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Solitary Sex

Thomas W. Laqueur

Z O N E B O O K S * N E W Y O R K

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C H A P T E R O N E

The Beginning

Modern masturbation can be dated with a precision rare in cul- tural history. It was born in, or very close to, the same year as that wild and woolly and profoundly self-conscious exemplar of “our” kind of human, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. It arrived in the same decade as Daniel Defoe’s first novels and the first stock-market crashes. (Readers will remember the repeated jokes-new at the time -in the first chapter of Gulliveri Travels that Swift began in 1719: “Mr. Bates, my master”; “my good master Bates.“) It is a creature of the Enlightenment.

Modern masturbation is profane. It is not just something that putatively makes those who do it tired, crippled, mad, or blind but an act with serious ethical implications. It is that part of human sexual life where potentially unlimited pleasure meets so- cial restraint; where habit and the promise of just-one-more-time struggle with the dictates of conscience and good sense; where fantasy silences, if only for a moment, the reality principle; and where the autonomous self escapes from the erotically barren here and now into a luxuriant world of its own creation. It hovers between abjection and fulfillment.

Sometime between 1708 and 1716 -“in or around 1712”- the then-anonymous author of a short tract with a long title not only named but actually invented a new disease and a new highly specific, thoroughly modern, and nearly universal engine for gen- erating guilt, shame, and anxiety. Its title: Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Po u ion,11 t and all its Fright&J Consequences, in both SEXES Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who

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have already injured themselves by this abominable practice. And sea- sonable Admonition to the Youth of the nation of Both SEXES.. . . There exists, the author warned, “so frequent and so crying an offense” that the usual sources of moral corruption -“ill books, bad companions, love stories, lascivious discourses, and other Provocations to Lust and Wantoness [sic]” - will not alone ac- count for it. Whatever its proximal causes, this sin is so wide- spread because those who engage in it do not know they are doing something wrong, because what they are doing seems free from the usual constraints of conscience and community, and because it seems to have no ill consequences.

Ignorance thus accounts for a great deal. Through “wanton- ness,” or just by being “idle and alone,” or by the instruction of intimates, the young learn to abuse themselves without learning how wrong and dangerous it is. Secrecy is the reason for igno- rance: “All other actions of uncleanness must have a witness, this needs none.” It promises its victims freedom from shame, guilt, and the restraints of social convention: bashful boys who are too delicate to approach a girl can satisfy themselves anyway; girls can use it to “combat strong desires” and refuse disadvantageous matches without “revealing their weakness to anyone.” And, finally, there is the supposed impunity of the act: no death penal- ty, as there would be for sodomy; no criminal or social sanctions, as there would be for fornication or adultery; no punitive conse- quences of any sort. Or so masturbators, to their peril, might think. There can be no other explanation for the existence of so terrible, endemic, but largely unremarked-upon sin, for willful self-pollution.

To be precise, the problem that had been so long ignored but that would come to play such a large role in the modern Western understanding of self and sexuality was this:

That unnatural Practice by which persons of either sex may defile their own bodies, without the Assistance of others. Whilst yielding to filthy imagination, they endeavor to imitate and procure for themselves that Sensation, which God has ordered to attend the Car- nal Commerce of the two sexes for the Continuance of our Species.

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The universe of potential perpetrators is capacious: “either sex,” alone without the help of others. This offense -unlike sodomy, nocturnal pollution, and a host of others-was one that men and women were equally likely to commit and one for which they were equally morally liable. It was the most democratic and luxu- riantly available of unnatural practices. Would-be sinners need only yield to “filthy imagination” in order to “imitate and procure for themselves” the sensations of orgasmic intercourse. This artful practice that had once signified so little would come to represent the psychic depths of boys and girls, men and women - as well as a danger to their relationships with their family, lovers, and the social order more generally-for the next three centuries.

The author - anonymous, but in fact, as we will discover soon, a surgeon of sorts who wrote soft-core medical pornography- invents the brilliant, almost entirely original, and wildly success- ful association of “willful self-abuse” with the Genesis story of Onan, who spilled his seed upon the ground rather than into the wife of his dead brother and was struck down. Onanism is born. The new sin, he suggests, has the same terrible consequences as the one in the Old Testament: death. Not the hand of God this time but a wounded nature will fell the sinner. In a sense, Onania and all that followed are one long effort to support Freud’s later claim that it is easy to commit a crime but difficult to remove its traces; both secrecy and impunity are illusory.

