Jenne Davis - The Clitical Guide to Female Self-Pleasure - How to Please Yourself So Your Partner Can Too

Sister White, although intelligent, proved to be no leader and the Sans floundered for about ten years until a quirky young doctor named John Harvey Kellogg took over daily operations. Kellogg was another Graham disciple and advocate. He was also highly regarded within the Adventists for his hard-hitting medical journalism. Unlike Graham, he openly embraced medical science and was constantly experimenting with wholegrain foods. Two years into the job, he invented the first Battle Creek health treat, which consisted of a mixture of oatmeal and corn meal baked into biscuits and then ground into bits.

For some reason he decided to call his treat ‘Granula’, a strange decision when you consider that the only other cereal on the market was also called Granula. Once they finished suing him, Kellogg took the decision to rename his new product ‘Granola’. Granola wasn't the only delicacy that was served to the inmates of the Sans. Other specialties included caramel cereal coffee, Bulgarian yogurt and meat substitutes.

At one point in his career Kellogg concentrated his research solely on nuts. He wrote a paper entitled ‘Nuts May Save the Race’. During this period of his studies he is believed to have invented peanut butter as well as malted nuts. As strange as it may seem now, this bland diet helped turn around the fortunes of the once-failing Sans. Kellogg believed that most of the patients admitted to the Sans simply suffered from Americanitis and the remedy was simply a change in diet. The cure rate at the Sans was remarkably high simply because no one who was seriously ill was ever admitted. Kellogg never admitted any chronic masturbators to the Sans, either. This suited his purpose and like Graham he continued to preach the doom and gloom of such abhorrent practices.

For example, on the night of his honeymoon, Kellogg spent his time writing his most famous book, Plain Facts for Old and Young, a Warning on the Evils of Sex. This book featured an amazing collection of symptoms and cures for the curse known as ‘self-pollution’ as well as covering all important sexual ills of the time, but self- pollution was by far the biggest. In this book, he included the 39 signs that would indicate to an outsider that someone in fact masturbated. The fact that this list covers just about anyone who even vaguely looks human was no accident. For example:

Sleeplessness, love of solitude, bashfulness, unnatural boldness, confusion of ideas, capricious appetite, use of tobacco, and acne.

This was a clever ploy from his point of view. Just as Graham had done before him, it was extremely difficult for anyone to prove the theories wrong. Dr Kellogg was never wrong, his way was the only way and to prove a point, although he married he never consummated his marriage to Ells Eaton and they lived in separate apartments. This was supposed to prove that sexual relationships were not necessary to obtain good health.

It's quite likely, though, that the doctor was in some way dysfunctional (one book suggests he had mumps). After breakfast every morning, he had an orderly give him an enema. This may mean he had klismaphilia, an anomaly of sexual functioning traceable to childhood in which an enema substitutes for regular sexual intercourse. For the klismaphile, putting the penis in the vagina is experienced as hard, dangerous, and repulsive work.

Whatever the reasons for his beliefs, they had long-lasting effects on society and many of the myths that still surround masturbation can be directly attributed to his way of thinking. The Sans became more and more famous and Dr Kellogg himself became something of a demagogue. He began to concentrate less on his fundamental beliefs and more on scientific facts and theories.

A major step in this direction came when a patient showed him a little wheat mattress a friend had sent her to aid her digestive problems. Invented by Henry Perky from Denver, they were what we now know as Shredded Wheat. At this time Shredded Wheat was not thought of as a breakfast food. Originally it was a main course, a natural food that followed the true Grahamite tradition. As well as the original Shredded Wheat there was a whole host of recipes associated with this biscuit. These ranged from banana croquettes with Shredded Wheat to cheese and Shredded Wheat toast – the list was endless. Perky even founded a scientific institute devoted to training demonstrators on how to educate the ordinary housewife on its uses.

In the humble Shredded Wheat the good Dr Kellogg saw the potential for the first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal and went about creating his own. After much experimentation he came up with Granose, the first flaked wheat cereal. Once again the Sans featured heavily in the development of this little wonder flake. As Kellogg put his ideas into commercial production he met with some stiff opposition, not least from Perky himself, who wasn't about to let anyone rip off his invention and had taken no less than 47 patents out with regards to Shredded Wheat. The effect of the cereal wars was that Battle Creek exploded with cereal and health-food manufacturers and almost overnight the place became known as ‘cereal central’. Many more wars ensued in the battle for the cereal that would rid the world of all its ailments.

John Kellogg was finally forced to turn the ailing Kellogg’s company over to his brother, William, who although he had worked at the Sans with John, had little interest in curing the public of bad eating habits and masturbation but in making money. So was born the Kellogg’s brand as we now know it today, but its original founder left his legacy in the myths that still surround masturbation to this day.

Late 19th Century to early 20th Century

Remember, as far back as Ancient Egyptian times we saw the emergence of the medical but vague term ‘hysteria’. At the same time as Kellogg’s and Graham were busy producing cornflakes and crackers, the medical profession was busy curing women of what was thought to be the often life-threatening disease known as, you guessed it, ‘hysteria’. Just as in Ancient Egypt, this disease only afflicted the female sex and caused a myriad symptoms, running the gamut from anxiety, irritability, nervousness, feelings of heaviness in the lower abdomen, sleepiness, to name but a few. Of course nowadays we recognize ‘hysteria’ for what it actually is: horniness.

Back then, though, the cure for hysteria was a simple one. Doctors would manually masturbate their female patients to orgasm. Of course the end results were not called ‘orgasms’; instead they would be referred to as ‘paroxysms’. As you can imagine, this was, in many cases, a time-consuming cure, and often a temporary one. Can you imagine how tired these doctors’ hands must have been?

So, being as this was the start of the Industrial Revolution, nothing was, or at least seemed, impossible and in order to relieve their cramped hands, many doctors turned to mechanical methods to help their patients reach the desired state of paroxysm. Unfortunately these machines were often poorly constructed and caused injury to the patient, but, as is often the case, electricity came to the rescue. In 1880, more than a decade before the invention of the electric iron and vacuum cleaner, an enterprising English physician, Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville, patented the electromechanical vibrator.

The vibrator was an immediate hit with doctors and patients alike and at the turn of the century, as electricity became more widely available across American homes, the humble, if often scary by today's standards, electric vibrator became a staple in many homes. Of course, when you consider this was a time when women were still considered the ‘fairer sex’, the actual use for the vibrator had to be disguised. Many popular magazines of the time would sell them as ‘personal massagers’, although their actual use was not exactly a well-kept secret.