Later, I’m having trouble getting Amy on the phone. I leave several messages with her roommate — I
suspect she’s blowing me off. But lo and behold, she phones and says she can go to the party after
all. We make arrangements and, as the call is wrapping up, I mention that I’ve gotten almost chummy
with her roommate, thanks to all the messages I’ve left. “Oh, you mean Tom?” she asked. “He’s my
husband. Is it OK if he comes to the party too?”

Well, hell — why not? And damned if they didn’t both come — my hot date and her mild-mannered spouse.
It wasn’t like that, either. Amy may have been perversely naive, but naiveti it was, not some other
wickedness.

An extreme example of miscommunication, but not unique. On more than one occasion I’ve vigorously
pursued a woman, only to have some phrase like, “As my boyfriend said recently” drop from her lips on
or about date No. 3, leaving me to wonder — what philanthropic urge did she think was
motivating my sudden outpouring of dinner invitations? Compassion for the clueless? Concern that
anyone so dense is surely unable to boil water and must be fed?

These puzzling encounters have led me to believe the dating scene has been misrepresented in popular
culture. There’s an underlying assumption that runs through almost all portrayals of romance, from
movies to magazines to Archie comics — the premise that, when boys and girls get together, everyone
knows the agenda. Will it be yes or no? Betty or Veronica? Embrace “The Rules” or break them, but
we all know the rules are there, and we all know what’s at stake.

Except for Tracy. I asked her out shortly after she told me about breaking up with her boyfriend. Or
Corrine — a small business owner who tentatively accepted my dinner invite by saying, “My only
constraint is this place” (her business). Or Delia — she not only accepted my invitation to the opera
but also mentioned she was spending Valentine’s Day with her parents.

According to my rulebook (oh, young and innocent notion), those statements were signals — coded
messages — meaning, “I am romantically eligible.” I was, of course, right out to lunch. Coded
messages don’t work when only one person is decoding. Tracy had reunited with her boyfriend before our
first date (there were three in total before this news was casually mentioned.) Businesswoman Corrine
turned out to be happily attached (later a female friend suggested to me that women don’t like to
think of boyfriends as “constraints”). As for Delia, she clearly viewed Feb. 14 as nothing more than the 12th Day of Groundhog. Her indifference to calendar-based romance didn’t bother her boyfriend
any — they’re married now.

The world has changed since the days when every intermingling of unmarried men and women was seen to
be fraught with danger and therefore tightly controlled. Ironically, the unspoken fears represented by
the presence of chaperones made the exciting potential implicitly clear. Repression soaked everything
in sex.

Not so today. My friend Amanda, a very attractive photographer, recently described a first meeting
with a male colleague. “He asked for my card and I gave it to him. I was in total business mode,” she
recalled. Soon, however, his amorous intentions became clear and the very married Amanda hastily
tossed out the H-word. “It’s been so long since I’ve been hit on like that,” she told me. “I keep forgetting that when you’re single, everyone you meet represents possibility.”

The modern necessities of business interaction have muddied the sexual waters considerably.
Admittedly, a little romantic inconvenience is a small price to pay for our more gender-egalitarian
society, but goddamn it, I wish we could all get it straight for once.

For a while I even tried to do it myself — to drain that alligator-infested swamp o’ love
single-handedly. To accomplish this, I wrote a little speech. The Speech was delivered, in what I hoped
were sincere and unthreatening tones, at the end of the first date. It announced to my companion that,
in case there was any lingering doubt, my interest was more than platonic — besides, I already had
enough buddies. Romance was what I lacked, and I hoped the same was true of her. If she was
unattached, I would like to see her again.

The Speech was spectacularly unsuccessful on every level.
Most of its targets were either frightened or annoyed. A woman named Sumi (pronounced like what I
wanted to do afterwards) simply lied about being single, evidently too terrified by The Speech to
understand that its whole point was to clear up any such misunderstandings.

Eventually the infant Speech was strangled in its crib, and for that I owe a debt of gratitude to
Marilyn. My experience with her highlighted important differences in male-female dating strategies. A
confident, outgoing graphic designer, Marilyn responded to The Speech by saying she wasn’t really
looking for a relationship, but would like to be friends. Oh no, I said. I’d been in too many of those
unhappy situations — two people pretend to be pals although one of them is merely trying to keep a
foot in the door for future romance. Forget it, I said. Too bad, Marilyn replied.

Marilyn met Jim no more than a month later. She told Jim exactly what she told me. Jim said: OK, let’s
be friends. Last fall Marilyn and Jim had a big wedding in Holland. But well before that happy event,
Marilyn, bless her heart (we did remain friends whether I liked it or not), had the decency to give me
a good scolding about my heavy-handed approach. Yes, she told me, of course romance between us had
been a possibility, had I possessed an ounce of subtlety. Instead, my zeal to clear up potential
misunderstandings led me to perform heart surgery with a rototiller. What was intended as honesty was
perceived as an insult — I didn’t want to be her friend? To hell with me, then.

