As I was watching this episode, “Curriculum Unavailable,” I remember calmly thinking something like, “Huh. That would really explain Leonard.” The possibility that “Community” might be about to “St. Elsewhere” its audience (“St. Elsewhere” ended on the reveal that everything that had happened in the series had all taken place inside the mind of an autistic boy) was not particularly alarming to me. Group psychosis explained a lot about the show’s extremely dark psychology, and, anyway, on “Community,” stranger things had happened.

As of late Friday evening, when “Community’s” creator and showrunner Dan Harmon was abruptly fired by Sony from the show he obsessively oversaw, I’ve realized that the real reason I was unphased by “Curriculum Unavailable” was because I was already very comfortable with thinking about “Community” as the figment of someone’s feverish imagination. That someone was just Dan Harmon.

Writing about “2 Broke Girls” recently, I noted that there is a fault line running through television where art rubs up against commerce. I should have saved that metaphor, because this “Community” situation is like an 8.0 on the art-commerce Richter scale. Consider the aftershocks: The perpetually low-rated, but fanatically beloved “Community” was just renewed by NBC for a fourth, 13-episode season. Why renew it just to fire the guy responsible for it? To escape the bad press of canceling a critically acclaimed series? Or is it the opposite impulse — to make enough episodes to get the show into syndication?

Harmon is an infamously — and self-proclaimed — difficult guy to work for and with. Earlier this year, he got into a public fight with “Community’s” Chevy Chase after Harmon played an incensed voice mail from Chase at a public event. Harmon apologized, though not to Chase, and a few weeks later was back to calling him a jerk on Twitter. If Harmon’s behavior was bad enough to get him fired, it was also the same crazy mentality that made “Community” one of the strangest shows to ever air on network television. How badly behaved does a great artist have to be to get kicked off his own creation without so much as a phone call?

Speaking about “Community” last week, before the news about Harmon was public, Bob Greenblatt, the head of NBC, said “Shows lose showrunners all the time and do well.” This is and isn’t true. Workaday TV shows, procedurals, sitcoms, long-running dramas, change showrunners all the time. But for the growing number of auteurist series driven largely by one personality — everything from “The Sopranos” and ‘The Wire” to “Louie” and, yes, “Community” — a showrunner change is not common, and is usually about as imaginable or advisable as Matt Weiner getting fired from “Mad Men” and that show soldiering on without him. It happens — Aaron Sorkin left “The West Wing” after four years, for example — but the shows are never the same.

“Community” seems to me particularly poorly designed to continue without Harmon. If “Community” were a more standard comedy, the new showrunners — two writers from “Happy Endings” — would just have to take the seven characters and make them funny. But causing belly laughs seems secondary to “Community’s” précis, which emphasizes being exhilaratingly clever, formalistically inventive and impressively bonkers over being laugh-out-loud hilarious. Harmon’s approach to television has always been almost athletic: With each episode, he sets out to break his previous record for genre bending, to outdo what everyone else has done before. To make “Community” “Community” then, the new writers don’t just have to tell jokes, they have to maintain its outdo spirit. They have to outrun or at least keep pace with Dan Harmon’s brain.

And because of his “let’s boldly go where no TV show has ever gone before!” ethos, Harmon has long since made his brain a major, off-screen character on “Community.” More than most other showrunners, even the great ones, one can feel Harmon in each episode, egging the show on to new heights, exposing the mechanics of the genre. I could watch Troy and Abed do their secret handshake 1,000 times a day, but I don’t watch “Community” for Troy and Abed, adorable besties that they are. I watch for the episodes with multiple timelines, for Dungeons & Dragons games come to life, for claymation Christmas specials, and for “My Dinner With Andre” and “Die Hard” spoofs. I watch for Dan Harmon’s unmatched and, now it seems, unsustainable ambition. Oh, damn it. I guess I mean watched.

V was the first Indian-American I’d ever met who actually liked to camp. I’d always associated camping with white people, along with sunbathing and being grounded, but here was V at REI — testing compasses, lusting after tents — with a thrilled, drifting look in his eye. I kept thinking about a term that a friend and hiking enthusiast had once taught me — “poop trowel” — two words that returned to me now with great foreboding.

