Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation

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.