Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation.

A Post-Modernist Theory of Wanking: Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. By Thomas Laqueur (New York: Zone Books, 2003. 501pp.).

In Solitary Sex Thomas Laqueur aims to provide a comprehensive explanation for the anxiety over masturbation which gripped the western world from the early eighteenth to the mid-(or perhaps late) twentieth century. He particularly wants to answer the question posed by Lawrence Stone and other scholars who have tackled this topic: why did the "hysteria" over masturbation appear "at a time when, he thought, all signs pointed to great [sic: greater?] acceptance of sexual pleasure." Laqueur thus focuses on the eighteenth century, though he concludes with a (rather scrappy) chapter on a range of counter discourses, stressing the "redemptive qualities" of masturbation, which emerged in the 1980s. Surprisingly, the nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries receive only fleeting glances, and their battery of cruel interventions to stop masturbation in children is ignored. The result is a text of 500 pages, including 75 of endnotes, which signals the author's ambition to have written the most serious work in a field already quite crowded: a search on Amazon brings up over thirty books on masturbation, though only one of these (Jean Stengers' recently translated Histoire d'une grande peur) is intended as a full-scale history. Scholarly interest in the phenomenon, as evidenced by a continuing flow of articles in journals, remains strong, and it is likely to be further stimulated by this learned, wide-ranging, provocative, often fascinating, sometimes irritating, yet finally disappointing study.

Despite its misleading sub-title, Solitary Sex is not really a history of masturbation at all, but of western attitudes towards the practice. Even with this qualification the scope of the book is more limited than the title implies. After a brief survey of the contrasting policies of ascetically-inclined Judaism and the sensual paganism of Greece and Rome, and a longer account of the evolution of Christian attitudes, Laqueur concentrates on the eighteenth century, particularly the iconic texts: Onania (c. 1712, now attributed firmly to John Marten) and Tissot's Onanism (1758). He then jumps from Kant to the 1990s with only a few references to the literature of the nineteenth century, and even fewer to that of the twentieth, except for Freud, who is quoted with reverence at every opportunity. There is nothing at all on masturbation as a physical activity, or even a definition, (1) let alone any discussion of whether incidence or technique differs according to social and physical variables, such as education level, religion, age of puberty or whether circumcised--the last a prominent topic in nineteenth and twentieth century debate. The study is situated firmly within the world of discourse. The term solitary sex is itself worrying. As Laqueur's own sources make very clear, most writers against masturbation were even more concerned about the practice in pairs or groups, and equally alarmed at other forms of sexual pleasure not derived from the entry of a penis into a vagina: John Marten denounced fellatio with as much vehemence as masturbation, though not, thankfully, at the same length, and without the additional warning that indulgence would provoke organic disease. (It was merely disgusting, even worse than sodomy.) There is a certain irony in the fact that Marten et al encouraged the very mode of sexual activity which was most efficient at spreading venereal diseases (sexual intercourse), and called it healthy, while trying to prohibit forms of satisfaction which were relatively safe.

Explanations for a big phenomenon like the two and a half century war considered here are generally of two main kinds: one posits the convergence of many small causes, the other looks for one big cause. Most previous students of masturbation, such as Michael Stolberg and Peter Gay, have followed the first strategy. In two recent articles Stolberg has stressed several political, ideological and economic motives, including religious concern with "uncleanness", bourgeois fears about self-control, and the "financial interests of the London venereal trade." (2) Twenty years ago Gay commented that the elements of an explanation of the phobia would be found under four headings: (1) willing ignorance on the part of doctors, arising from their failure to carry out objective research into sexual anatomy and function and from not testing claims that masturbation induced physical or mental disease; (2) the application of the principle of household thrift to bodily functions; (3) the transformation of masturbation from a moral transgression into a medical condition without any reduction in its sinful connotations--indeed, with their amplification; (4) the rising power of the medical profession, who took on much of the pastoral role formerly played by the clergy, yet who were pretty helpless when it came to treating most diseases; the masturbatory hypothesis allowed them to validate their claim to omniscience by blaming the victim. (3) Laqueur rejects particulars like these and seeks a grander theme: nothing less than the onset of modernity and the rise of commercial society. His account takes off from another of Gay's comments: that "the persistent panic over masturbation" was "a cultural symptom laden with baffling meanings that reached ... into [the nineteenth century's] most troubling preoccupations"; Laqueur identifies these as features of modernity which had emerged in the previous century, such as the newly problematic relations of the individual to society, of credit to "real" wealth, and of consumption to production, as well as contentious issues like the virtues and vices of solitude, reading and knowledge.

