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Sexualities
DOI: 10.1177/1363460704044806
2004; 7; 363 Sexualities
Benjamin Shepard
Masturbating Madness
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Benjamin Shepard
Independent Academic Researcher
Masturbating Madness
Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. New
York: Zone Books, 2003. New York: 501 pp. ISBN 189051323 $34.00
(hbk) 189051331 $19.95 (pbk).
Deep within his dissent to the Lawrence vs. Texas Supreme Court ruling
repealing the US sodomy laws, Justice Antonin Scalia offered a telling clue
about the continuing phobia conservatives experience concerning the
subject of Thomas W. Laqueurs new cultural history: masturbation. If
sodomy laws are unconstitutional, Scalia wrote, then so are laws against
bigamy, same sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution, masturbation,
adultery, fornication, bestiality, and obsenity . . . Few assumed that any
laws against masturbation were on the books anyway (Hertzberg, 2003).
Well, not technically. But for those with a keen eye on hierarchies of trans-
gression, this seemingly trivial topic takes on inordinate meaning.
To make sense of Scalias dissent, it is useful to look back to 13th-
century Christian theology, specically St Thomas Aquinas categorization
of luxuria, signifying crimes against nature in which masturbation
signalled the beginning of a slippery slope leading to sodomy, adultery,
and bestiality. For Aquinas and the rest of the every sperm is sacred
crowd, masturbation is a sort of gateway pleasure, like marijuana is to
heroin. It is not very dangerous in and of itself. Yet left to the active
imagination, it is capable of opening doors to a vast arena of possibilities
(pp. 1423). Hence Scalias reference to the subject in a Supreme Court
decision about sodomy. While one would assume Aquinas Summa
Theologica is not applicable to Amertican law, given the supposed separ-
ation of church and state, its cultural inuence cannot be underempha-
sized. Teachings on crimes against nature have established the basis for
laws that continue to criminalize countless sexual practices, including
homosexuality. For example, the assumptions behind these laws propel
abstinence-only sex education, as called for by the current American
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Sexualities Copyright 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
Vol 7(3): 363368 DOI: 10.1177/1363460704044806
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presidential administration.
1
For this reason alone, it is vitally important
that Laqueur, a professor of history at the University of California at
Berkeley, has unpacked the often underinterrogated topic of self pleasur-
ing in his sweeping new history, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Mastur-
bation. The result is a thck, rich, and often complicated journey through
the history of cultural attitudes towards a topic which almost everyone has
had a hand on at one time or other, yet few of us ever imagined reading
about for 501 pages.
Laqueur dates the birth of solitary sex as a moral issue to the publication
of an anonymous tract some time between 1708 and 1716. Its title
Oniana; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Conse-
quences, in both SEXES Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to
those who have already injured themselves by those abominable practices. And
Seasonal Admonition to the Youth of the nation of Both SEXES . . . To
review, Onan was a character in the book of Genesis. Rather than spill his
seed inside the wife of his brother, Onan spilled it on the ground. For this
transgression, Onan was struck down by God. The author of the tract a
doctor who wrote soft-core pornography thus suggested that ejaculat-
ing on ones own was willful self abuse, associating the act with the old
Bible story. And masturbation came to be known as onania or onanism.
The publication of Onania is also the story about the Enlightenment,
the history of medicine, and capitalism. If ever there was a case study of
the commodication of a social problem resulting in commercial prot,
Onania is it. The tract was sold in English public houses, the bars where
people met, recieved mail, and met socially. Coincidentally, relief for the
new malady an early form of herbs and snake oil was also sold there.
Thus, Onania found a market where civil society thrived. The revul-
sion/attraction to the practice created a vast market for writings on the
subject. Onania became a publishing sensation as generations of readers
were drawn to the lurid tales of harm produced by this innocuous act.
Edition after edition of Onania laid the foundation for medical tradition
that drew on the pillars of high Enlightenment medicine to invent notions
of modern sexuality. Hundreds of articles, dissertations, and medical
treatises contributed to a moralistic narrative. By the middle of the 19th
century, well after many had come to doubt the claim that masturbation
caused physical harm, a French doctor could still cite close to 100
conditions seen as the consequences of self abuse (p. 16).
Modern intellectuals fron Rousseau to Wittgenstein agonized over
masturbation. Kierkegaards fear and trembling was thought to be the
result of it. American social purists Cotton Mather and Anthony Comstock
called for prohibitions against the practice. Freud and his disciples debated
it. An American Surgeon General was red for merely admitting that it
was a worthy alternative to abstinence or unsafe sex (pp. 157). The
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practice gained new autonomy during the AIDS years as gay men created
jack off clubs which functioned as community spaces and safe alterna-
tives to both disease and repressive heterosexual norms (p. 81). The
authors breadth of scope is extraordinary. From the Greek Syntars to
Montaignes essays to Augustines City of God to Roths Portnoys
Complaint, the cultural history of solitary sex articulates a story of the
relation of the body to passion, desire, and selfhood.
