one’s head spin. But don’t worry, POLITICO is here with your handy guide to the Roger Stone trial.

So what’s this all about again?

It seems like ages ago, but it was only January when Stone got indicted for lying to Congress and obstructing its 2016 Russia probe.

You may remember the predawn raid that CNN caught on film thanks to a reporter and cameraman who took a chance staking out Stone’s South Florida home. Or the fiery news conference Stone gave later that afternoon after his arrest and booking at the federal courthouse in Fort Lauderdale.

Turns out, the charges lodged against Stone were the last to come from Mueller before he closed up shop less than two months later. Fast forward to November. Jurors over the next two to three weeks will be asked to determine Stone’s guilt or innocence on seven counts that essentially boil down to whether he obstructed House Intelligence Committee investigators starting in mid-2017 with false testimony, lying about having relevant records and then tampering with another witness.

Stone has pleaded not guilty to the charges and has been out on bond since his initial arrest.

I thought Mueller was done, will I learn anything new from the trial?

There’s a good chance.

Between the final Mueller report and a series of lengthy indictments, the now-former special counsel has laid out a plethora of evidence about Russian election interference aimed at boosting Trump. But his office never went to trial in any of its cases focused on Russian meddling, WikiLeaks or the congressional probes into those efforts (recall that former campaign chairman Paul Manafort’s trial last year was over bank fraud and tax evasion).

That means Stone’s trial will be the first time those Russia-related issues will be laid out in front of a jury, although U.S. District Court Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who’s overseeing the case, made clear Monday she wants to keep things focused on Stone’s alleged false statements and obstruction of justice. She’s likely loath to let the trial devolve into a squabble over unfounded conspiracies about who hacked the Democrats’ emails and then released them in the thick of the 2016 White House race, or the Trump campaign’s possible links to Russian intermediaries.

That might be hard, though.

One mystery that might come up is an oblique reference in the Mueller report to Trump receiving a phone call from an unidentified person in the summer of 2016 who seems to have informed him about upcoming email dumps that would hurt his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton. Rick Gates, a key Manafort deputy who is expected to testify during the Stone trial, was in the car with Trump at the time. Redactions in the Mueller report suggest Stone’s involvement in the episode.

The trial could also shed more light on Stone’s interactions with the online persona Guccifer 2.0 — a Russian front, according to intelligence officials — that was behind the release of hacked Democratic emails.

“please tell me if i can help u anyhow. it would be a great pleasure to me,” the mysterious Guccifer wrote in a private message to Stone amid the releases.

Does this matter for impeachment?

Stone’s trial inevitably has overlap with the Democratic impeachment effort, which centers on the president pressuring Ukraine’s leaders to launch investigations into his political opponents.

That connection is all about CrowdStrike, the cyberfirm that the Democratic National Committee hired to investigate its email breach during the 2016 campaign.

In his much-scrutinized July 25 phone call with Ukraine’s president, Trump raised the idea that Kyiv could do him a “favor” by launching an investigation into the company over its work during the last presidential election.

Trump’s request appears to have originated from a conspiracy theory Stone has been pushing in his own legal defense. According to Stone’s court filings, the government relied only on the “inconclusive and unsubstantiated” CrowdStike report when it blamed Russia for the DNC hack, failing to collect any direct evidence from the DNC itself.

Department of Justice prosecutors countered that they did in fact reach their conclusions independently. Yet the unfounded allegations continue to linger as part of broader baseless conspiracies about CrowdStrike’s ties to Ukraine and whether the company somehow helped frame Russia for the hacks.

During a pretrial hearing Monday, Jackson warned Stone’s attorneys not to stray into such territory, noting the case to be argued before the jury has nothing to do with the Russian hackings.

Even if the hacks heard round the world don’t come up, the trial’s optics and outcome will inevitably play into the impeachment debate.

Trump and his GOP allies would celebrate a Stone acquittal as more proof that the Mueller investigation was an ill-premised “witch hunt” that has morphed into the current impeachment inquiry.

Democrats are also keeping close tabs on Stone. House Intelligence Chairman Adam Schiff, who’s leading the Democrats’ impeachment probe, cited Stone’s court case in a letter last month to lawmakers defending his use of closed-door depositions as he gathers information about Trump’s Ukraine pressure campaign. The strategy has been a major point of contention for Republicans.

