The decloseting of masturbation?

The Joy of Self-Pleasuring: Why Feel Guilty About Feeling Good? By Edward L. Rowan. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000, 226 pages. Paper, $19.00.

Masturbation as Means of Achieving Sexual Health. Edited by Walter O. Bockting and Eli Coleman. New York: Haworth, 2002, 147 pages. Paper, $17.95.

Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror. By Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck (Translated from the French by Kathryn A. Hoffmann). New York: Palgrave, 2001, 239 pages. Hardcover, $24.95.

Freud wrote much about masturbation, perhaps most quotably in his wrap-up of the 1912 symposium on "Onanie" for the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. After summarizing at length the group's agreements and disagreements, he concluded (almost throwing up his hands, we might imagine), "But I think the time has come to break off. For we are all agreed on one thing--that the subject of masturbation is quite inexhaustible" (Freud, 1912/1958, p. 254).

Masturbation may be inexhaustible as a topic, but there has not been any inexhaustible outpouring of books about it. Since the 1960s, only around 30 have appeared (this total includes 7 works of either fiction, jokes, or photos; Cornog, 2003, pp. 321-323). This is a paltry showing, considering the publishing torrent about sex during those decades--both scholarly and popular--and considering that masturbation is surely the second most common human sex act.

Of those 30 books about masturbation, 13 appeared in the 1990s and 5 since 2000. This bodes well. As we all know, the Kinsey reports and feminism opened up the topic toward the beginning of this period. Later, the Joycelyn Elders and Pee-Wee Herman scandals of the 1990s pushed the "M word" into the media, joining with the Bobbitt and Clinton-Lewinsky scandals that put penis and oral sex (perhaps even fellatio!) into public discourse. How many people thought that instead of firing Elders, Clinton should have taken her hint, playing with himself instead of with Monica Lewinsky?

Now that elderly actress Gloria Stuart has written openly in her autobiography ("A Touching Memoir," 1999), "I am devoted to masturbation," perhaps the time is right for more books on the subject. Certainly, people have concerns. When I polled the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT) list-serve recently as to what clients and students want to know about masturbation, at least 10 AASECTers showered me with questions they hear all the time. Many were variations of "Is the way I masturbate normal?"; "Can you do it too much?"; "Is it abnormal or wrong to masturbate if you're in a relationship?"; and "Will it have a bad effect on me/decrease my sperm/make it harder for me to have an orgasm any other way?"

FOR FRESHMAN LEVEL

Rowan's book The Joy of Self-Pleasuring--the first of three reviewed here--is designed for such questioners. He writes as a psychiatrist and sex therapist: "This book presents the material that I know to be helpful in the process of changing our attitudes towards masturbation." He encourages readers to enjoy masturbation by grounding permission in scholarly sources made accessible---essentially, blending the popular and the scientific. "We have to understand how psychology, sociology, anthropology, statistics, anatomy, physiology, medicine, religion, and education have viewed sex and masturbation over time" (p. 15). Several good masturbation "how-to" books have been on the market (e.g., Allison, 2002; Dodson, 1996; Litten, 1993, 1996), but Rowan's was the first nonscholarly book to take a broader perspective and anchor it with notes and references. He covers the following topics: why we feel bad about masturbation, early masturbation experiences and effects, the sexual response cycle, masturbation techniques (including warnings about dangerous ones), frequency statistics and who does it, animal masturbation, masturbation in other cultures, religious viewpoints (Judeo-Christian only), medical viewpoints and fears of disease starting with Onania, Boy Scout Handbook texts about masturbation over the decades, masturbation fantasies, masturbation in male-female relationships, masturbation as part of sex therapy, and supplanting the negative myths of masturbation with more positive affirmations.

Is this a tall order? Yes. Much information about masturbation has been fragmented, chaotic, disorganized, spread over hundreds of sources, and badly substantiated if at all. Choosing what to present from among this mess and figuring out how to synthesize it understandably for nonscholarly readers must have posed challenges for this author.

Rowan has a dry wit and uses it well to make the scholarly material digestible, but occasionally jocularity jars against the scholarship rather than leavening it (e.g., an appendix titled "Websites for Wankers"). Not quite journalism, not quite therapy, and not quite scientific writing, the text does not always flow smoothly. Subheadings would have helped with navigating subtopics and arguments. Sometimes main points drown in details, and sometimes transitions seem forced. At times many topics jostle together within one chapter, not always comfortably. Moreover, the title misleads: "joy of" suggests a sex manual, but the thrust is really about the masturbation taboo, how it came about, and why to discard it. Still, these are relatively minor problems in a work so concisely useful for patients and anyone approaching the topic seriously for the first time.

FOR GRADUATE LEVELS AND UP

If Rowan wrote for the freshman level, then Bockting and Coleman hit the upper level graduate and postgraduate courses. There is much even senior sexologists do not know about masturbation, and this book addresses a number of questions while yet asking more--and that is good. It is a collection of five papers copublished simultaneously as an issue of Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality (Vol. 14, Nos. 2/3), some originally presented at the 1999 annual conference of the Midcontinent Region of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality. The papers are prefaced by Bockting's introduction, Coleman's essay about sexual health, and Vern Bullough's historical overview. Coleman summarizes links between masturbation and sexual development and adjustment, and he outlines needs for future research. Bullough argues that understanding attitudes toward masturbation is key to understanding societal attitudes toward human sexuality in general. Indeed, the study of masturbation helps us see how many of our traditional attitudes toward sex have been based on erroneous conceptions.