Phillip Roth once wrote that in order to get through writing a novel a
writer has to have a lot of pornography. Essential to Laqueurs thesis is the
insight that masturbation is intimately bound up with the power to create,
the process of self-making, and cultural combat over social control (p. 69).
The latter is demonstrated clearly in the visual material presented. For
example, the image Faces of the Masturbator by Emory C. Abbey from
1875. To the left is the 16-year-old masturbator, looking much like a
haggard, hungover partyer after a night on the town; to his right is the
upright 21-year-old abstainer in a pressed suit. Below them is the 50-
year-old masturbator, hunched over with a cane and an unkempt beard;
to his right is the 70-year-old abstainer, still upright and healthy (p. 65).
As masturbation becomes more and more a part of modern sensibilities,
the self portraits of Egon Schiele unabashedly groping himself; Vitto
Acconcis Seedbed, a performance on masturbation, voyeurism and the
art world; and Lynda Benglis mocking the phallus in Artforum offer
telling images of the relation between creativity, masturbation, selfhood,
and the rejection of social control.
Laqueur concerns himself with the question of why this most accessible
and democratic of sexualities has worried so many. Onania would not have
caught re if it did not speak of deep-seated cultural concern. While
Laqueur contends that the sin of solitary sex was a product of the
Enlightenment, some of his most compelling research positions solitary
sex in relation to Medieval Christian concerns over non-procreative
sexuality. The Greeks and the early Christians remained basically indiffer-
ent to the pursuit in and of itself; yet, it was still part of an approach to
pleasure which the church abhored. The medieval grouping of mastur-
bation with crimes against nature established the roots for a medical model
promoting social control of personal pleasure. For Aquinas, any sexual act
other than missionary position intercourse man on top of woman was
assumed to be a sin of irrational gratication, of lust. Oral sex, sodomy,
prostitution any sex that rejected the one truly acceptable reason for sex
within marriage was considered suspect. Omnis luxurious attactus every
erotic stimulation of the genitals in which sex as procreation was averted
for pleasure became a form of adultery. The ramparts being defended here
are social, not individual. Sins contrary to nature were a direct assault
on the institutions that God created to allow fallen men to live with
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concupiscence, the author explains (pp. 1534). Medieval and early
modern church leaders feared that the impure act could overwhelm the
sexual body of the laity at any turn (p. 166).
Having laid out its roots, historic interpretations, reinterpretations,
meanings, and representations from antiquity through the advent of the
World Wide Web, Laqueur spends Chapters 3 and 4, the bulk of the book,
assessing The Problem of Masturbation and Why Masturbation Became
a Problem. The short answer to this thick, thorny topic is the insight that
for many, masturbation is a step towards self-discovery, a part of the
making of the modern, secular self. At issue were debates about the
boundaries of true heterosexuality; throughout the 18th century,
Onanism was considered outside the bounds of normal heterosexuality,
within an axis between sodomy and masturbation (pp. 2556). Social
purity advocates suggested the practice leads to a hypersexual, excessive
sex drive for both men and women (p. 260). By the 19th century, the rst
steps toward adultery were thought to begin with self-pollution (p. 262).
Masturbation was considered a paradigmatic expression of interior desire,
regarded as a possible alternative to age-old forms of religious, judicial,
communal, and political control. Thus masturbation stood as harbinger of
the modern imagination and a rejection of social and religious hierarchies
(pp. 271, 315).
Recognizing that masturbation offered a sort of social and political
transformation, reform-minded anti-vice societies sought to stop the
practice. The dilemma for purity advocates was how to stie interest in this
most available of sins. Talking about it stimulated further discussion of a
brash new secular morality. Thus, it was discouraged as secrecy and shame,
intrigue and power became associated with the practice. The prohibition
of solitary sex presents a case study for Michel Foucaults critique of the
states power over bodies. The argument is familiar is enough. By the 18th
and 19th centuries, professionals sought to identify and control the
mechanisms of desire the interior subjectivity that stimulated longings.
And eros became a locus for the exercise of power. Confession of the
practice formed the basis for cultural discourses around permissiveness.