But as I trailed along, I found myself vaguely infected by V’s enthusiasm. It was one of the things I liked best about him, his ready embrace of adventure. He had once done a seven-day solo hike through the Himalayas, sans guide, and slept at a tea house each night. Before I bought a bicycle, V got me to double on his and we rode all around New York City that way, though it took me a while to loosen my clench on his waist.

Ironically, it was that very sense of adventure that seemed to prove us incompatible. We were plagued by the question of where we would live for the next 10 to 20 years, if we were to get married. Prior to meeting me, V had spent a year in rural India and three years in Sierra Leone. He had always envisioned living and working abroad, either in India or Africa; I had never even entertained the possibility. The question of where led to a multitude of what ifs. We tried coming up with timelines and spreadsheets that would fulfill both our geographical needs. Google Docs became a primary form of correspondence.

I think we both believed that we would soon be parting ways, and that this camping trip would be some lovely, pastoral memory we would linger over, long from now, when we were married to other people. I agreed to go hiking, mostly because of his enthusiasm, and how much I would miss it.

Not 15 minutes into our hike, I was faced with a number of immutable truths — that my backpack was the approximate shape and weight of a mini-fridge, that my one prized possession, a king-size Hershey bar, was somewhere in his backpack instead of mine, that we had to first ascend a mountain in order to descend it. V went ahead of me, leaping from stone to stone, chatty and upbeat, immune to my slightly exaggerated mouth-breathing. The first bad sign came early on, when we were met by a hiker descending the mountain. He said that the weather, on his way up, had grown so chilly and cloudy that he’d decided not to go above treeline. We told the hiker where we were planning to go: up the mountain, along the ridge, through a ravine, along another ridge, and into a colony of shelters by sundown.

The hiker took one look at me in my oversize yellow poncho, bowed under the weight of my mini-fridge, and asked for our full names. “Just in case,” he said, leaving off the rest.

This is the point in the TV movie where you curse the foolish hikers and urge them to turn back. In our defense, a park ranger had initially approved our route, had even guessed that a yellow blob like me could tackle the whole journey without a problem. The views, he said, would be worth it.

But at the top of the mountain, the landscape turned lunar, drained of color, bereft of plant life. We stood among the gray rock, surrounded by cloud on all sides, a far cry from the turning leaves we had come to see, the livid orange and garnet that lavished the slopes at this time of year. This was a more desolate beauty, remote and isolating. But we’d been planning this trip for weeks, and after a mere hour of suffering and no sign of those magical, mist-clad mountains, we weren’t about to turn back around.

I decided to adopt a certain philosophy toward the hike, which was something like my approach to life at 26: I don’t know where I am but I’m keeping on. I was living in New York City, working as an assistant editor on a documentary film, writing my first novel in the evenings, and trying to negotiate with the mouse that lived in the bowels of my gas stove. Around that time, I read Rilke’s “Letters to a Young Poet,” in which I’d starred these lines: “Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question.”

As the hike went on, I found myself living a lot of questions. I kept waiting for the visual rewards that the White Mountains website had promised us — a sapphire lake, a giant, sleepy moose — but no. The uphill climb flattened out into a hostile field of gray boulders. Buffeted by wind and nearly horizontal rain, I struggled to keep my balance.

And I learned another word — “cairns” — cryptic little piles of stones that marked the trail. Those stone snowmen became for me tiny totems of authority and hope in our increasingly bleak surroundings. After we crossed the boulder field, we checked the map. We weren’t covering enough ground to stick to our original plan. We had no time to sit and eat. Instead we took turns shoveling mixed nuts into our mouths from a sweaty Ziploc bag, and though I hate mixed nuts, I nibbled with a feral intensity.

Cold and wet and miserable, I focused on composing a series of speeches, which I planned to deliver as soon as we found ourselves within reach of a proper toilet. Rhetorical questions included: Why couldn’t we have started with a day hike? Why didn’t we obey the several signposts that read, DO NOT GO PAST THIS SIGN? But the light was fading too quickly to pause and interrogate. The sun had begun to set by the time we reached the ravine, a steep descent among jagged rocks and a rather anemic stream. We had no choice but to strap on our headlights, like miners, and scoot from stone to wet stone on our rears. Propelled by resentment, I led the way.