Situating this text - and the years around 1712 -in the history of sexuality and sellhood is in some measure an exercise in the history of medicine. Our author says that he was initially of a mind to offer only religious remedies. But he showed his work to a pious physician, whom he told about the problem of people suffering from a secret sin and that no help was available to them. This putative encounter changed history. The pious physi- cian -like the author, anonymous - “imparted to me [the nar- rator, who identifies himself as the author] two medicines of great efficiency.” The one cures oozing and gleets (discharges) of all sorts, in men and women, that are not the result of venereal disease -fluor albus (a white vaginal flux), nocturnal effusions, seminal emissions upon urination or defecation; the other cures

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infertility and impotence, whether caused by venereal disease or not.

Ask for them by name, the publisher Mr. Varenne - a third voice - advises: the “Strengthening Tincture” and the “Prolific Powder.” There were also tie-ins: the “Strengthening Tincture” works best with the “Decoction” and the “Injection,” for ex- ample. Medicine seems to have hijacked morality. The author/ narrator in fact distances himself from Onania’s therapeutic huck- sterism by telling his readers that the physician-not he -started printing up editions of the tract at his own expense -two thou- sand at a go -and that he “has administered the Medicines with greatest benefit and success in the world” ever since.’

Remarkably, this shameless effort to invent a new disease and at the same time offer its cure at a steep price became the found- ing text for a medical tradition that would draw in the pillars of high-Enlightenment medicine and help create modern sexuality. Scores of dissertations, hundreds of articles, encyclopedia entries, didactic tracts, and many learned tomes would find their origins in 1712. Almost two hundred years later, when many had come to doubt that masturbation caused serious physical harm, a noted French doctor could still find almost a hundred conditions that were either signs or consequences of self-abuse.*

But the history of medicine tells only part of the story. Well before and well after 1712, the body was thought to suffer from bad behavior. Medicine had always been something of a moral guide, a kind of ethics of the flesh. That role increased dramati- cally in the eighteenth century as moral norms became, at least in progressive circles, rooted more in nature and taught in schools, the world of physicians and pedagogues, and less in divine author- ity and preached in church, the province of priests or pastors. In this context, it is not surprising that cultural anxieties were trans- lated into disease: diseases of civilization, for example, caused by a variety of bad things-too much luxury, too much mental activity and not enough exercise, too much sympathy or too much novel reading, which stirs up the body and its nerves, or diseases that followed upon too much sexual activity. But excessive venery, to take the last example, had been recognized as a medical problem

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since Antiquity. The fundamental question, therefore, is not why sometime around 1712 masturbation came to be regarded as a medical problem or why around 1920 it stopped being thought to cause disease. More puzzling is why solitary sex in particular became so troubling a moral problem at precisely the time when sexual pleasure itself was enjoying ever more secular approval. The problem is in explaining an ethical transformation of consid- erable magnitude and staying power; masturbatory diseases were but one of its putative manifestations.

In fact, masturbation continued to be a morally fraught, much- thought-about arena of human sexuality -indeed a critical com- ponent of what came to be understood as “sexuality” -long after it stopped being regarded as a cause of real physical harm. It re- mains so today, even though its most virulent opponents no long- er claim that it causes blindness, madness, or other bodily ills. Moral passion and medical danger grew up together, the latter as an expression of the former. But when the threat of physical harm ceased to be persuasive, the anxiety about solitary sex -first voiced around 1712 - did not go away. To the contrary.

Queen Victoria’s surgeon, Sir James Paget, for example, wrote in 1879 that the putative ill effects of the solitary vice were best regarded as a form of “sexual hypochondriasis” and that physi- cians should tell their patients -both adult and adolescent - that it was no more, or less, harmful than “sexual intercourse practiced with the same frequency.” But he mixed this admission with regret: he was sorry that he could say nothing worse of “so nasty a practice; an uncleanliness, a filthiness forbidden by God [and] despised by men.” Why, we must wonder, this hyperbole - “so nasty . . . forbidden by God. . . despised by men” - for a medi- cally benign practice ?3 Freud and his circle debated passionately whether onanism caused organic harm and whether it was gener- ally injurious - the Master tended to be old-fashioned on such matters -but all the founding fathers of psychoanalysis, and many of their successors, agreed that it was critically important in understanding the history of the self and its place in the social order. In 1995, the surgeon general of the United States, Jocelyn Elders, was fired, ostensibly because she answered a question,

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put to her at a press conference, with a somewhat tentative yes: children should be taught about masturbation in the appropriate health or social-studies classes. As a culturally significant aspect of our sexuality, in other words, onanism has easily survived its tenure as a disease.

