From the issue dated March 7, 2003
Knowing Thyself
A historian explains how the stigma of 'solitary sex' rose ... and fell
By PETER MONAGHAN
In the 14th century, in his fictional Hell, Dante Alighieri excruciated adulterers, homosexuals, and other time-honored categories of transgressor. Like thinkers since ancient times, though, he paid no attention to people who had committed carnal sin all by themselves.
The Romans had thought the practice odd, and abject, given gentlemen's free access to supposedly better options – slaves, prostitutes, women of low birth. But censure rarely went beyond the mild mockery that was still leveled in late-17th-century England, when John Dryden joshed a young squire for indulging "some sport which he alone does find/And Thinks a secret to all humane kind."
Suddenly, after about 1700, gentle jibes gave way to such stinging locutions as "filthy Commerce with oneself" (Saturday Post, 1718).
What explains that sea change? asks Thomas W. Laqueur in Solitary Sex (Zone Books).
If Mr. Laqueur, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley, needed a credential for taking up his prickly new cultural history, he could offer his acclaimed Making Sex: Body and Sex From the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press, 1990). Three years ago, he says, he delayed starting a study of "memory and death" when he decided that he could toss off Solitary Sex in a few months. He had been gathering material for more than a decade. "But it just took off. I had such a good time writing it that I wasn't going to stop.
"I thought, 'It's a serious subject, so why don't I write a really solid book?'"
Conscientiously, but not dourly, Mr. Laqueur has written the history of "the Vice of Monks recluse," as one 18th-century sawbones called it. The book is a kind of whodunit in which the culprit is, in one sense ... reading.
What set the ball rolling was the publication in 1712 of the indulgently titled 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 injured themselves by this abominable practice. And seasonable Admonition to the Youth of the nation of Both SEXES. In London's booming coffeehouse scene, its 17 printings sold like so many thousands of lattes. Its unnamed author, Mr. Laqueur determines, was John Marten, who had earlier written a popular treatise on venereal disease, and who was clapped in irons in 1708 for obscenity. Marten had then reappeared as a "surgeon," purveying remedies for ills caused by "willful self-abuse," which his book luridly detailed.
With "carnivalesque hucksterism," writes Mr. Laqueur, Marten hawked book-and-potion packages for 12 shillings – "more than two weeks' wages for a footman." Later editions contained readers' testimonials of cures, or lamentations that the book had come, alas, too late.
Returning to Onan
Marten originated the notion that the biblical figure Onan, who "spilled his seed upon the ground" (Genesis 38:8-10), had been guilty not of coitally interrupting the propagation of his race, but of choosing "lasciviously to grope with the privities," for which the Lord neither blinded him nor rendered him hairy-palmed, but did smite him dead.
Christian exegetes had largely ignored the Genesis passage, and solitary sex over all, other than to tut-tut it between the 7th and 12th centuries, toward the end of which the practice was briefly made the decidedly junior partner of sodomy and bestiality as acts "contrary to nature." Sodomy got you 10 years of self-mortifying penance (and bestiality, presumably, more), the lesser vice 10 days of breast-beating on bread and water.
The act then largely slipped back out of inquisitorial view, until Onania so gripped the public imagination that "onanism" entered the first great European encyclopedias. Thus, a little-noted primordial practice came to be certified as a sick syndrome.
Such volumes as Eronania, The Crime of Onan, and the best-selling, much-translated L'Onanisme of 1759, by the celebrated Enlightenment physician Samuel Auguste David Tissot, soon joined with Onania to pull off "one of the most spectacular episodes of intellectual upward mobility in literary annals," writes Mr. Laqueur. The books not only teased out anxiety but also, in a stroke of marketing savvy, turned readers on. "Onania," Mr. Laqueur says, "was basically soft-core medical porn – 'how I learned to do it,' and then, 'it was really bad.'"
For three centuries, Marten's book essentially framed the understanding of why one should feel guilty about recourse to "nature's handmaiden" (in a correspondent's euphemism). It ruined your health, and it disrupted the social order. Enlightened medical men and philosophers together usurped the moral authority of churchmen, and "moral passion and medical danger grew up together," writes Mr. Laqueur.
So great was concern about the ill effects of the practice that many 18th-century Englishmen agreed with Bernard Mandeville when he argued, in A Modest Defense of Public Stews (1724), that even brothels bubbling over with venereal disease were safer than "manual venery."
The notion that secret, solitary sex causes disease was "an amazing invention," Mr. Laqueur suggests. The link was all too credible given how rotten people constantly felt as a result of disease, bad diet, and boozing. Onania and its ilk could inscribe in popular and learned thinking a litany of ailments – blindness, slack jaws, heart murmurs, epilepsy, pimples, wasting – that would, it just so happened, respond well to Marten's potions: Strengthening Tincture, Prolific Powder, and Volatile Aromatik Snuff. Post-1700, it was general wisdom that one depleted at great peril one's precious bodily fluids – especially semen, the "balmy-spiritous-vivifying essence," as one of Marten's fellow demagogues called it.
Women at Risk
So a trade came to flourish, from then until World War I, in devices like erection alarms, sleeping mitts, cradles that raised bedsheets away from danger zones, and hobbles to keep girls from spreading their legs. The last of those, notes Mr. Laqueur, highlighted one startling aspect of the contagion: that it affected women as much as men. In fact, argued the experts, girls and women were particularly prone to myriad ailments. Full-blown nervous collapse might land them in asylums – if they didn't die of consumption first.