At some point, I turned and noticed that V had fallen a good bit behind. When he finally reached me, he showed me his hands, which were pale and trembling slightly. His lips were going numb, making it difficult to talk. Hypothermia, he guessed. I could see he was scared. I pressed his wet-gloved hands between mine. It didn’t help.

We went on boulder-scooting, slowly now. Every so often, I called behind and he replied, but if his voice was too distant, I waited until he reached me. Soon, the dark engulfed us completely, and all I could see was the small tunnel of light from my headlamp, brightening the few steps ahead but nothing more. The snowman totems were lost to us. Our map had fallen apart. All we had was the sound of our names in the dark, or I’m here, or Go on.

It was pitch black when we reached the bottom of the ravine, and yet instantly warmer below treeline. We stumbled along what we thought was the trail and finally arrived at a group of rickety lean-to’s in which hikers could pitch their tents. Climbing into a lean-to, I felt an almost deranged euphoria. I didn’t even mind, later that night, when we realized that V’s sleeping bag had been soaked through by the rain. We stuffed ourselves into my lady-size sleeping bag, packed so tight that I couldn’t move my torso or legs, a sort of two-headed sausage. As was his custom, V fell asleep within minutes. Exhausted as I was, I lay awake, listening to him snore, never so content to be partially paralyzed next to another.

As I write this, I’m in New Delhi and V is in Mozambique, but usually we live in Washington, D.C. We got married two years after our White Mountains hike, and while we spend some months out of each year in different countries, I’ve come to believe that the question of where we’ll live 15 years from now is as foggy as who we will be. Ours is a marriage that some of my relatives call “modern,” and by modern, I think they mean inscrutable.

And as married folk do, we’ve recounted That Time We Went Hiking to our friends so often that we can call up the smallest details, like the squirrel scratching all night at the skin of our tent. (Another rodent negotiation.) What I don’t remember as readily is the growing panic, the uncertainty behind every step. The memory of that fear fades a bit with every telling.

In retrospect, the happy ending of our hike seems a fated eventuality, but logic — and a hundred other hiker horror stories — suggest otherwise. There is a multitude of other routes the story could have taken, that our story could still take, twists and boulder-scooting turns that no Google Doc spreadsheet could foresee. Such is the wilderness of marriage. We continue calling across the dark, across continents, and so long as the other answers, I’m here, we are safe; we keep on.

One thing made a difference: The actions of Lucie’s father, Tim Blackman, who arrived in Tokyo to join his other daughter, Sophie, in publicizing the search and prodding the police. Richard Lloyd Parry, Tokyo bureau chief for the Times of London, covered the case as it unfolded, first over the course of several months while Lucie’s whereabouts and abductor remained unknown, and finally for the six years it took to try the man accused of killing her, Joji Obara. The book Parry wrote about the case, “People Who Eat Darkness,” is an exceptionally perceptive and nuanced look at a terrible crime, one that put nations, institutions and family members at odds, and often into bitter and toxic conflict.

Unlike Truman Capote, author of “In Cold Blood,” the most celebrated true crime narrative of all, Parry is in essence a reporter; this is no “nonfiction novel.” But like Capote, he’s less interested in dishing the eerie or lurid details than he is in exploring the penumbra of the crime, the complex factors that fed into it and the unpredictable effects it had on an ever-spreading network of people. The true crime genre has a (mostly well-earned) reputation for trashiness, but it fascinates for legitimate reasons, as well. Transgression, justice and punishment speak to the very heart of what a society is, how it holds its people together and how they decide who lies beyond the pale.

Because Lucie Blackman was a foreigner, and one employed in an industry that the Japanese view as disreputable, the Tokyo police were inclined to dismiss her disappearance. Bar hostesses get paid to talk to and flirt with customers, and they are expected to go on (paid) dinner dates with them outside the clubs where they work, but it’s an arrangement that usually stops short of actual sex. Nevertheless, the Japanese think of most foreign hostesses as irresponsible, drug-loving backpackers who might well run off without telling anyone or get mixed up with dangerous people. Whether or not a Westerner would call what bar hostesses do a part of the sex industry, for the Japanese, these women belong to that category of “bad” girl who can expect little help or concern from authorities should she get into serious trouble.