“It is of paramount importance to ensure that witnesses cannot coordinate their testimony with one another to match their description of events, or potentially conceal the truth,” the California Democrat wrote.

Who are the key players at the trial?

Mueller may be long gone, but his fingerprints are all over this case.

The special counsel handed off its Stone file to the U.S. attorneys’ office in Washington, D.C., which during the trial will be represented by two career federal prosecutors, Michael Marando and Jonathan Kravis. But they will be joined at the government’s table by former Mueller lawyers Aaron Zelinsky and Adam Jed, who have since returned to jobs at the Justice Department.

For his part, Stone is leaning on a team of South Florida-based lawyers that includes Bruce Rogow, a First Amendment expert who in the early 1990s represented the rap group 2 Live Crew; Robert Buschel, a well-known defense attorney in Broward County and an aspiring novelist; and Grant Smith, whose father, Larry Smith, served in Congress as a Florida Democrat.

Judge Jackson’s name may sound familiar, too. The Obama appointee who took the bench in 2011 has been at the center of Mueller-led cases dealing with Manafort, Gates and Alex van der Zwaan, a Dutch attorney whose 30-day jail sentence made him the first person to go to prison in the Mueller probe.

Prosecutors designated Stone’s case as related to those earlier ones, which caused it to be assigned to Jackson. Stone’s attorneys were apparently eager to have it reassigned and fought the designation, but she turned down their request.

Who’s going to be on the witness stand?

Prepare for Trumpworld to descend on the D.C. courthouse.

Bannon, the former Trump 2016 campaign manager, is likely to give testimony describing his communications with Stone during the campaign.

Bannon and Stone have bad blood going back at least a couple years. Stone publicly advocated for Bannon’s firing from the White House by calling him “a spent force” who was more focused on self-promotion than helping Trump fulfill his campaign promises.

“He did a lot to help himself but not much to help us,” Stone declared at the time. Bannon was axed the next day.

The two men’s feud continued into the fall of 2018, when a report emerged that Bannon had testified to a grand jury investigating Stone. The longtime GOP operative fired back with a brutal Daily Caller column entitled, “The Treachery of Steve Bannon.”

Another key witness will be Randy Credico, the therapy dog-toting liberal talk show host. Credico was close to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Stone pumped him for information about the website’s plans to release damaging emails pilfered from Clinton’s campaign. Credico’s decision not to testify before Congress is central to the government’s charge that Stone tried to intimidate a witness. DOJ prosecutors said they intend to question Credico about Stone’s text messages from April 2018 telling him he would “take that dog away from you” and also urging him to “do a Frank Pentangeli.” The latter is a reference to a scene from the “Godfather Part II” in which a character backtracks on giving Congress incriminating testimony about the Corleone crime family.

Other figures expected on the stand include Gates, the deputy Trump campaign chairman who was indicted in 2017 on a slew of charges alongside Manafort, his longtime boss. Gates pleaded guilty to two felony charges early last year and has been assiduously cooperating with prosecutors in a bid to minimize his yet-to-be-determined sentence.

A potential wild card witness is Jerome Corsi, a conspiracy-minded author who exchanged emails with Stone about reaching out to Assange while the WikiLeaks founder was cooped up at the time at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London. Corsi appears to have come close to facing criminal charges of his own in the Mueller probe. He announced a year ago that he turned down the Mueller team’s bid to have him plead guilty to perjury. Corsi was never charged.

And given Stone’s attention-seeking reputation, many outside observers expect he will indeed take the witness stand in his defense. It’s a risky move that most people in his position wouldn’t take.

But “Roger Stone is definitely not like most,” said Annemarie McAvoy, a former Gates defense attorney. “He loves the spotlight, and he likely feels no one can explain better than him why he is not guilty of anything.”

What’s Stone’s defense?

We’ll find out during the trial, but Stone and his attorneys have telegraphed at least some of their case over the past 10 months.

Some of the legal wrangling has been totally unrelated to actual charges.

In July, Jackson banned Stone from using Facebook, Twitter or any social media after he had been hauled before the judge several times over his commentary about the case. Most notably, Stone got in trouble for an Instagram post in February that appeared to show a gun’s crosshairs above a picture of Jackson’s head, prompting Stone to take the witness stand and issue an apology.