The more general problem is this: Why, in or around 1712 (at the dawn of the Enlightenment) does masturbation move from the distant moral horizon to the ethical foreground? For millennia, it had been dwarfed by other, seemingly far more important matters regarding the ethics of the body in general and the desiring body in particular: the purpose and regulation of sexual pleasure within marriage or the question of same-sex love, for example. For mil- lennia, doctors, philosophers, rabbis, theologians, and preachers who expounded on sexual ethics had concentrated on men. But all this changed within decades. As sex with oneself became a topic for the most serious reflection, the young- boys and girls -and especially women were said to be its prototypical practitioners. Not just in Europe but wherever the issue of the modern desiring self arose, there too one came to find the problem and the novel attractions of what had been largely unspoken. Masturbation is the sexuality of modernity and of the bourgeoisie who created it. It is the first truly democratic sexuality. Why, for the first time, then, does the regulation of a form of sexual gratification said to be so dangerously attractive to boys and girls, men and women alike become so worrisome when before, insofar as it was dis- cussed at all, it was largely regarded as a relatively marginal prob- lem for adult men and especially monks?

Beginning in or around 1712, the trajectory forward of this new “trouble and agony of a wounded conscience,” as Onania labels it, this “heinous sin [“crime” in later editions] of self pollu- tion,” is clear and sharp. Its rise to prominence constitutes one of the most spectacular episodes of intellectual upward mobility in literary annals: in just over fifty years, it moved from Grub Street to the Encyclqddie, the greatest compendium of learning pro- duced by the high Enlightenment. Churchmen and cultural con- servatives were not responsible; modern masturbation was born of a new secular moral world; it was that world’s dark, other side.

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The Enlightenment project of liberation - the coming into adult- hood of humanity - made the most secret, private, seemingly harmless, and most difficult to detect of sexual acts the center- piece of a program for policing the imagination, desire, and the self that modernity itself had unleashed,

The crucial moment in my history is around the late seven- teenth or early eighteenth century, when the sin whose history we are tracing came into its own. This is the age that invented the notion of morality as self-governance; it insisted that all humans shared a common moral capacity and the specific psychological capacities that we needed to exercise our freedom.4 In these years, a profoundly individualist culture came into being: “It prizes autonomy; it gives an important place to self-exploration;. . . and its visions of the good life generally involve personal commit- ment.” The formulation is the philosopher Charles Taylor’s, and we can turn it to our purposes. The individual has broken free from a cultural world in relation to which we were not autono- mous, not self-exploring in quite the same way, and in which the good life was something to be found in an order of things and not within each of us. In the pre-modern world, broadly speaking, what is right and good is to be sought in a providential order, in the authority of religion, in the authority of the state, and more generally in one’s relationship to a metaphysical reality beyond oneself. When Aristotle writes that the happy man ought to live pleasantly among friends and that “if he were a solitary, life would be hard for him,” he expresses a truth about sociability and the good life that is underwritten by a reality beyond humans and their particular social arrangements. Nature gives us this as the human default mode. That is, in one form or another, the individ- ual’s relation to the cosmos was given in the hierarchic, organic universe in which most people imagined themselves before the late seventeenth century. Imagining such a connection has been increasingly difficult in the West since the late seventeenth cen- tury. In this sense, the problem of the individual to society is dis- tinctly modern.5

There is, however, no single vision of this “modern self”; the whole idea is wildly contested. My point is simply that all the

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people I deal with in this book, the famous and the not famous, are engaged with what is essentially the same problem: How is the autonomous individual in a world without fixed poles going to negotiate the relationship between himself, or herself, and oth- ers? Or, put differently, they are engaged with creating the kind of inner discipline that makes individualism and liberty possible.

Why masturbation became so central to the history of the self in relation to the broader cultural history of the last two hundred years, to the history of gender, and to the history of individual guilt, anxiety, and autonomy- I leave for Chapters 5 and 6. Before giving an explanation, however, I have other stories to tell. I will begin, in the next chapter, by mapping the spread of mas- turbation as a culturally resonant sexual practice from its begin- nings in the early eighteenth century to the present. This is the story of how, with awesome adaptability, Oncmia filled the avail- able ecological niches across first a nation, then a continent, and finally the world, how the vice it proclaimed came to rank among the most spectacularly successful ever, anywhere. (I also reveal, for the first time, the name of the author of the long-anonymous tract that began it all.)