Crime is not what it was in Capote’s day. In addition to finding and building a case against the perpetrator — jobs for law enforcement authorities — there’s handling the media, a task usually left to the victim and his or her relatives. Lucie’s father proved, initially at least, to be a master at this. Tim could detach himself emotionally from the horror of his situation and strategize. He was able to capitalize on a G-8 summit meeting being held in Japan around the same time Lucie vanished and parlay it into the intervention of British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Blair publicly asked Japan’s prime minister to front-burner the investigation, and met with Tim and his younger daughter Sophie while he was in Tokyo.

The police, who had been dragging their heels on Lucie’s disappearance, found this development (which made perfect sense in the political context of Britain) flabbergasting. Still, it worked: Lucie, who might have been written off as one of those “disposable” women of dubious virtue, was conclusively cast as an innocent girl, “naive perhaps, out of her depth,” but an adventurous daughter rather than a reckless slut. Tim was driving the narrative, as an electoral campaign manager might put it, and he was good at it. He liked talking to the press, even the tabloid press, and they liked him.

But if Tim was good at telling Lucie’s story, he was less successful at telling his own. Some of the most penetrating passages in “People Who Eat Darkness” concern what Parry refers to as the “script” expected from bereaved parents. Years later, Parry covered a press conference given by the father of another murdered girl and recognized in him “everything the world expected of a man in his situation: broken, helpless, turned inside out by loss.”

Tim, however, was composed, which aroused a formless popular suspicion regarding his sincerity. In similar cases, this uneasiness frequently takes the form of outside observers suddenly deciding that the parents might be implicated in their child’s disappearance or death. Tim, halfway around the world when Lucie vanished, was immune to that, but when he quarreled with the rich businessman funding the private search for his daughter, accusations of self-interest and even exploitation surfaced.

Lucie’s mother, Jane, on the other hand, behaved exactly as a grief-stricken mother is supposed to. In some respects, the truth about her parents’ failed marriage is as unknowable as the events of Lucie’s final hours. Unamicably divorced, Tim and Jane avoided even being in the same room together throughout the crisis. Was Jane, who seems to fall for every kind of supernatural hokum that crosses her path, pathologically vindictive, or was Tim as big a shit as she claimed? Just when you think you’ve made up your mind on that question, a new development comes along to knock you into the other camp.

As for the perpetrator himself, he remains something of a cipher to Parry, who was never able to interview him. Obsessively camera shy, Obara deftly avoided being properly photographed even after his arrest. He was clearly demented, as a long, self-justifying self-published book (disguised as the work of concerned supporters) amply demonstrates. Resolutely confident and unrepentant, Obara was also utterly unlike the vast majority of Japanese criminal defendants. (Parry explains that the justice system there depends almost completely on the ability of police investigators to shame suspects into confessing.) They simply didn’t know what to do with him. The Japanese blamed Obara’s recalcitrant behavior on his Korean ethnicity.

The Blackmans and Obara, Western-style players, descended on a criminal justice system unprepared to cope with them. “The inadequacy of its police force is one of the mysterious taboos of Japanese society,” Parry writes, “a subject that the media and politicians strain to avoid confronting, or even acknowledging.” The blunders of the police were many, but they could also be dogged investigators. Their real problem, according to Parry, is that they are good at dealing with “conventional Japanese criminals,” but when faced with the unexpected, they’re “sclerotic, unimaginative, prejudiced and procedure-bound.”

Obara behaved like a British or American criminal — taking charge of his defense, actively contesting the prosecutors, formulating a counternarrative to account for Lucie’s death. Watching how Japanese institutions responded to him, as well as to the Blackmans’ efforts to influence the investigation, proves fascinating. Since true crime, at its best, serves as a window on what a society cares about — how it constitutes not only what’s right and wrong but what’s sympathetic, reasonable, acceptable and important — the Obara trial was a most illuminating culture clash.

Parry doesn’t, however, forget what lies at the root of this drama: the death of a young woman who, whatever her doubts or flaws, had every reason to hope for a wonderful life. As the investigation would eventually reveal, this tragedy was eminently preventable. The people who tried to tip off the police about Obara were dismissed as not worth listening to. Let’s hope they’re not the only ones to learn from that mistake.

It has no place, however, on a map of the United States.

Let me explain: California is a state. New York is a state. Texas, for the time being at least, is a state. And they deserve to be. They’re big, they’re boisterous — but most crucially, they’re populated. Thirty-seven million people live in California, four million in Los Angeles alone. New York is home to almost 20 million people. If California were a country, it would have the eighth largest economy in the world. If New York City were its own state, it would be the 12th largest — and in my humble New Yorker opinion, the best.