The Speech didn’t work for a number of reasons, not the least of which was: Proper dating procedure
occupies a middle ground between truth and lies. Lies are to be avoided, but truth? Like Jack said to
Tom, you can’t handle the truth — at least not in the beginning.

Dates are desperate attempts to gain small bits of information from which a larger picture can be
extrapolated. In the compressed dating schedule, there is not enough time to create a detailed
portrait. Therefore every gleaned factoid tends to be given undue weight. If your date finds out four
things about you, each of those four things becomes 25 percent of your perceived personality. Do you
have a pile of old Spider-Man comics under the bed? Save this biographical tidbit for your one-year
anniversary and it becomes a charming little background filigree in the rich and manly Portrait of
You. But let it slip on the first date and bingo — you’re an inbred moron.

Dating is diplomacy. Code words carry extra punch, as was the case in the Nation Formerly Known as the
Soviet Union, where the most innocuous official remark — “Beloved leader has the sniffles” –
actually meant the funeral was last week. Seen in this light, The Speech was equivalent to a magnum of
drugstore perfume exploding in an elevator. If I was being this blunt right off the bat, my dates
assumed, surely my aggressive boorishness could only escalate.

Another in my rich trove of disaster tales: Carol mentioned on our third outing that her foolish
friends thought we were dating. We are, I said. We’re not, Carol protested. Fittingly, the setting was
a Vietnamese restaurant — a veritable Khe Sanh erupted over plates of Imperial rolls. Exasperated, I
threw all diplomacy aside and asked which of the last four or five days she had been born on.
Remarkably, the donnybrook actually resulted in an honest conversation — Carol eventually admitted
that she was interested in a potential relationship. She just hated spelling it out in black and
white. Should things not work out between us, Carol wanted plausible deniability — the ability to
tell herself and others that romance was never an option anyway.

But if The Speech doesn’t work and plausible deniability must be maintained, how do poor single
seekers avoid misunderstandings? Are we forever doomed to romantic evenings with our dates and their
spouses? I decided that I needed to talk to Amy again. Perhaps she could tell me what went wrong. Why
hadn’t she twigged to my real intentions?

“But you’re a journalist,” Amy pointed out later over coffee. “You were interested in me, yes, but I
thought you were just interested in people.”

Like Amanda the photographer, Amy, a TV reporter, had seen nothing but collegiality behind my chatter.
Why not mention the existence of hubby Tom, just in case? “I didn’t give it much thought,” she
confessed. “I thought, you’re in media — your interest is just related to your profession.”

There you have it. Like so much of what ails society today, this was the media’s fault. As for Amy,
you can probably tell she’s a trusting and good-hearted soul. Her husband’s nice, too. Maybe we can all catch a movie next week.

Earlier this year, I reported on recent attempts to raise awareness about what some say is widespread abuse within the BDSM community and a tendency to either ignore it or cover it up. As I said at the time, “We’re talking about real abuse here, not the ‘consensual non-consent’ that the scene is built around.” That means safe words being maligned or ignored, and boundaries being crossed. In the months since, the conversation has only gotten louder; and following the social networking site’s removal of posts that identify alleged abusers — most often by their Fetlife moniker only — a petition was started to remove a clause from the site’s Terms of Use requiring users to pledge to not “make criminal accusations against another member in a public forum.” Currently, the proposal has 864 “spanks” (the site’s equivalent of “yes” votes).

When I asked John Baku, the founder of Fetlife, for the reasoning behind deleting accusations, he let out a heavy sigh and said, “It’s definitely a tough situation. We see both sides.” Later, he adds, “There’s many reasons. We don’t really allow people to attack other people on the site.” Asked whether there are legal concerns behind it, as many in the community have speculated, he says, “There definitely probably is.” (In Canada, where Fetlife is based, laws are “much more friendly to plaintiffs” than in the U.S., where online publishers are protected from being held responsible for user posts, says Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.) Baku, who rarely gives interviews, continued, “but our focus really is on trying to get people to speak to the proper authorities so that the people who have committed these horrible crimes get put away.”

When I asked whether the company is trying to protect users against false accusations, Baku spins a yarn: “Let’s say you and I — you do have a beautiful voice — I come to San Francisco and we go on a date. Hypothetically, I’m submissive, you’re dominant, and I ask you to tie me up,” he says. “You think we have a wonderful night, I think we have a wonderful night, and all of a sudden tomorrow I go online and say, ‘You raped me,’ and email your editors at Salon and say you raped me and go onto Twitter and say you raped me.” Falling for his role-play scenario and flattery, I offered that I’d want to talk to him to figure out whether I had unknowingly violated his consent.

