i read a victorian porn book - with a wand

I read a book recently called “An Inconvenient Wife” (author Megan Chance, 2004), another one of my one penny “Acceptable Condition” scores from Amazon. Look: “Acceptable Condition” is the same quality as the average library book so why not buy it? Buy 10 and pay the shipping of one. Amazon. Killing the library one used book at a time.

This book is an easy first person read.  tells the tale of one of those turn of the century New York socialites floating from ballroom to ballroom in a bustled skirt and bearing no expression, it having been wiped clean off her face by a steady dose of laudanum, whose uterus is being blamed for all her husband’s trouble. <em>“She’s not conforming! She has a busted uterus!”</em> And so it went back then. If a woman showed an inclination toward anything other than behaving, accompanying or properly reflecting, some perv doctor was rushed in to shove his hand into her cunt, deem her hysterical! a failure of a wife! and sympathize over a brandy with the poor husband whose wealth was likely acquired from the woman in the first place.  Of course, he would consider himself duped into the union by his troublesome bride's father but with 50,000 a year, or whatever was considered rich, it likely came out in the wash if the marriage was a step up for the groom. Nonetheless, dose her with drugs and make her excuses to the Vandershits.

Back then, women weren't married so much as acquired in the pursuit of a man's furtherance. They were obtained for their wealth, their social status and, in the best of cases, their father's lack of a male heir.  This was objectification (of the non-sexual kind) in it's finest hour.  Sexually, the upper class wives were touched quickly, with purpose, in the dark and almost always while entirely clothed.  It was a proper event packed with such shame that husbands would be  rendered unable to identify their headless wives' corpses.  Should they become headless.  It wasn't proper to fuck your wife.  That's what prostitutes were for and the turn of the 19th century was a wicked hey-day for whores, boy.  Wives of class were not considered a source of sexual pleasure but merely an occasional outlet in which to jerk off quickly and without any sullying.   Used for everything else, valued for nothing but what they could do for the husband's social standing, women of the upper class lived in a sexual abyss.  It may even be that way now, I don't know.  I am not married and my only experience with marriage is through acquaintance with married men and based on that alone I'd have to say the times haven't changed all that much.  With the exception of this:

Today a woman can have a bad day and keep her uterus.

In 1850 she had better keep her shit to herself or she'd be locked up in an asylum, dosed hourly with opium and soaked in ice water for lengths of time which would be considered criminal even by the Ayatollah. Â Her money would stay at home with the master who would multiply it, revel in it, blow it on whores and stop just short of fucking a pile of it on the wife's empty bed. Â By 1870 things got a little trickier for women still. Â Doctors figured out how to rip the uterus right out. Â Cry three times in a year - asylum. Â Four? Â Hysterectomy of the 50% mortality rate persuasion. Â It was a grim time for women. Â But with the advent of real psychiatry came understanding, treatment, the divorce and well well....here we are.

"An Inconvenient Wife" has all the trappings of this shitty time for chicks, including the wielding of the "wand", a medical curiosity which, despite the vibrating humiliation of it, was accepted widely by many upper class parted thighs.  The book has also the striking earmarks of a chick flick as it goes down the path of fantasy where the woman becomes empowered in a matter of a page and turns the tables on a sociopathic lover who, on his knees and contrary to every trait of his personality, professes undying love.   The ghost of Jane Austen is smugly pleased.

Turns out I didn't really review the book here but instead waxed indignant over the period of the misunderstood period and the overall treatment of women by husbands and the doctors they employed to shut them the fuck up.

Every once in a while I feel like I've dodged a bullet.]]></