Whereas Nebraska?

There are more Americans in prison than in Nebraska. And not for nothing, but as I drove past endless rows of cornstalks, I couldn’t help but think: What’s the difference? Nebraska, whose official state motto is “Equality Before the Law,” nonetheless feels like a punishment for a crime. And like a criminal, I whiled away the hours (or was it days?) thinking up mottoes that better apply: “Nebraska — a great place to serve some time.” “Nebraska — if you lived here, you’d be bored by now.” “Nebraska — Canada’s Mexico!”

Sure, the argument could be made that Nebraska is in fact an idyllic land full of picturesque cities with enviable small towns steeped in small-town values personified by some of the loveliest Americans to grace the planet — and, I confess, in my wildest dreams I often fantasize about living among them in such a glorious place — but let’s be honest: It’s also a lifeblood-sucking leech on our body politic. Yes, my fellow citizens, despite what the original Constitution of the United States says about the qualifications for statehood and the guarantee of representation in Congress, by every measure that truly matters in America (bigness, crowdedness, awesomeness, Texasness), Nebraska doesn’t deserve its star on the American flag.

Which is to say nothing about Montana (4th largest, 44th most populous).

Or Wyoming (10th largest, 50th most populous).

Or the largest but 47th most populous state we call Alaska.

Add it up, and more than half of all Americans live in eight states. The big ones. The important ones. How many live in the eight least populated states? Less than 3 percent. Three percent — also known as the margin of error. (Which raises a terrifying scenario: It’s possible these states are completely empty.)

Yet what concerned me during my soul-deadening voyage toward Omaha was not whether these states deserve their claim on so much territory (they don’t), or whether, as guaranteed by Article I, they should be represented by two senators as powerful as the senators in states where people actually live (they shouldn’t). Rather, as my car sped past miles and miles of unharvested high-fructose corn syrup, my muscles atrophying and my eyes fluttering in and out of semi-consciousness, my mind was focused on Article IV. Because it is Article IV, the first in the Constitution to turn its full attention to the states rather than the branches of national government, that wants me to believe that Nebraska, this expanse of emptiness which so begs for my disdain, actually deserves my respect.

It reads, in part:

Section 1: Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and Judicial Proceedings of every other State.

Section 2: The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.*

Put plainly, Article IV makes a revolutionary claim: All states are created equal. Laws made in Alaska, which is known for its lawlessness, are as valid as laws made in Pennsylvania, which invented laws. Article IV insists that, as a nation, we should care as much about the Carolinas as we do about California. Montana  matters as much as Massachusetts. And New York is no better than any of its 49 neighbors — not even Nebraska. Which is, put even more plainly, ridiculous.

I should know. I’ve driven through Nebraska. I live in New York.

- – - – - – - – - – - – -

Was I thinking about the merits of giving “Full Faith and Credit” to each state as I drove through Nebraska? Not at all. At the time, I was merely thinking: I am soooooooo not a Nebraskan.

I was, at the time, a Californian. I had lived in the Golden State for four years, and as such, all of the rights and benefits of California residency were mine, all mine! I could serve on California juries, vote in California state elections, and draw California unemployment checks. Had I a major case of glaucoma or a minor case of cancer, in a few years I would even be eligible for my very own California-state-sanctioned, medically warranted marijuana — if I were, you know, into that type of thing. Citizenship has its privileges.

And Article IV is cool with that. It is designed to help me be a Californian even outside California. As written, it would guarantee that if I am granted certain “Privileges and Immunities” in my home state, all other states must also grant me those rights. I can thank Article IV for the fact that when I crossed the border from Colorado into Nebraska, I wasn’t immediately pulled over for not having a valid driver’s license. It is why when I stopped in North Platte to fill up my gas tank, the attendant couldn’t legally charge me $10 a gallon just because I wasn’t “from ’round these parts.” Although the Supreme Court has occasionally retreated to a more “limited interpretation” of Article IV — merely that states may not discriminate against citizens of other states in favor of its own citizens — it has always returned to the basic theme of Article IV: States must play nice with others, and do unto residents from other states as they would do unto their own.

