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Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation
Journal of Social History, Fall, 2004 by Robert Darby
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.
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