Sure, that’s all good and great, he said, but what about the potential consequences? “The community’s very small, right? So you might lose all your friends,” he says. “You might lose your job.” Baku adds, “We live in a society where you’re innocent until proven guilty. ‘Proven’ is very important.”

Kitty Stryker, an activist and dominant who is campaigning to raise awareness about abuse in BDSM, doesn’t buy the argument that people’s lives might be ruined by being labeled as an abuser on Fetlife, particularly because real names are rarely used. “The debate is constantly about whether or not we should name screen names. It’s not like these are actually people’s legal names. Hell, on Fetlife you don’t even have to have a photo of your face. It’s really your own fault if you make yourself traceable.” So, in general, we’re not talking about a rape accusation that’s Google-able by a future employer. Within the BDSM community, though, these screen names are important: “It’s great for establishing some sort of accountability” — and for helping people avoid dangerous encounters.

Stryker, who is a dominant, admits that even she has “had instances in my past and looked back and thought I didn’t cross a boundary, but maybe I did.” But she says, “I’d rather be held accountable or be falsely accused of something and have space for people to take that seriously than silence one victim.”

I asked Baku whether the risk of false accusations might be outweighed by the potential benefit of spreading the word about predatory community members. “That’s a good question,” he said, pausing. “But how is that solving any problems? It’s written in some group somewhere — how are we really protecting people? You’re giving a false sense of security.” Baku’s main concern, he says, is that “we need to go after rapists and put them away. I know people have concerns about police and the way they handle rape. But the energy needs to be put into fixing that problem, into educating police, educating lawyers.” He adds, “It doesn’t need to be figured out in the court of popular opinion. Posting something on Fetlife, you’re not solving the problem,” he says. “We’re not set up to have judges and jury hear both sides.”

Thomas MacAulay Millar, a lawyer and kinkster who has written a seven-part series on the issue of consent in BDSM, says, “We have this well-entrenched narrative of the lying victim against a backdrop of people lying about things all the time,” he says. “It’s no more true about allegations of sexual assault than anything else.”

“People want to abdicate a certain amount of responsibility and have someone make the decision for them: ‘Did this happen or not?’” But, he says, “No such system is available to us. We’re not gonna elect a grand high judge of the community, we’re not gonna grant our own communities subpoena power, and the justice system won’t serve that function for our communities.”

As he explains in part four of his series, “[E]ven assuming that everyone in the system was perfectly professional, no matter who the victim is, in the U.S., the criminal justice system comes down ultimately to the jury trial, even though in the vast majority of cases, no such thing ever actually happens,” he continues. “If the police and prosecutors and the judge are all entirely fair to victims of abuse who might be queer and/or trans and/or kinky and/or people of color and/or undocumented and/or doing sex work, it doesn’t mean a jury would [be].  The jury is drawn from the general population, and we all know they’re always perfectly progressive, right?”

Stryker points out that sex workers rely on virtual blacklists of abusive johns, also known as “bad dates.” They will post a name, a few digits of a phone number, an email address or a physical description, along with the details of their experience with the client. “That keeps us from getting killed,” says Stryker, who is a sex worker herself. “We can’t go to the police, and I don’t see how that’s any different for BDSM.”

Some people in the kink community already maintain informal lists of “ethical practices and lack thereof,” says Stryker, but they aren’t widely distributed. “There’s very little discourse independent of Fetlife about BDSM issues,” says Thomas. On top of that, people don’t post these lists independently on personal blogs and the like because they’re worried about liability. Looking to the future, Stryker says, “The pressure is continually on Fetlife, and it will eventually have to take a stand and either say, ‘We don’t care,’ or ‘We do care, and here’s how we’re going to deal with this.’”

Fetlife’s position is “ever-evolving,” says Baku, who repeatedly asked what I thought they should do during our interview. “This is something that we question every day.”

That is, until you look at the alleged proof.

The key study advocates point to is one commissioned by the Texas Legislature in 2009. But that very report states, “no study has authoritatively linked alcohol, sexually oriented business, and the perpetration of sexual violence.” What’s more, when I talked to Bruce Kellison, director of the Bureau of Business Research at the University of Texas at Austin, and one of the authors of the report, about the alleged link between strip clubs and sexual assault, he said, “That’s not really what our study was trying to do.”

What it was trying to do was review the research on whether clubs have a “negative secondary effect” (in other words, harmful side effects). “Most of the [research] has found that there is a moderate amount of increased criminal activity outside of clubs,” he said. That’s a point contested by some: Daniel Linz, a communications and law professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, says studies used to support restrictive zoning or special taxes on strip clubs are methodologically flawed — they fail to use appropriate controls and rely on inconsistent and unreliable data sources. Take, for example, that zoning laws often relegate strip clubs to shadier parts of town, where, of course, there is greater crime. Without an appropriate control, that crime can’t be attributed to the club itself.