As for the actual merits of the charges, Stone’s attorneys have argued that their client was selectively prosecuted because of his politics. But that hasn’t exactly gone over well with the judge, either. In August, Jackson denied a motion to dismiss the case, saying Stone’s arguments were “made up out of whole cloth.”

Still, don’t expect Stone to cave.

He has been helping fund his legal defense by selling $33 T-shirts that declare he “did nothing wrong!” Stone has also sent repeated signals he has no intention of pleading guilty or flipping on Trump.

“There’s nothing I could tell them that could be damaging to the president,” he told POLITICO in May 2018. Close friends see no change to that stance now.

“Roger is committed to taking this all the way through to the end because he believes in America,” said Michael Caputo, a former Trump 2016 campaign aide and longtime Stone friend who is planning to attend the D.C. trial. “This whole rotten system that they called justice has never encountered a man like Roger Stone. Cause he’s got balls the size of maracas buddy and he believes in this country in his marrow.”

What’s Stone looking at if he’s convicted?

In theory, the 67-year-old Stone could be put away for life — but don’t expect that.

While Stone could face up to 50 years, his actual potential sentence would likely be much less than the maximum.

If Stone is found guilty on any of the counts, Jackson will have to calculate the sentencing guidelines. She isn’t obligated to follow them, however. The guidelines could vary dramatically depending on the ultimate conviction, meaning the range could fall anywhere from just a few months to several years. Notably, judges almost never give near the maximum in these type of white-collar cases.

Any Stone jail sentence would inevitably set up the question of a presidential pardon or commutation as the 2020 campaign kicks into full swing.

For Trump’s part, he appears to have been following along. In January, Trump fired off a series of tweets after Stone’s indictment questioning why the special counsel had targeted his longtime associate but not turned the focus back on prominent former law enforcement officials and Clinton.

Then he added, “Roger Stone didn’t even work for me anywhere near the Election!”

#Foreign #Politics #Stone #trial

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nancygduarteus · 6 years

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Historians’ Favorite Anecdote About Victorian-Era Orgasms Is Probably a Myth

It’s among the most delectably scandalous stories in the history of medicine: At the height of the Victorian era, doctors regularly treated their female patients by stimulating them to orgasm. This mass treatment—a cure for the now-defunct medical condition of “hysteria”— was made possible by a new technology: the vibrator. Vibrators allowed physicians to massage women’s clitorises quickly and efficiently, without exhausting their hand and wrist.

It’s an intoxicating insight, implying that vibrators succeeded not because they advanced female pleasure, but because they saved labor for male physicians. And in the last few years, it has careened around popular culture. It’s given rise to a Tony-nominated play, a romcom starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, and even a line of branded vibrators. Samantha Bee did a skit about it in March. A seemingly endless march of quirky news stories have instructed readers in its surprising-but-true quality, including in Vice, Mother Jones, and Psychology Today.

In short, the tale has become a commonplace how people think about Victorian sex. And according to a contentious new paper, it may also be almost totally false.

There is absolutely no evidence that Victorian doctors used vibrators to stimulate orgasm in women as a medical technique, asserts the paper, written by two historians at Georgia Tech. “Manual massage of female genitals,” they write, “was never a routine medical treatment for hysteria.”

“There’s no evidence for it,” says Hallie Lieberman, an author of both the new paper and Buzz, a popular history of sex toys. “It’s inaccurate.”

It’s not hard to see how the idea spread. The entire hypothesis of Victorian vibrators originates from the work of one scholar: Rachel Maines, a historian and visiting scientist at Cornell. Her 1999 book, The Technology of Orgasm—described at the time as a “secret history of female sexual arousal”—argued that clitoral massage was used as a medical technique for centuries, from the time of Hippocrates to the modern day.

But that’s just not true, according to Lieberman and Eric Schatzberg, the chair of the School of History and Sociology at Georgia Tech. There is scant evidence that orgasms were widely understood as a cure for female hysteria, and there’s even less evidence that Victorians used vibrators to induce orgasm as a medical technique, they say. “Maines fails to cite a single source that openly describes use of the vibrator to massage the clitoral area,” their paper says. “None of her English-language sources even mentions production of ‘paroxysms’ by massage or anything else that could remotely suggest an orgasm.”