"Solitary sex broke the gender barrier," writes Mr. Laqueur. Self-stimulating women could no longer be ignored because managing one's body was essential to the Enlightenment idea of coaxing humanity to adulthood. Medical men, philosophes, and novelists extolled the virtues of sex whether it was marital or merely a pleasurable aspect of "sensibility," which elevated both the individual and society. But the sexual act that Mr. Laqueur calls the "most secret, private, seemingly harmless, and most difficult to detect" had to be suppressed because it was motivated by a "phantasm" rather than by any valid object of desire. It was evidence of "unleashed" imagination, desire, self.
Hence the moral objections to the practice, on which Enlightenment gurus had much to say. Voltaire denounced the depravity that "popery" encouraged by insisting on celibacy. Rousseau lamented the antisocial "pure interiority" of the act that he coyly called "the dangerous supplement." Kant boosted "selbst-befleckung" ("self-pollution," a contemporary German term) to "a new level of ethical centrality," says Mr. Laqueur. Kant, recognizing that the bourgeoisie was increasingly being left to steer itself, argued that only through each citizen's responsible self-management could civil society forge ahead. Even one slip, he declared, was unnatural, "moral madness," "suicide."
The history of "the vicious action" (a Parisian medical-curiosities catalog, 1805) is, then, "part of the history of how the morally autonomous modern subject was created and sustained," Mr. Laqueur suggests. Thinkers who were celebrating the emerging "right kind and just measure of bourgeois privacy" shuddered at the persistence of a "realm of privacy into which the civilizing process could not reach."
As Mr. Laqueur relates, privacy's solipsistic, "perverted doppelgänger" popped up everywhere. The rise of schooling increased awareness of adolescent sexuality. "Much lamented" was the practice, noted in Rousseau's popular novel Emile, of "nurses' tickling the penises of infant boys to keep them quiet" – or to make the little fellows larger and the parents prouder. In 1793, the case for chopping off Marie-Antoinette's head included that she had taught the skill to the 9-year-old dauphin.
But the cultural practice that most provoked anxiety about solitary pleasures, in Mr. Laqueur's view, was the reading of novels. Suddenly affordable, they became key pedagogical tools. According to a new moral physiology, they affected the organs of the body, ideally inculcating a sense of sensibility and sympathy, a capacity for common humanity, and resistance to excess.
But novels also put readers at risk of "the solipsism of private vice." Many paintings depicted bourgeois women, in private, enrapt with love letters, or spent after their "one-handed books" tumbled aside as they swooned, variously en déshabille or fully in flagrante.
The frequency of this coupling of fiction and friction surprised Mr. Laqueur. "I hadn't understood that this was part of the commercial revolution in print," he says.
With books in hand, indulgers in solitary sex threatened to subvert the new, enlightened age.
Michel Foucault famously proposed that, beginning in the late 18th century, power exercised itself in new ways as state-licensed professionals gained control over aspects of inner life. But Mr. Laqueur believes that such an analysis falls short when it comes to the solitary vice. While doctors and other professionals did help to impose "guilt as a way of patrolling yourself," he says, the real control came more generally from the overall development of civil society.
Freud, Kinsey, and Beyond
Of course, much changed in the 20th century. With Freud, "the primary addiction," as he called it, became a stage of psychogenesis from which individuals graduated unless stumped by guilt-ridden "arrested erotic evolution." But after Freud, in a new revolution, the practice came to be seen as natural and universal. The Kinsey reports of the late 1940s, and then Masters and Johnson's Human Sexual Response (1966), presented indisputable evidence that everyone, or near enough, does it – presumably not excepting those 18th-to-20th-century detractors, crafty devils.
The women's movement, the sexual revolution, the gay-and-lesbian movement. ... Eventually, writes Mr. Laqueur, it seemed that "self-manipulation was the gold standard of pleasure":
"The first, easiest, and most convenient way to experiment with your body" – Boston Women's Health Book Collective, Our Bodies, Ourselves, 1971.
"Our primary sexual life" – Betty Dodson, Sex for One: The Joy of Self Loving, 1995.
(But "proof of a selfish, depraved society" – the politico-moral right. Ask Joycelyn Elders, former U.S. surgeon general.)
John Marten's Onania was titillating. Mr. Laqueur's volume is not. Still, it has run into some trouble. Printing was delayed because Zone Books's usual, American printer declined the job. The publisher's staff members found a Canadian press capable of handling the book's high-quality graphics, then worried that customs officials might not let shipments back in. Five bookstores have invited Mr. Laqueur to talk about his work, but three have declined, describing themselves as "family bookstores." Radio and television talk shows have shied away as well.
Certainly prudes will not cozy up, unless furtively, to the last section of Mr. Laqueur's book, in which he considers late-20th-century artistic representations. He suspects that what repelled the original printer was a photograph of a performance by the self-styled "post-porn modernist," Annie Sprinkle – a "brilliant" statement of female sexual autonomy, in his estimation.
Why fuss over a photograph, he asks, when there's a multibillion-dollar Internet-porn industry at anyone's fingertips, a world of "private sex," which, he suspects, may forge a new direction in his subject's history?
For now, however, at least in American culture, talking about solitary sex in public remains "almost like lifting the lid on a pre-oedipal you. And that wasn't always the case. That's what I think is so interesting about masturbation."
Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