According to a study Linz conducted, “Those studies that are scientifically credible demonstrate either no negative secondary effects associated with adult businesses or a reversal of the presumed negative effect.” He tells me, “We’ve done crime map after crime map after crime map of many cities and there just aren’t clusters of crime around [strip clubs]. Most crime in most cities tends to occur around high schools.” Tax the teens!

That’s just to speak of crime in general. The important thing here, given the aim of these tax initiatives, is sex crime. The Texas report looked at the incidence of sexual violence in particular inside the clubs and found that there wasn’t “additional sexual assault violence going on in the clubs,” says Kellison, or even around the clubs.

Again, as with many things in this arena, that’s contested by some. Richard McCleary, a criminology professor at the University of California, Irvine, whom Linz says he’s had a “10-year scientific battle with,” argues that there is a sexual violence impact, but not the kind that these initiatives imply. He cites a 1998 survey of “a small sample” of adult entertainers that found a high rate of reported sexual victimization inside or nearby the club. This contradicts the findings of the Texas report, however. It’s also important to note that the proposed special taxes don’t go directly toward victimized dancers; the intended target is much broader than that.

McCleary also backs up his assertion saying that street prostitutes “are attracted to the neighborhood because of the clientele and that tends to be an extremely violent trade.” Even if we’re to presume that street prostitutes are driven to strip club neighborhoods in droves, and that they in general experience a high level of violence in their work, it isn’t a direct consequence of the venue itself. As Judith Hanna, an anthropologist and author of “Naked Truth: Strip Clubs, Democracy and a Christian Right,” told me, decriminalizing prostitution would be a much more effective way to address the violence that street prostitutes face.

Hanna is particularly sympathetic to the cause. She’s worked as a volunteer for over a decade with a program for victims of sexual assault, and yet she says, “I never, nor have others in the program, known of a sexual crime victim related to a strip club.” She’s quick to point out that “there is a plethora of evidence that clergy have committed sexual crimes against women, boys and girls.” Where’s their sexual violence tax?

Kellison cuts to the chase: “The reason that many advocates say the strip club industry is being tied directly to the effort to raise funds for rape crisis centers is not because there is increased sexual assault behavior going on inside the clubs or outside the clubs or as a result of a guy going to a strip club,” he says. “That is a very difficult argument to make. What the advocates will say is that it’s an industry that is primarily run with the use of women for, generally speaking, male purposes, male benefit. And that’s why advocates have seen it reasonable to ask the industry to support a tax that would fund services that are primarily geared toward women.”

Well, they rarely actually come out and say it so plainly without the cover of alleged evidence, but that is the fundamental moral judgment behind these initiatives.

Now, there is a strong link between alcohol consumption and sexual violence, but, as Linz says, “any location that is serving drinks, whether it’s a strip club or a regular bar is going to have this societal effect.” He adds, “Compared to other businesses that serve alcohol in the community, these places are no better and no worse.” In other words, it’s the booze, not the boobs.

McCleary, on the other hand, argues that there’s evidence that those who have consumed both alcohol and adult entertainment are more violent than those who have consumed only one or the other. But this is based on laboratory research, which McCleary admits is a far cry from the real world. He also says “it’s very difficult to establish a causal link.”

Critics say these measures have advanced because of courts holding them to a low standard of proof. While some circuits require “reliable social science evidence” to establish negative secondary effects, says Linz, others essentially say, “The city can pick and choose among findings and come to whatever conclusion they want.” Some argue that secondary effects — which were originally used to justify zoning restrictions but have since been applied to even regulations on the content of dances and the degree of nudity — have trumped First Amendments rights. David L. Hudson Jr., a research attorney at the First Amendment Center, calls exotic dancing “a First Amendment stepchild” and writes in a report on the topic, “Many free-speech advocates claim that the secondary-effects doctrine has allowed municipal officials an easy path to censorship.”

Speaking of censorship, Hanna sees crusading religious moralism at work. “A segment of the politically active Christian right are not only opposed to these clubs but they are working like the Tea Party works,” she says. “They have alliances, they have big money and they’re fighting it. Sometimes it’s indirect, they’re electing their people to legislative bodies — you only need one person to start making big noise.”

These measures are a crystal clear reflection of extreme conservative views of sexuality and gender. As Hanna tells me, “The Christian right believes that if you see a nude woman you’re gonna go out and rape the first woman you see.” She also points to the stereotype of “men as a volcano of testosterone ready to be ignited.” From that vantage point, the leap from strip clubs to rape makes intuitive sense — but it doesn’t make it fact.