Oklahoma must say to Oregon: Legal physician-assisted suicide? Not the way I would have done it, but I respect your choice. It looks good on you.

Oregonians must say to South Dakotans: Seriously? You’ll only provide abortions to a woman who has been raped if her life is at stake? Seems a bit heartless, but I guess that’s just another reason why we don’t live there.

This makes sense — I, for one, enjoy those regional quirks, and wouldn’t want to live in a country where I couldn’t tell Montana from Maine.

Yet Article IV isn’t all-powerful. As a referee between the states, it has its limits. The most famous check on Article IV, in fact, involved the states of New Jersey and Delaware, a boatload of purloined oysters, and George Washington’s nephew Bushrod. In 1832, Bushrod, then  a federal circuit court judge, ruled on a landmark case, Corfield v. Coryell. The question at hand was whether the state of New Jersey should be allowed to prohibit the plaintiff, Mr. Corfield (and all other non-Jerseyans), from gathering oysters found in the pristine waters off New Jersey (keep in mind, this was back in 1832, when New Jersey waters stood the chance of being pristine) only to return back to their home states to sell them for profit. Bushrod ruled that although the “Privileges and Immunities” protected by Article IV do include “the right of a citizen of one state to pass through any other state … for the purposes of professional pursuits,” stealing oysters isn’t one of them. “We cannot accede to the proposition,” he wrote, “that the citizens of several States are permitted to participate in all the rights which belong exclusively to the citizens of any particular State, merely upon the ground that they are enjoyed by those citizens.”

In other words, go ahead and cruise down our New Jersey turnpike and breathe our fresh New Jersey air, but if you’re not from New Jersey, hands off our New Jersey shellfish.

Article IV doesn’t merely snub oystermen from Delaware. It fails to protect Mormons who might want to marry a dozen sister-wives in Utah and expect Vermont to approve of their polygamous bliss, or gun-toting Kentuckians who want to bring their semiautomatics to church while visiting gun-skittish Maryland. These, too, go too far.

But what if I’m not a Delaware oysterman or a Utahan missionary or an armed Kentuckian? What if I am, say, a gay Iowan? And instead of illegally gathering winkles in Weehawken or wives in Salt Lake City, I have gotten legally married in Iowa — which sanctioned gay marriage way back in 2009. And what if I wanted to celebrate the nuptials with a road trip through Nebraska? (I’m not sure why I’d do that, but just roll with me.) Would Article IV compel Nebraskans to recognize my marriage?

Congress has tried to say no. In 1996, it passed the Defense of Marriage Act, citing the broad power Article IV gives Congress — brace yourself for some gobbledygook — to “prescribe the Manner in which such Acts … shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.” Which, if you ask me, makes about as much sense as in which such Sentences … shall be understood, and the Nonsense thereabouts.

Now, such gibberish would baffle a normal human; to Congress, however, it made perfect sense. It determined, conveniently, that if could limit “the Effect” that gay marriage would have as it traveled the nation, it could also prescribe that it must have no effect at all — which is to say, it could give states the power to ignore gay marriages entirely. The Harvard constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe has called this linguistic tap dance “a play on words, not a legal argument,” which forms in us the bad habit of creating “categorical exceptions” to Article IV, when Congress has no such power.

Neither side is happy with the arrangement. Gay couples, skeptical that the  federal government will ever give them that wedding day owed to them, want to see more states legalize gay marriage; opponents of gay marriage, fearful that gays might spontaneously band together and attack their northern border brandishing Le Creuset spatulas and Rufus Wainwright CDs, want to see nothing less than a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman. It’s all very confusing. What’s a gay couple to do — other than plan their honeymoon in San Francisco?

It is this competition, between what one state might want for its citizens and what another state might demand for its own, that Article IV is supposed to referee. Yet it hasn’t. It doesn’t. And what’s more — with all due respect to our nation’s homosexual polygamist mollusk aficionados — its failure to do so has meant repercussions far greater than a marriage license, or a second wife, or cheap, tasty New Jersey seafood: Namely, Article IV, with its schoolyard devotion to fair play and radical equality, has done something far more treacherous.

It started the Civil War.

From the book “Me the People,” by Kevin Bleyer. Copyright © 2012 by Kevin Bleyer. Reprinted by arrangement with Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House Inc. All rights reserved.

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.