For the purposes of recounting how modern masturbation conquered the world of sexuality, I assume that it did, in fact, begin in or around 1712. But the act itself, of course, did not begin then nor did talk about it. Chapter 3 tells masturbation’s prehis- tory, first from a medical perspective, and then, more extensively, from the perspective of sexuality and ethics: from the epony- mous Old Testament Onan himself-probably not a masturbator at all - and later Jewish commentary on what he might have done wrong, through classical Antiquity and almost two millennia of Christian writing and preaching on the subject, to the eve of the Enlightenment. Compared with what came afterward, the story is relatively thin, relatively unfocused; not very much was said on the subject, and what was said quickly veered off in other direc- tions. Equally important, it was almost entirely directed to adult men. This prehistory is about what did not happen. It is about the eclipse of an ethics of sex with oneself by serious thinking about other sexual practices through which a man’s relationship to the

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social and the divine order was monitored and regulated. Chapter 3 thus stands at the opposite pole from the rest of this book; if masturbation represented so much after the eighteenth century, it explains why it meant so little before. It makes the case that it is indeed the sexuality of modernity, the first democratic, equal- opportunity would-be vice.

The next question is, What, exactly, became so threatening about masturbation at the dawn of the Enlightenment? It was not that there was more of it. There may or may not have been hut, in either case, neither we nor contemporaries would know. No one in the eighteenth century thought this was the problem. Nor was hostility to masturbation an aspect of hostility to sexual pleasure generally. Far from it. Seminal loss was not the new problem. It was a chestnut of ancient medicine, and it could not have been what so disturbed people about the masturbation of young boys and girls and especially of women, who produced in their orgas- mic exercises nothing except fantasy and desire. The answer in brief is that three things seem to have been regarded as the core horrors of sex with oneself: it was secret in a world in which transparency was of a premium; it was prone to excess as no other kind of venery was, the crack cocaine of sexuality; and it had no bounds in reality, because it was the creature of the imagination.

By Chapter 5, we have been prepared for an explanation. I have already hinted that the history of masturbation is part of the history of how the morally autonomous modern subject was cre- ated and sustained. Specifically, an explanation of why it became so exigent depends on understanding why its core elements - imagination, excess, solitude, and privacy-became so problem- atic. Modern culture encourages individualism and self-determi- nation and is threatened by solipsism and anomie; it asks that individuals always desire more than they have and imagine far more than is real and at the same time that they learn to moderate their desires and limit their imaginations themselves. The reality principle comes not from the next world, or even directly from this world, but from within ourselves. Masturbation is the sexual- ity of the self par excellence, the first great psychic battlefield for these struggles.

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Chapter 6 takes the story up to the present. It begins with how an increasingly dense tradition that extended from the early eigh- teenth to the early twentieth century is transformed by sexology and psychology. Masturbation becomes a stage of development and abandoning it at the proper time a mark of maturity, mental health, and social conformity. Freud is the master of the new model, and he became the focus of debate on the left and the right.

Masturbation changed its valences again during the last forty or fifty years of the twentieth century. Beginning in the 195Os, picking up energy with the feminism of the 1960s and early 197Os, with the subsequent sex wars, and with the worldwide gay move- ment of the last quarter of the century, it would become an arena for sexual politics and for art across a wide spectrum of society. The disconnected, imaginative, individualist, resolutely ahistori- cal qualities of masturbation -no form of sexuality is more prof- ligate with time or less linked to family and inheritance -that so disturbed eighteenth-century critics had, for a time in the Freudian story, subsisted as a kind of infantile sexuality that nor- mal people transcend through the processes of civilization. Now it became a practice of individual autonomy and of sexual energy, an instrument of freedom, or, in the minds of some, a sign of abjec- tion and despair. Self-pleasuring teeters between utopia and its opposite. Walt Whitman’s most romantic reveries jostle with the bleakest visions of self-indulgence, egocentrism, and anomie.

The history of masturbation thus goes through three stages al- though the earlier ones are never left behind: Rousseau and Freud live on in us. But there is change. Beginning in the eighteenth cen- tury, solitary sex came to represent the relationship between the individual and the social world, a sort of crossroads where men and women, boys and girls could go terribly wrong, where they might, if not carefully watched and taught otherwise, choose the wrong kind of solitude, the wrong kind of pleasure, the wrong kind of imagination, the wrong kind of engagement with their inner selves. A false step led not so much to sin as to disease and decay; it was a secular waywardness. Then came the Freudian revolution. Now masturbation was less a crossroads where one might go astray than a stage that one had to pass through in an appropriate way. We

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all have to struggle in the shoals of autoeroticism to emerge with a socially useful articulation of the ego with its sexual energies. Finally, masturbation becomes an experience of self-esteem or self-love, a form of personal autarky that allows each of us to form relationships with others without losing ourselves. What the philosophes had regarded as the surest road to ruin has become for some a road to self-realization, the nearest thing we have in our day to the Hellenistic care of the self but now available not only to the leisured gentleman, as it was in antiquity, but to everyone democratically. None of these developments is so clear or so straightforward, but complexity can wait. First I need to fill in the terrain, to show how an obscure vice became a sexual superstar over three centuries.

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