Instead, they argue, Maines conceals this lack of support by relying on a “wink and nod” approach to primary sourcing and by “padding her argument with a mass of tangential citations.”

In an interview, Maines said that she has heard variations of the paper’s criticism before—and that her argument in The Technology of Orgasm was really only a “hypothesis,” anyway. “I never claimed to have evidence that this was really the case,” she said. “What I said was that this was an interesting hypothesis, and as [Lieberman] points out—correctly, I think—people fell all over it. It was ripe to be turned into mythology somehow. I didn’t intend it that way, but boy, people sure took it, ran with it.”

Maines added that she was a little surprised it took so long for other scholars to question her argument, given how admittedly “slender” the evidence she gave in The Technology of Orgasm was. “I thought people were going to attack it right away. But it’s taken 20 years for people to even—people didn’t want to question it. They liked it so much they didn’t want to attack it.”

Even though Maines now calls her argument a “hypothesis,” her writing in The Technology of Orgasm does not take the same provisional tone. “In the Western medical tradition, genital massage to orgasm by a physician or a midwife was a standard treatment for hysteria,” she wrote in that book’s first pages. “When the vibrator emerged as an electromechanical medical instrument at the end of the 19th century, it evolved from previous massage technologies in response to demand from physicians for more rapid and efficient physical therapies, particularly for hysteria.”

“I intended it as a hypothesis. Perhaps the way I expressed it didn’t communicate that,” Maines said when asked about the book’s declarative tone. “Interpretations of historical data are open to interpretation.”

“In the book, she doesn’t refer to it as a hypothesis at all. She makes the claim that this is a fact, and it happened,” says Schatzberg. “To me, it suggests that Maines was aware of the weakness of her claim, and later, after it was taken up so widely, tried to backtrack.”

Certainly Lieberman did not imagine Technology of Orgasm to be hypothetical when she first encountered it. Her new paper with Schatzberg originated from a classroom aside in 2010, when Lieberman was working on a dissertation about the history of sex toys. Her adviser mentioned that he sometimes found it useful to understand other scholars’ work by checking their citations. “I started doing that on this book, and I found that nothing added up,” said Lieberman.

She brought the book to Schatzberg, who was a professor at Wisconsin at the time, for a second opinion. They began going through the book citation-by-citation—and found what they believe to be significant errors. In one passage, Maines alludes to a technique described in 1660 by the British surgeon Nathaniel Highmore. The original quote, translated from Latin, describes a movement that “is not unlike that game of boys in which they try to rub their stomachs with one hand and pat their heads with the other.” Maines says this is a reference to the difficulty of producing orgasm through “vulvular massage.”

Not so fast, say Lieberman and Schatzberg. “The quote about the boys game occurs in a discussion of complex motions of the fingers, especially when playing stringed instruments,” they write. “Nowhere does this discussion even hint at massage of the vulva.” (When asked, Maines continued to insist Highmore was referring to genital massage.)

In another passage, Maines quotes a 19th-century physician describing how a vibrator can speed up the massage process. A doctor without a vibrator “consumes a painstaking hour to accomplish much less profound results than are easily effected by the [the vibrator] in a short five or ten minutes,” reads the quote.

But this does not describe genital massage, Lieberman says. “Vibrators were patent medicine,” she told me, and they were used as a labor-saving device for many different types of less titillating massage. This physician was actually advocating for vibrator massage of “the intestines, kidneys, lungs and skin,” she says.

Even once Lieberman and Schatzberg had made these discoveries, publishing them was not a given. At first, Lieberman hoped to publish an article that combined her own research into the history of sex toys that with a refutation of Maines’ thesis. But she found that anonymous peer reviewers resisted her framing of The Technology of Orgasm. Eventually, Lieberman removed all her critique of Maines from her article, and it was accepted for publication.

Lieberman, working with Schatzberg, turned that criticism of Maines into a full journal article—and they again struggled to find a journal that would publish it. According to emails reviewed by The Atlantic, editors now felt their criticism should focus on more than one book and that it should be more generous to Maines’ political context. One editor said that they should treat Maines’ claims not as erroneous facts, but as outdated historical interpretation. “You are letting ‘facts’ slide over into what might fairly be called interpretation,” that reviewer wrote. “Don’t we, as example, continually revisit what the ‘facts’ of the industrial revolution were and how it happened?”