There’s also just plain financial desperation behind these initiatives. Several sponsors have admitted that the tax is a response to devastating budget cuts to sexual assault resources. Sin taxes — those applied to alcohol, cigarettes and gambling — are not new and have only increased as cities face severe budget cuts. What’s unique about the strip club taxes is not only that boozy adult entertainment venues are being singled out — as opposed to the broader category of liquor — but also that the taxes are being directed toward a cause that is empirically unrelated.

When it comes to adult entertainment, though, critical thinking often falls by the wayside. Strip clubs are an easy target for religious moralizing and political pandering — and one few are willing to defend.

Usually it’s men, but he’s had a couple of women do it, too: One grabbed his crotch and then pulled his sweat pants down before he could stop her. Then there’s the woman who had an orgasm just from him massaging her thighs. “All of a sudden her knees locked and her legs became straight and I thought, ‘Oh no, maybe I hurt her, maybe she has boundary issues.’” Afterward, though, she made it clear what had happened — and that it was the best massage she’d ever had.

Even massage therapists who haven’t personally experienced sexual harassment or abuse on the job are fed up with the need to constantly reaffirm the fact that they are licensed medical professionals. Shows like Lifetime’s “The Client List,” which stars Jennifer Love Hewitt as a single mom trying to make ends meet by providing happy endings, certainly don’t help to diminish the nudge-wink side of massage, nor does the ubiquity of euphemistically driven ads for massage parlors. And, for the record, many object to the use of the terms “masseuse” and “masseur” because they leave too much room for misinterpretation.

Even still, some question the legitimacy, or at least earnestness, of the allegations against Travolta and suggest that it’s the massage therapist’s responsibility to avoid sketchy situations. Barbara Joel, a massage therapist and former president of the New York State Society of Medical Massage Therapists, tells me, “I disagree how he is being portrayed as the brute and the therapists as the innocent victims … I doubt that the therapists were unaware as to what they were walking into.” Joel says experienced massage therapists understand that “many male politicians, celebrities and men of power feel a sense of self-righteousness and that they are above the law.”

To others, that sounds too much like blaming the victim. Turning down clients — particularly high-powered clients that could make your career — is challenging. Joe was voted the best masseur in New York several years in a row, but when the economy tanked his business did too, and he moved to Kentucky for the affordable rent. Now he finds it hard to reject new clients during the initial screening process because he sorely needs the gigs. “It’s difficult when you’re a therapist trying to make money in this economy,” he says. Usually, he simply tries to dodge the wandering hands. “I move my legs away from the table and after a while they’ll mellow out,” he says. “If it starts to get really bad, I’ll grab their hand and press it firmly down onto the table and say, ‘C’mon now, I’m a licensed massage therapist, this is not about sex.’”

Like Joe, Cameron Richards, a massage therapist in New York, describes encountering inappropriateness from both genders. He recently had a male client ask to be undraped during the massage. “This was all red flags,” says Richards, who’s only been in the business for four years. “To make a long story short, he wanted me to fondle him.” Once, he had a female client try to urgently book a session within the hour and then she attempted to get him to massage her breasts. “She told me when she went on a cruise they massaged everything, which I knew was a lie,” he says. Richards also knows a massage therapist in Florida who is thinking about quitting the industry because “she is getting lots of phone calls from men looking for happy endings.”

In over a decade of massage therapy, the worst Eva Pendleton has ever encountered is a client grabbing her butt. “I just quickly stepped out of the way,” she says. But Pendleton had plenty of clients get “a little frisky or flirty” when she worked in a health spa. Now she specializes in geriatrics and end-of-life care, but still she’s encountered a hospice client who asked flirtatious questions like, “Who massages you?” He was also “really into having his abdomen rubbed, hinting about wanting me to work lower.” (That’s an example of the hospice saying, “You die as you lived.”)

Massage therapists often become accustomed to the hint of an erection under the sheet. “It’s tricky because the male body sometimes sends a signal just as part of the relaxation response,” says Pendleton, “not because they’re having a sexual reaction, so I learned to ignore erections and I usually gave the client the benefit of the doubt,” she says. “It’s rarely as obvious as perhaps some of Mr. Travolta’s massage therapists experienced.”

On the whole, the female massage therapists I spoke with reported less frequent in-person sexual harassment, maybe because they are more motivated to screen aggressively. Whenever she gets a call from a potential client, Denise mentions that she offers both massage and martial arts classes — which is not easily confused as a sexy euphemism. Most people who are looking for sex hang up after that, but the ones who stay on the line usually send up red flags by asking for “adult” or “full body” massage, or asking what she looks like or what she wears during the treatment. Recently, she had a man call to ask if he could “confess his bad behavior.” She suggested that he seek “psychological or spiritual counseling” and he hung up.