Laqueur describes the anxiety over masturbation arising as "the evil twin of the virtues of modern commercial society--individual moral autonomy and privacy, creativity, desire and abundance." It was more threatening than it had hitherto been for three reasons: it was "a secret in a world in which transparency was of a premium"; it was more prone to "excess" than other sexual activity; it had "no bounds in reality because it was the creature of the imagination." These themes are elaborated with a great wealth of reference, but I am not convinced that much of it is real evidence, nor that all of these ideas make sense. Do social or economic developments always have an "evil twin"? The metaphor does little more than dramatise the paradox already identified: that masturbation was demonised at a time when restrictions on heterosexual adults were loosening (but those against homosexual acts becoming more severe) and when the Enlightenment was challenging old theological prohibitions. Why was "transparency" more sought after in a society that had rejected the confessional? John Locke had famously declared that all political liberty derived from an individual's property in his own person; for a doctor, priest or philosopher to assert that girls and boys, or even women and men, were not free to do what they wished with their own genitals seems a blank denial of this proposition. Laqueur notes that the strongest objection to masturbation was that it was anti-social, but wasn't the rise of the middle class about the triumph of individualism? The concern with social control seems more like a rearguard action by the ideologues of the old Gemeinschaft, the last stand of the traditionalists against the advance of Gesellschaft, with its social mobility and unsupervised subjects. And if solitariness was the main problem, why did preachers against the practice condemn masturbation in groups and pairs even more vigorously? Laqueur explores these paradoxes in great depth, but I am not sure that he has elucidated the precise ways in which masturbation (rather than something obviously harmful, like stock market manias, quack medicines, cruelty to children, adulterating food, or the ongoing loss of traditional common rights, such as those identified by E.P. Thompson) came to symbolise all that was wrong with the modern world.

In blaming capitalism for the masturbation scare (though he objects to expressions like this) Laqueur lets other likely suspects off the hook too lightly. Judaic and Christian theology had always condemned masturbation as sinful and were ever on the look-out for new arguments for continence. The religious authorities seized on the new medical wisdom (that masturbation was physically harmful) as support for their own case; and even today, though the medical evidence has vanished, religious conservatives continue to assert that it is wrong. Onania and similar texts were part of a general counter-attack on the loose morals of the Restoration, described as "the moral revolution of 1688", in which the church sought to reassert religious supervision of both public and private life with the aim of stamping out debauchery, idleness and vice. (4) The medical profession also had much to gain: financially by selling cures for imaginary diseases, and in social authority by pretending to have a new and definitive explanation for real ones, as well as behavioural modifications which would defeat them, if only the patient had sufficient strength of mind. Laqueur describes Onania as inventing a new disease, but this rather misses the point: Marten's innovation was to blame a host of real diseases (anything from gonorrhoea to tuberculosis) on masturbation; it was a new explanation for existing disease, not a disease in itself. I thus find the socio-economic argument of Solitary Sex far-fetched and ultimately reductionist, showing insufficient appreciation that there were different parties, each with its own agenda and separate reasons for jumping on the anti-masturbation bandwagon. In Laqueur's account these tend to be absorbed into an amorphous cultural ethos, suffusing everything from Scottish political economy and Kant's philosophy to medical texts and ads for quack remedies.

