| It was viewed as the crack cocaine of sexuality, writes Thomas W. Laqueur about masturbation in the 18th century. "It was prone to excess as no other kind of venery was… it had no bounds in reality, because it was a creature of the imagination," Laqueur writes of the beliefs surrounding onanism, in his exhaustive history of the practice Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (Zone Books). So much for the Age of Enlightenment.
In fact, documents Laqueur, a historian at UC Berkeley, the era’s deep thinking about issues of solitude, privacy and the imagination were in part what fuelled the medical and moral hysteria that swept the Western world throughout the 1800s.
But John Marten started it. Sometime around 1712, he published – anonymously at the time – a short tract with a less-than-catchy title: Onania: or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences, in Both SEXES Considered, With Spiritual and Physical Advice to Those Who Have Already Injur’d Themselves By This Abominable Practice…
Coincidentally, he had just the thing to cure it. Marten made a small mint selling Strengthening Tinctures and Prolific Powders that cured "oozing and gleets (discharges) of all sorts, in men and women, that are not the result of venereal disease." In a population where poor diet often led to poor health and general malaise, says Laqueur, it didn’t take much to convince people that maybe masturbation contributed to their malaise, and that a Marten’s potion might pep them up.
Laqueur documents in detail how before this time, throughout history, masturbation was believed to be at best, a good way to get rid of excess sperm, at worst, something adolescent boys should practice in moderation. Even the practice’s biblical namesake, Onan, was actually rubbed out by God for coitus interruptus, not masturbation, as is often believed.
However, thanks to Marten, the rise of publishing and advertising, the quack medicine market, endorsements from some of the Enlightenment’s most important medicine men, thinkers and writers – Samuel Auguste Tissot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, – within one century, a vice that had barely raised an eyebrow suddenly represented the gravest possible threat to an individual’s moral integrity.
By mid 19th century, devices such as erection alarms, penis cases, sleeping mitts, bed cradles to keep the sheets off the genitals and hobbles to keep girls from spreading their legs joined the potions and pills of the anti-masturbation marketplace. The Boy Scouts of America founder Lord Baden-Powell warned in a pamphlet that he had "seen boys as young as twelve years, or slightly more, in insane asylums from excesses of this kind." A pamphlet put out by the American Federation of Women’s Clubs warned that masturbation would result in a complete collapse of the young women’s nervous systems, which could send them not only to an insane asylum but "to an early grave." Pictures in widely circulated popular medical books depicted the recognizable "masturbator" with his pale, desiccated limbs, hollow chest and powerless sunken head.
Things didn’t start to calm down again until 1920. Within the last century, the study of sexuality by people like Alfred Kinsey, Masters and Johnson, the feminist movement, the female erotica of Nancy Friday, books like Betty Dodson’s revolutionary 1974 Sex For One and television’s Seinfeld have worked to reverse some of the damage done to masturbation’s rep in the two centuries before. And, for the last decade, the entire month of May has been devoted to celebrating the practice.
Laqueur thinks something like Masturbation Month goes a long way to helping change attitudes about something that was reviled or at the very least embarrassed people for so long. Can Sexual Intercourse, Oral Sex, or Sex While Swinging From the Rafters Blindfolded Months be far behind? "I don’t think we want anything about sexuality to evolve to mean nothing," explains Laqueur. "I wouldn’t want it to become as perfunctory as urination, for example. It’s important to realize that we don’t make sexuality out of scratch. It exists within historical bounds. But what I like about things like Masturbation Month is that those promoting it are saying, ‘We can remake what sexual cultures mean.’ Just as people in the 18th century decided it meant one thing, we can have it mean something else without harming people."
Happy wanking! |
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