Elise Constantine has been working as a licensed massage therapist for 14 years and only once had a client cross the line: He kept asking to be naked during a Thai massage, which is usually done on a clothed body. “I was infuriated,” she says, “but did not engage in any further discussion beyond saying, ‘There is the exit. No payment is expected. Do not contact me again.’” Since then she’s developed strict policies to avoid inappropriate clients and dangerous situations. She only books new male clients when one of her colleagues will be in her office suite and never does outcalls for men unless they come with a direct, reliable referral. Constantine also makes a point of dressing “modestly” and not posting photos of herself on her professional website.

The erotic plagues the industry for some of the same reasons that massage is a good cover for sex work: the intimacy of nakedness and the sensuality of healing touch. We have a hard enough time separating nudity from sex, let alone naked touch. So it’s no surprise that there’s a genre of porn that eroticizes the tension between the legitimacy of massage therapy and the naughtiness of a paid-for hand-job. “Some people don’t get touched very often, they don’t have a love life, and to them it’s like, ‘Oh my god, this feels so good,’” says Joe. “It’s synonymous with sex or foreplay to them.” Of course, there’s a crucial difference between the occasional boner on the massage table and trespassing on another person’s body. One represents a natural physiological response, the other a raging dick.

As I was by the two other vintage vibrators that I got to try out — the White Cross Electric Vibrator from 1917, which has a pronged aperture that makes it seem like the ancestor of Jimmyjane’s Form 2, and the Beautysafe Vibrator from the 1940s, which is reminiscent in look, feel and sound to a car waxer.

The U.S. release this week of “Hysteria,” a Maggie Gyllenhaal flick about a Victorian-era doctor who invents an electric massager and uses it to bring about “paroxysms” of relief in female patients with “hysteria,” seemed like a good excuse to get a private tour of the museum, which provided vibes that appear in the film, to learn about the history that’s left out of the movie’s fictionalized story line — and, of course, to try out antique pleasure devices while on the clock.

While the movie is set in the 19th century, doctors’ “manual manipulation” as a treatment for female hysteria goes back as far as the second century. “That took too long,” said Queen. “So doctors started training midwives to do it.” In Rachel P. Maines’ “The Technology of Orgasm: ‘Hysteria,’ the Vibrator, and Women’s Sexual Satisfaction,” she quotes a 1653 medical book that advises:

When these symptoms indicate, we think it necessary to ask a midwife to assist, so that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside, using oil of lilies, musk root, crocus, or [something] similar. And in this way the afflicted woman can be aroused to the paroxysm.

Of course, this paroxysm was orgasm, but it was rarely acknowledged as such. Instead, it was said to be the exorcism of hysteria, a vague, catch-all diagnosis for female ailments thought to arise from a displaced uterus or, charmingly, a “wandering womb.” “Some of these women probably had PTSD, some of them were overworked, some of them had extreme stress in their lives, some of them almost certainly had sexual issues going on,” Queen explains. As Maines points out, “many of its classic symptoms are those of chronic arousal: Anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability, nervousness, erotic fantasy, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen, lower pelvic edema, and vaginal lubrication.” Married women were often given the prescription of sex with their husbands.

Eventually, doctors turned to technology to speed up the laborious treatment. “It started with hydraulic devices, water jets, but that really only worked well at spas,” said Queen. In 1869, an American physician patented the Manipulator, a padded table with a steam-powered vibrating mound that rested between the legs. A decade later, British physician Joseph Mortimer Granville – who’s at the center of “Hysteria,” albeit heavily fictionalized — patented a battery-operated vibrator for treatment of muscle pain. Interestingly, he was vehemently against the device being used for hysteria. He wrote, “I have avoided, and shall continue to avoid the treatment of women by percussion, simply because I do not wish to be hoodwinked, and help to mislead others, by the vagaries of the hysterical state.”

Ads selling vibrators as home appliances began to appear in women’s magazines, often showing “women in attractive nightclothes, using it on their chest,” Queen said. “You see facial massage shown from time to time.” These spots referred to them as “aids that every woman appreciates” and promised “all the pleasures of youth … will throb within you.” But when vibrators started showing up in stag films in the 1920s, the ads started to disappear, Queen says.

“Within the next 10 years or so, the doctors close up shop,” she said, perhaps in part because it became impossible to deny the sexual nature of these therapies. “In 1952, hysteria is taken out of medical books,” Queen explained. “The medical associations voted to say, ‘Nothing to see here, there’s really not a disease – no, no, no, we haven’t been treating this with clitoral and vulva massage.’”

Vibrators were still sold direct to consumers, but manufacturers made no mention of hysteria and instead “talked about body massage and vague promises of health, vigor and beauty.” The ’60s did away with the subtlety and euphemisms: Maines explains in her book, “When the vibrator reemerged during the 1960s, it was no longer a medical instrument; it had been democratized to consumers to such an extent that by the ’70s it was openly marketed as a sex aid.”