Prohibitionist efforts backred as ad innitum discussions of sex led to
the production of sexuality and the elaboration of fantasy where disci-
plinary regimes hoped to assert control. The writers of the confessional
and moral advice literature could only watch as the vice became more
attractive the more they talked about their subject. Thus, Onania created
a problem, sin, cure, and a series of ever more elaborate and enticing
discourses (pp. 2701). Laqueur elaborates:
As it took on new meanings, it became emblematic of all that was beyond social
surveillance, beyond the discipline of the market, all that threatened a well-
ordered world. Conversely, the rehabilitation of masturbation in the twentieth
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century was part of a political movement for a new sexual and a new moral order.
Beginning in the 1970s, solitary sex was regarded as a way of reclaiming the self
from the regulatory mechanism of civil society and of the patriarchal sexual
order into which the Enlightenment and its successors had put it. It became a
sign of self-governance and self-control instead of their collapse. (p. 277)
To release the shackles of prohibition around solitary sex was to open
up a new chapter in the history of sexuality and identity. Yet, the struggle
was not without its emotional price. Throughout the 20th century, guilt
and psychic costs replaced the mechanisms of religious and social control
which had stigmatized the practice in ages past. While not quite as terri-
fying as madness and death, 20th-century anxieties and sex phobias
remained vexing both in and of themselves. Sex radicals were thought to
take on an outsider status shared with suspect social groups including
delinquents, unsupervised students, the undeserving poor, philosophes,
libertines, opponents of the church, underworld types, trade unionists,
and social revolutionaries (pp. 333, 361). Contemporary transgender
writer Pat Calia outlines what sex radicals were up against as they sought
to claim autonomy for sexual self-determination through masturbation:
I was tormented by lust, which had taken on a new and bittersweet urgency
with adolescence. I had little idea of what people did about these tempests of
need . . . My gleanings of erotica and frequent, guilt ridden masturbation were
all that kept me sane until I escaped parental supervision . . . The inner voice of
eros is arbitrary, bizarre, impeccably honest, bountiful, and so powerful as to be
cruel. It takes courage to hear its demands and follow them. Because I sensed
a connection between private fantasy and good sex, I did not abandon my home
movies . . . Today reading porn and playing with my vibrator are as important
to me as the sex I have with lovers, friends and tricks. I prefer partners who are
willing to risk their dignity in pursuit of delight and who do not make hard and
fast distinctions between masturbation and love making. (Calia, 1994[1980]:
11314)
A new sexual ethos emerges in Calias narrative. For many years,
women were told the only way to nd sexual pleasure was through vaginal
orgasm. Freud suggested that mature women should reject anything else
(pp. 3923). Yet as the 1960s turned into the 1970s, the womens
movement pointed out that clitoral orgasm offered far richer pastures. To
discover the clitoris was to discover countless possibilities (including rejec-
tion of the need for men at all, as the penis lost its exclusivity as a sexual
phallus). A new self-determination emerged; counter patriarichal narra-
tives took hold. The kids should be encouraged to explore their own
bodies and the bodies of others and to masturbate, asserted the Furies
Action Day Care Manifesto of 1971. For many, masturbation offered space
for friends to build community within small circles of pleasure and
support (p. 403). Unfortunately, Laqueurs discussion of the womens
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movement and solitary sex becomes strained. Certainly, the history of
masturbation opens up a conversation about rejection of shame and social
control. Yet, the authors contention that for womens liberationists,
embracing masturbation was a way to discover a better, less sexist society
is rather ambitious. Within a survey of a millennia of writings on a topic,
some material is clearer than others. While certainly women were explor-
ing masturbation and the vaginal orgasm without men for ages before the
1960s, lack of historical evidence about female sexuality leaves the author
with a gap in his study. It is also a testament to the notion that self pleasure
has all too often been a domain of men.
Laqueurs contribution is to have unearthed and connected the dots
between the primordial, medical, social and cultural narratives that have
produced the shame over the most simple of sexual outlets. Reading
through this tour of age-old phobias and prohibitions, one begins to see
why so many continue to feel terrible about acknowledging the possi-
bilities and meanings available through solitary sex. For Laqueur, mastur-
bation offers nothing less than realization of the essential human right to
sexual happiness. Once released, the possibilities of practice are difcult,
if impossible, to contain.
Laqueurs cultural history of masturbation is like a long overdue biog-
raphy of a historic player who has remained in the shadows for far too
long. In between debates over individual moral autonomy and privacy,
creativity and the imagination, abundance and desire, what emerges is
nothing less than the intellectual history of the dueling relations between
purity and pleasure.
References
Calia, Pat (1994[1980]) Among Us, Against Us The New Puritans: Does
Equation of Pornography with Violence Add Up to Political Repression? in
Pat Calia Public Sex: The Culture of Radical Sex. Pittsburg, PA: Cleis Press.
Hertzberg, Hendrik (2003) Northern Light, The New Yorker 7 July: 24.
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