In the first paper, Dekker and Schmidt open with a fascinating longitudinal study of German university students. In surveys from 1966, 1981, and 1996, they found a trend in both sexes, and especially in women, toward masturbating earlier in youth. In addition, these young adults became more likely to masturbate independent of relationship status or whether they were having intercourse. Moreover, in 1996 three quarters of respondents stated that masturbation is a form of sex in its own right and does not interfere with partner sex. Sexologists since Kinsey have tended to assume that if frequency of coitus goes up, other "outlets" go down. This more recent research, as well as papers discussed below, challenges this homeostasis model. Another interesting finding: more men and women reached orgasm at their last masturbation than at last coitus.

English-language cross-cultural data on masturbation are sadly lacking, so the next paper from Kontula and Haavio-Mannila fills a real void, with analysis of national sex surveys in Finland, Sweden, Estonia, and St. Petersburg, Russia. The authors found that in all four locations, each new generation has been more active than the previous one, but Estonia has lagged behind Finland and Sweden by 20 years, and Russia has lagged behind the two Scandinavian countries by 30 years. Among many complex and interesting findings, masturbation tended not to decrease with age and was almost unrelated to relationship status. (Much international cross-cultural data are provided in Francoeur, 1997-2001, and Francoeur and Noonan, 2003, but the reports are necessarily brief.)

The third paper in Bockting and Coleman's book reports Robinson, Bockting, and Harrell's collaboration on a study of masturbation and HIV risk in a sample of U.S. African American women. Contrary to expectations, participants who reported masturbating were more likely to report multiple partners, nonmonogamy, and high-risk sexual behaviors. Apparently masturbation was not used as a form of safe-sex but instead occurred as part of a larger pattern of interest in sexual activity of all types.

The next paper, by Pinkerton, Bogart, Cecil, and Abramson, also supports this finding among women. In a study of U.S. undergraduates, masturbation among the women was correlated with number of sex partners and incidence of intercourse. Among men, masturbation frequency was associated with condom use during intercourse.

If masturbation can be associated with increased interest in sexual activity, then perhaps it can be used to treat hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD)--that is, to awaken sexual interest in those with low desire. Zamboni and Crawford explore this hypothesis in the final paper in this book, another study of undergraduates. Results suggested complex relationships among sexual desire, sexual activity, masturbation, and a number of predictive variables but generally supported using masturbation to treat HSDD. It will take a different study actually using this technique with patients to confirm empirical success of this approach.

All these studies point to a growing perspective that masturbation is perceived less and less as a substitute for "real" sex. Moreover, sexuality appears less and less like a fixed conglomerate of "outlets" per person, with some allocated to this activity and some to that and in which when one type of outlet increases the others decrease homeostatically. Instead, frequencies of different sexual behaviors may vary independently for many people, especially for women. Masturbation has been envisioned as a way to promote safe sex if people substitute it for riskier behaviors. But that does not seem to be the way people use masturbation, except possibly group masturbation (Cornog, 2003). However, masturbation may promote comfort with one's genitalia and hence enhance condom use, as well as having other benefits. A recent medical study reports a protective effect of masturbation against prostate cancer (Giles, et al., 2003). All told, the Bockting and Coleman anthology makes provocative and required reading for sexuality therapists and researchers.

FOR ADVANCED HISTORIANS AND EMERITI

Laqueur's (2003) intriguing history of masturbation is being reviewed in The Journal of Sex Research by another reviewer and has received wide notice in the popular and scholarly press. However, another relatively new historical work seems to have escaped much attention. Stengers and Van Neck's history was originally published in French in 1984, with the English edition appearing in 2001. To some extent, their account has been updated by Laqueur's. Yet Stengers and Van Neck's extensive references to European papers not available in English along with their own unique appraisal of events make this additional work quite useful for historians and advanced scholars.

Can serious scholarship and publishing about masturbation finally be catching up to a millennia-old sexual practice? Perhaps masturbation is out of the closet at last.

REFERENCES

Allison, S. (2002). Tickle your fancy: A woman's guide to sexual self-pleasure. San Francisco: Tickle Kitty Press.

Cornog, M. (2003). The big book of masturbation: From angst to zeal. San Francisco: Down There Press.

Dodson, B. (1996). Sex for one: The joy of selfloving. New York: Crown. Francoeur, R. T. (Ed.). (1997-2001). The international encyclopedia of sexuality (Vols. 1-4). New York: Continuum.

Francoeur, R. T., & Noonan, R. (Eds.). 2003. The Continuum complete international encyclopedia of sexuality. New York: Continuum.

Freud, S. (1958). Contributions to a discussion on masturbation. In J. Strachey (Ed. & Trans.), The standard edition of the complete psychological works of Sigmund Freud (Vol. 12, pp. 239-254). London: Hogarth. (Original work published 1912)

Giles, G. G., Severi, G., English, D. R., McCredie, M. R. E., Borland, R., Boyle, P., et al. (2003, August). Sexual factors and prostate cancer. British Journal of Urology International, 92(3), 211.

Laqueur, T. W. (2003). Solitary sex: A cultural history of masturbation. New York: Zone Books.

Litten, H. (1993). The joy of solo sex. Mobile, AL: Factor Press.

Litten, H. (1996). More joy... An advanced guide to solo sex. Mobile, AL: Factor Press.

A touching memoir. (1999, September 6). Newsweek, 134, 74.

Martha Cornog, MA, MS, 717 Pemberton Street, Philadelphia, PA 19147; e-mail: perpcorn@ dca.net.