Laqueur hardly attempts to provide an explanation for the decline of medical anxiety about masturbation from the 1920s to the 1940s, and of moral concern in the 1970s, and the neglect creates uncertainty about his analysis of their rise. It is not self-evident that the relations of the individual to society, credit to real wealth, production to consumption etc were any more resolved in the mid-twentieth century than in the 1750s. If early consumer capitalism was responsible for the panic, why has the panic disappeared in most places where consumer capitalism is going stronger than ever? By the 1930s (at least in Britain) it was accepted that children were sexual beings who naturally engaged in masturbation, variously expressed, but that these practices were not harmful unless "excessive". This was not the result of Freud's rediscovery of infantile sexuality: eighteenth and nineteenth century writers were all too gloomily aware of the sexual drives of infants and children, especially boys, deplored them, and sought means to stamp them out. What had changed was not the understanding of children, but the attitude to masturbation: once it ceased to be regarded as "an habitual incontinence eminently productive of disease," as William Acton defined it, (5) sexual manifestations in children could be accepted as harmless. This development has far more to do with the emergence of a correct explanation for the diseases once attributed to masturbation (micro-organisms) and effective means to combat them (vaccines and antibiotics) than any revolution in knowledge about sexuality emanating from Vienna.

Laqueur would probably not call himself a Marxist or a Freudian, though the shadow of both these fallen gurus lies heavily on this work: Marx in the temptation to relate cultural phenomena to economic processes, and Freud in the tendency to regard the mind as more important than the flesh. In postmodernist style, Laqueur approaches his subject matter neither chronologically nor thematically, but by means of a series of passes like a space probe circling an unknown planet in an ever-narrowing orbit, but which veers away whenever touch-down seems likely. Such a style makes for lively and non-authoritarian reading, but also for a diffuseness which makes it hard to follow the argument or discern the points being made. More seriously, the approach tends to minimise the reality of the body and ignore biological processes, rather illustrating Terry Eagleton's recent comment that post-modernism is "obsessed by the body but terrified of biology." Although the body was "a wildly popular topic in US cultural studies," he writes, it was the "socially constructed body, not the piece of matter that sickens and dies." (6) The manifestations of this tendency in Solitary Sex are particularly evident in its neglect of both disease theory and the intimate connection between the horror of masturbation and the rise of male circumcision.

In explaining why masturbation became such a problem, Laqueur discounts the significance of disease theory, and so pays less than deserved attention to the reasons given by Tissot et al for the physical harm it was thought to cause. He does not consider the slow decline yet dogged persistence of Galenist/humoral theory (positing that too much evacuation or accumulation of semen was pathogenic), nor the rise of an alternative in nerve force theory, holding that nervous energy should not be squandered and that any nervous shock or drain, such as that experienced in orgasm, was the real cause of illness. He thus fails to appreciate the point of Diderot's defence of masturbation in d' Alembert's dream, where it is justified, in traditional Galenist terms, as a legitimate means to relieve plethora and thus preserve health. The anatomy and physiology of the genitals are also ignored, despite the hint from Burchard of Worms as to the central role the foreskin plays in masturbation ("Did you slide your foreskin?", confessors were told to ask male penitents in the eleventh century); or the pathetic letter to Marie Stopes asking whether circumcision would help the writer to overcome his bad habit. Although Laqueur quotes this document twice, it makes no sense because he has not discussed the vast nineteenth century literature on the value of circumcision as a disincentive to masturbation in boys, and of clitoridectomy to treat the problem in girls. Laqueur's ignorance of male anatomy reaches laughable depths when he refers to infants fingering their glans penis. Normal infants before the late nineteenth century, even in the USA, could not touch their glans because it was inaccessible, tucked safely away beneath their tight and non-retracted, but very ticklish, foreskin. This was what they fingered and tickled, and it was the universality of the manoeuvre which led many doctors to the conclusion that the most efficient way to discourage masturbation in infancy and childhood was by removing the preputial tissue entirely, so that there would be less down there to play with. Although no eighteenth century authority recommended it, many of the nineteenth century figures mentioned in this book--Lallemand, Copland, Stanley Hall, Rohleder, Kellogg--urged widespread circumcision as the most efficient approach to the masturbation problem. Laqueur is silent about this element in their work.