Asked whether doctors or patients saw the treatment as sexual, Queen said, “One of the schools of thought is, ‘How could they not?’ They’re touching the genitals, she starts to sweat and flail around and vocalize and her breathing changes and she gets a flush.” But others argue that “the definition of sex and sexual functioning for a woman was so associated with intercourse,” it was so male-centric, that this treatment, which was most often external, wasn’t seen as sexual. As Maines puts it, “Since no penetration was involved, believers in the hypothesis that only penetration was sexually gratifying to women could argue that nothing sexual could be occurring when their patients experienced the hysterical paroxysm during treatment.”

Paradoxically, Queen explains that hysteria was overtly linked to sex “in that they said women without husbands who were spinsters or widows or whose husbands had become incapacitated were more likely to suffer from it,” she said. “So there was a subtext of, ‘What this lady needs is a good fuck and, sadly, she can’t have one — but this is the next best thing.’” Maines attributes the demand for the treatment to two sources: “The proscription on female masturbation as unchaste and possibly unhealthful, and the failure of androcentrically defined sexuality to produce orgasm regularly in most women.”

We haven’t exactly escaped the expectation that women should be able to climax from penetration alone, but we’re slowly improving on that front — and the mainstreaming of vibrators has played a big part. That point was only driven home as I left the museum, which is located in the back of a Good Vibrations store, and walked past scores of sleek and sexy toys in every color of the rainbow, all unabashedly advertised as what they are: Tools for sexual pleasure.

While I wouldn’t assume there’s a vast amount of historical and social accuracy to “Hysteria,” it’s a lot of fun, and could definitely provide a viable moviegoing alternative for adult women eager to move on from “Iron Man” and “Captain America.” Gyllenhaal’s character, the crusading feminist and social worker Charlotte Dalrymple, who becomes the comic and romantic foil to Hugh Dancy’s stuffy, stammering Granville, might be described as a supporting character who takes over the movie. Charlotte effectively becomes the modern viewer’s window into the world of “Hysteria,” insisting as a matter of course that women indeed enjoy sexual pleasure (but are often plagued with partners who don’t know how to deliver it) and espousing then-outrageous views about women’s right to vote, go to college, work outside the home and so on.

Although still best known for her roles in independent films like the 2002 spanking-liberation manifesto “Secretary,” Spike Jonze’s “Adaptation” and the underappreciated “Sherrybaby” (not to mention her early role opposite real-life brother Jake Gyllenhaal in “Donnie Darko”), Gyllenhaal has also appeared in several major Hollywood productions, including “The Dark Knight,” “Crazy Heart” and the forthcoming “Won’t Back Down,” in which she stars with Viola Davis as parents trying to rescue a failing public school. Her prodigious on-screen charm is matched by a reputation as one of the most genuine and easygoing people in the movie business, and although I’d never met her before, this was one of the most relaxed interviews I’ve ever conducted.

We began our conversation, in fact, by talking about the Park Slope Food Coop, the legendary Brooklyn collective grocery store where we are both members. Unlike some celebrity members I could name, Gyllenhaal and Sarsgaard perform their assigned Coop work shifts personally. (She works in the basement, wearing a kerchief and packing nuts, teas, spices and cheeses, although like any other new mom she now has a one-year work exemption.) Is the Coop’s produce both better and cheaper than the pretty but nosebleed-expensive stuff for sale at Manhattan’s outdoor markets, we asked each other rhetorically? It is. Then we moved on to “Hysteria.”

So it seems like this must have been a fun character to play. You get to be the totally uninhibited character in a movie where everybody else has the 19th century hanging over them. You’re the liberated woman at a time when there almost weren’t any.

Right. Sometimes, a movie is set up where you’re meant to be winning, you know what I mean? I’ve certainly played a lot of characters who were really flawed and did horrible things, and where the challenge is to ask the audience if they can be compassionate enough to still have empathy for you. That’s really important to me, and I think that’s a really interesting thing to do with film — play a character who’s really flawed and ask the audience to practice being compassionate. Or who does things that are really outrageous that the audience might have judgments about, and make them question where their judgments come from.

This is completely different. This is like, you walk in and the movie doesn’t work if Charlotte isn’t winning. But the one thing I really did think — I mean, the script was so great, and so much of the tone of the movie was in place. I didn’t think it needed to be shifted almost at all. But one thing that I think comes from me is that I didn’t care at all about her being historically accurate. About her not having the 19th century over her, like you said. I think the movie is served better if she seems wild even now, if she seems so full of life that she could come from any time. Or any planet!

Because what she’s talking about in the movie — the actual politics — is very simple. The movie doesn’t have room for a complicated discussion of socialism. She says, “Socialism is a lot of people working together.” Well, you know, I mean — there’s a lot more to say about it! (Laughter.) Or, you know, women should have the right to vote, women should be able to go to college. We’re good with that here! So because her politics are so simple, and because the things that were so outrageous that she was saying do not sound outrageous now, she needs to be more outrageous in her spirit. So, yeah, it was fun to be able to just go, “You guys are constricted and constrained by all these things, and I just don’t feel them!”