The article was published in The Journal of Positive Sexuality in August.

“Some people have said, ‘Oh, you’re attacking [Maines].’ But my life would have been so much easier if her work had been accurate,” Lieberman said. “I did not want to critique her, I do not want to attack her, I have no problem with her. I just want to build on someone else’s work, and when that work is incorrect, it creates problems for scholars in the field of history of sexuality.”

“It’s a real problem if you’re a grad student writing a dissertation, and in what seems to be the widely accepted work in your field, you can’t find any justification for,” said Schatzberg.

Other historians have previously identified problems with Maines’ work. Fern Riddell, a popular historian who studies Victorian sex, attacked the idea that “Victorians invented the vibrator” in a 2014 Guardian article. (Riddell did not respond to an email sent through her publisher.)

And Helen King, a classics professor at the Open University in the U.K., wrote a lengthy scholarly rebuttal of Maines’ use of Greek and Latin sources in 2011. Maines “deliberately skewed” translations of the ancient texts she cited, like interpreting a medical text “in which the lower back is massaged as ‘masturbation,’” King said in an email. “She played just as fast and loose with the secondary material; for example she cited a general article on Roman baths to support her hypothesis that piped water in the baths was used for masturbation, even though that article says nothing about water pressure or women, let alone masturbation!”

Reading the new paper, King said she had one thought: “What comes as a surprise is that Maines’ book is even more flawed than I’d thought. ... I do wonder if anyone at all looked at it for the press.”

That press was the Johns Hopkins University Press, which published The Technology of Orgasm 19 years ago. “As most senior scholars know, university presses peer-review their books by relying on other senior scholars to comment on the quality of the work,” said Greg Britton, its editorial director. “Before it was accepted for publication two decades ago, this book would have been selected by the editor, undergone a rigorous round of single-blind peer review, and then approved by a faculty editorial board.”

He added: “Presses do not, however, fact-check their books as Lieberman and Schatzberg acknowledge. More to the point, Professor Maines has always maintained that her assertions were hypothesis open to further exploration.”

Maines nodded to King’s work as a precedent for the Lieberman and Schatzberg paper. She maintains that she never set out to pass off the notion of vibrators as a Victorian treatment for hysteria as historical fact; rather, she simply wanted to present the possibility as a way to get people thinking and talking about “orgasmic mutuality,” or female orgasms in addition to the traditionally more familiar male orgasm. And given its outsize impact in popular culture, especially through works like Ruhl’s play, “I think I succeeded in that,” she says.

This kind of symbolic victory is exactly what Schatzberg worries about. “In this post-fact era, the one bastion where facts should still be loved, and honored, and respected, and relentlessly pursued is academia,” Schatzberg said.

In the last few years, the social sciences have been rocked by a “reproducibility crisis,” in which once-bedrock findings in psychology, nutrition science, and other disciplines have failed to replicate when tested. Lieberman and Schatzberg believe the same “publish-or-perish” incentives which drove that crisis also explain the vibrator story: Its success, they write, “serves as a cautionary tale for how easily falsehoods can become embedded in the humanities.”

“People are not rewarded for checking previous work,” Schatzberg said. “They’re rewarded for coming up with a sexy new research finding. That’s true in the sciences, but it’s also true in the humanities.”

Lieberman said the entire episode seemed to illustrate the academy’s tendency to confirmation bias. “It was salacious. It was sexy. It sounded like a porn,” she said.“It fit into our belief that the Victorians weren’t as educated or knowledgable as we are about sex—and this idea that we progressively get more enlightened about sex, and that history follows this narrative from progression to progression. It fits so well into this. It fits into ideas that people had that women’s sexuality wasn’t understood.”

“One of the big takeaways for me is that the peer-reviewed process is flawed. Peer review is no substitute for fact-checking,” she added. “We need to fix this, and we need to start checking other people’s work especially in history.”

To King, the takeaway was clear: “People wanted to hear this story,” she said. “Vibrator stories sell.”

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/09/victorian-vibrators-orgasms-doctors/569446/?utm_source=feed

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