Aside from these limitations, the greatest weakness in Solitary Sex is its lack of specificity. Could there be a single explanation for the grande peur covering Europe, Britain (and presumably its colonies, though these are not mentioned) and the USA over three centuries? Is it possible that the different forces pushing the anti-masturbation bandwagon had distinct agendas and concerns? Might the history of masturbation differ in the various countries through which the bandwagon passed, and over time? It seems reasonable to treat Britain and Europe as a unit in the eighteenth century (since the same texts were translated and widely read in most places), but significant differences in national policy emerged in the nineteenth century. Unlike Britain and the USA, no European country ever adopted circumcision of young males as a disincentive to masturbation. While the bandwagon ground to a halt in Britain in the 1930s, in the USA it continued to rumble until well into the 1970s (as shown in studies by Edward Wallerstein and Frederick Hodges not cited); (7) and if the Joycelyn Elders case is any guide, it continues to roll even to this day. Is there a connection between the persistence of anxiety about masturbation in the USA and the tenacious survival of routine male circumcision there? Laqueur avoids controversial questions of this kind.

In his concluding discussion of various "redemptive" discourses on masturbation which emerged in the late twentieth century, Laqueur introduces us to some fairly esoteric performance artists and websites, but he neglects what may be the most vital factor of all in any process of rehabilitation: AIDS. Countries such as Britain, Australia and Germany have kept HIV infection at a low level by means of safe sex education stressing use of condoms and alternatives to sexual intercourse, including masturbation; one British poster proclaimed: "Once they said it could kill you; now it could save your life". If anything was going to make masturbation respectable it was the promise that it could reduce the danger of AIDS, as it has done in many places--but not in the USA, apparently, which boasts the highest incidence of HIV infection of any country in the developed world. (8) Medieval theologians held that it was sinful to relieve plethora in males and females by "artificial" means such as masturbation even if it meant the continued illness or death of the patient: their soul was more important than their body. Something of the same otherworldly spirit seems to be alive and well in the world's most technologically advanced superpower today.

ENDNOTES

1. A more complex matter than you might think: see Alan Soble, "Masturbation: conceptual and ethical issues", in his Philosophy of Sex (Fourth edition, 2002), pp. 67-94; seen at http://www.uno.edu/~asoble/pages/masturb.htm, 30 September 2003.

2. Michael Stolberg, "Self-pollution, moral reform and the venereal trade: Notes on the sources and historical context of Onania," Journal of the History of Sexuality, Vol. 9 (2000), pp. 37-61; "An unmanly vice: Self-pollution, anxiety and the body in the eighteenth century," Social History of Medicine, Vol. 13 (2000), pp. 1-21.

3. Peter Gay, Education of the senses (The bourgeois experience--Victoria to Freud,) Vol. 1 (New York, 1984), p. 309.

4. The Church of England endorsed Societies for the Reformation of Manners with this brief in 1699. See John Spurr, "The church, the societies and the moral revolution of 1688," in John Walsh et al (ed.), The Church of England c. 1689-c. 1833: From toleration to Tractarianism, (Cambridge, UK, 1993), esp. pp. 127-31.

5. William Acton, The functions and disorders of the reproductive organs, 6th edn (1875) (London, Churchill, 1903), p. 38.

6. From his new book, After theory, cited in Guardian, 20 September 2003.

7. Edward Wallerstein, Circumcision: An American Health Fallacy (New York, 1980), p. 125; Frederick Hodges, "A history of spermatorrhoea: The evolution and legacy of medical conceptualisations of a venereal disease and male debility in nineteenth-century America", D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 2000. We must hope that this important study finds a publisher soon.

8. See Robert Darby, "Been there, done that: Thoughts on the proposition that yet more circumcision can save the world from AIDS", Australian Quarterly, Vol. 74 (Sept--Oct 2002), pp. 26-35.

By Robert Darby

Australian National University 

School of Social Sciences

Canberra ACT 0200

Australia