I have to say the question of historical accuracy, or lack thereof, really never bothered me. It’s not that kind of movie.

Yeah. I think you’re on the wrong track if that’s what you’re worried about!

But one thing the writers really got right — or maybe this is your theatrical background and English-lit education at work — is that Charlotte feels like the heroine of a George Bernard Shaw play that Shaw never got around to writing.

Right! Right! She fits into a history of great wild women, you know? Even, like, ’40s women, screwball women, who you love even though they’re pissing you off. So, yeah, I agree with that. I liked that about it. I thought it would be fun!

You know, I probably can’t push this analysis of your career too far, but you do have a pattern of playing transgressive women, women who are defying social norms. Do you see it that way?

Well, I guess I think — and this might not be true either — but if you think about who might be interesting to watch, is it interesting to watch someone who’s absolutely following the norm and the pattern you’re used to watching? Sometimes people write those characters and they’re much more secondary characters meant to give you some exposition or whatever. Usually, the interesting character in a movie is either making a big change or transgressing somehow — making you think about how you live. So, yes, that is what appeals to me, but I also think it appeals to many people.

But no, I think maybe you’re right. When I think about Chekhov’s “Three Sisters,” for example — did you happen to see the production that we did last year?

No. I really, really wanted to. I love that play.

Well, so, of the three sisters, the transgressive one is Masha, and that’s who I played. But of course Olga is such an interesting character, and she’s not really transgressing at all. And in the movie I did after this, which is called “Won’t Back Down,” I’m also fighting against everything. It’s coming out in September, I think. I’m so pregnant! I’m all like, “It’s coming out sometime! I’ll talk to people about it!” Then there’s my character in “Crazy Heart” — she’s transgressive too, in a way. In her heart.

And of course everybody’s going to bring up “Secretary,” which, although it’s quite a different movie from “Hysteria,” is also about liberating female sexuality.

Well, yeah. That’s why people think about me that way. It’s always about what your first big movie is, that anybody knows about. And that movie is about transgression. I mean, that movie is overtly about what it means to transgress, and how it feels, and how you can live as a transgressor. But maybe it’s true: I am interested in people who are thinking — although the girl in “Crazy Heart” definitely isn’t thinking, or she wouldn’t do a lot of the things she does! I don’t know, you probably can’t tie them all together.

No, I wasn’t arguing that they all fit into that template. I’m always curious about the effect of having appeared in a really big movie. Do people see you on the street now and recognize you just because of “The Dark Knight”?

Some people do, yeah. It’s funny, because I’ve moved back and forth a lot. Even last year, I made “Hysteria” and then I made “Won’t Back Down,” which is a studio movie. There’s such a different feeling in terms of schedule, in terms of time, in terms of subject matter. I used to find it much easier to work on little movies: the pace and the way of working was just better for me. But I think I’m starting to change. I think I work the same way now on a smaller movie as I did on “Won’t Back Down.” It depends on the style of the movie. It’s harder when you’re in and out, like on “Dark Knight” or “World Trade Center.” I find that difficult. You’re not going to work and working for two months, going into the tunnel and just getting in your body who you are.

How has moving into your 30s changed your career? Don’t get me wrong, you’re still young! I was actually thinking it might have opened up some different possibilities.

Yeah, I actually feel like getting older has opened up a spectrum of roles to me. When I was younger, a lot of the roles that were coming to me were like, especially from a more Hollywood standpoint, the wacky girl. (Laughter.) Now I feel really drawn to playing grown-up women. I’m 34, and maybe it’s the way people age now or whatever, but I still feel like some roles I play are not grown-up women and some roles are. In “Won’t Back Down” she’s a child. In “Hysteria” she’s a woman, and in “Crazy Heart” she’s kind of half and half. You know, I have one foot in and one foot out. But thank God I’m done with, like, the wacky 25-year-old girl! That never worked that well for me. Plus, it’s so interesting to see a crop of really talented new actresses who are in a different generation.

Tell me who you especially like.

I love Rooney Mara. I was absolutely blown away by her performance in “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” Absolutely blown away. And to be honest, when you’re an actress, you go in and say, “All right — show me what you can do!” And every turn of that performance was excellent, and not just excellent in the way that some young actors are, where they’re just working on instinct and they have no craft. That was a crafted, excellent, beautiful performance. So to root for someone younger, that’s new for me. (Laughter.) You know, I’m sort of not in that young group anymore! I’m in another group now, but I like seeing talented young women come along. It’s exciting! What are they like? What I loved about Rooney Mara in that movie was that she wasn’t asking for anyone to love her. That’s hard to do!

“Hysteria” opens this week in New York and Los Angeles, with wider national release to follow.