Abstract
The early Cold War had far-reaching effects into the gendered and sexual aspects of adult life. Those effects are clearly evident in the United States and United Kingdom, in which physicians and their assistants used technology to practice aversion therapy on male patients who were sexually “deviant,” including homosexuals, cross-dressers, fetishists, sadists, and masochists. They designed a form of aversion therapy using an electroshock machine together with a penile strain gauge in order to shock those men into heterosexually normative sexual desires and behaviors. The treatment did not work, and physicians abandoned it in the light of the rise of gay rights and amid civil rights movements and professional reinterpretations of homosexuality in the late 1960s and early 1970s. This chapter first describes the setup of early voluntary sex research laboratories, which provided a framework for the setup of laboratories using involuntary subjects. It then details the theoretical framework, based on Martha Nussbaum’s conception of objectification and Michel Foucault’s ideas on the functions of institutions in policing people’s bodies and minds. It describes how aversion therapy (originally using drugs) and the use of electricity on human and animal bodies came together in the mid-1960s in the form of electroshock aversion therapy. That description includes primary-source interviews with patients, doctors, and nurses, all of whom had varying responses to the use of such therapy. The chapter concludes with an explanation of how electroshock aversion therapy largely ended by the mid-1970s and how some doctors, nurses, and patients resisted it.
An erratum to this chapter is available at 10.1007/978-94-007-7064-5_6
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Notes
- 1.
Even though homosexuality was illegal in Czechoslovakia, and admitting to homosexuality could land them in treatment programs designed to make them heterosexual, nevertheless some men preferred to lie about their sexual preferences and go through a treatment program rather than serving in the military (Freund 1991).
- 2.
Interestingly enough, no other scientist has ever replicated Ramsey’s research on the different possible meanings of erections. Thus scientists generally presume that the erections they measure indicate sexual response, when the erections also could indicate a reaction of fright, anxiety, or other emotions. John Bancroft pointed out that lack of research at a conference in 2003 (Bancroft in Janssen (ed) 2007, p. 308).
- 3.
A female doctor remembered how machines separated patients and medical staff during treatments: “It was the nurse therapists who actually gave the aversion therapy, although it was automated, and the nurse therapist would sit in another room when the treatment was taking place. I can’t remember now whether they had a one-way mirror or something like that… There was some sort of physical barrier between the nurse and the patient” (Elliot 2010, p. 2). A junior male psychologist recalled how he could sometimes not even see the patients whom he was treating: “You didn’t really have that much contact with the patients. The room was basically a broom cupboard. Literally it had been a broom cupboard and it was cleared out or so I was told…. I would strap two electrodes on the wrist. Occasionally I seem to remember some people seemed to prefer it on the leg. But it was mostly on the wrist. They’d be on one side of the screen where you projected the slides and I’d be on the other side. You really wouldn’t see them even if the light was on. I’d be on the other side operating the projector and the electric shock apparatus” (Isaac 2010, pp. 1–2).
- 4.
“Heath Robinson” is a term used in British English, named for the cartoonist W. Heath Robinson (1872–1944), which refers to a machine or device that is unnecessarily complicated to achieve a simple task (Carswell 2012).
- 5.
The home-use shock boxes did not work any better than the laboratory-based shock treatment. The fiancée, later wife of a man who was given a shock box remembered it this way: “It was a small wooden box which gave him electric shocks. It would be about 4 or 5 inches square with a dial on it and wires. He explained that he’d been told that whenever he felt interest in a man he should give himself this treatment. I never witnessed him using it, so I don’t know how it worked specifically or what his immediate reaction to it was when he gave himself the treatment. He explained that he did use this from time to time and that he felt that the advice he’d been given was that this would help him to get over these homosexual feelings and that he should be able then to lead a ‘normal life.’… For it to work he’d have had to carry it round in his pocket and every time you saw a man you fancied you’d have to go ahead and give yourself an electric shock in order to make sure you took action on any possible opportunity. He’d been assured that by giving himself this treatment this would suppress the urges and eventually they would go away” (Joan 2010, p. 1). See also (Tony 2010).
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Drucker, D.J. (2014). The Penile Strain Gauge and Aversion Therapy: Measuring and Fixing the Sexual Body. In: The Machines of Sex Research. SpringerBriefs in History of Science and Technology. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-7064-5_2
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