The sound of one hand slapping

A new book explores the history of masturbation -- and why the finest minds of the 18th century suddenly freaked out about it.

By Betsy Andrews

May 9, 2003 | Apparently I've been doing it wrong, or by the lights of the gatekeepers of Western morality, I've been doing it right, if I must do it at all. Either way, I blame the school nurse. Mrs. Hirshman was a little truck of a woman with a supposedly enlightened perspective. (I might as well have capped that "e," for as UC-Berkeley history professor Thomas Laqueur explains in "Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation," Enlightenment thinkers were totally freaked out about masturbation.)

They were freaked out about masturbation because it engaged the imagination in ways that disengaged the self from society. Onanism, as they called masturbation, was premised on fantasy, and fantasy dissolved social reality; it would lead to the downfall of the socioeconomic order. So, when Mrs. Hirshman told us that it was A-OK to jerk off, just so long as we didn't go ahead and fantasize when we were doing it, she was, unbeknownst to herself or to any of the boys and girls in my ninth grade health class, teaching from within a framework of anxiety in continuance since the Enlightenment.

She was a regular Samuel Tissot (we'll get to him), that Mrs. Hirshman, and she screwed up my masturbatory technique for years to come. Up until Mrs. Hirshman, I had fantasized while jerking off -- pirates and bandits and sundry molesters -- and after Mrs. Hirshman, I didn't. As the person of Mrs. Hirshman displaced that of a peg-legged captain in my mind's eye, the prospect of guilt kept me from my fantasies. It did not stop me from masturbating. I simply focused, instead, on myself. And so I have remained, an entirely narcissistic jerk-off.

As Laqueur paraphrases the 1930s Freudian, Laura Hutton: "If a single woman must masturbate to relieve tension,..(n)o fantasy at all cost, and 'get over it and forget about it.'" If any self-service was acceptable, the kind bereft of imagination, and as logic would have it, pleasure, was the only acceptable kind, because the limit on pleasure marked the limit on self-sufficiency; a wanker would still need to make relationships with others in order to satisfy his desire for pleasure, and so the engines of society would keep on firing, the markets would remain peopled, the economy would not collapse. And, yet, it turns out, the opposite is true. Bereft of fantasy, I don't need anybody but myself to get it on; I'm autonomous, even, from the images manufactured in the Enlightenment thinkers' beloved marketplace.

Even when I'm in a relationship with someone I find utterly delicious, when I'm alone, I'm alone. I am, at that moment (and thus eternally, for anti-onanistic theory was absolute), the utterly autarkic onanist that everyone from Jean Jacques Rousseau to Sigmund Freud was so uptight about. Thus, having digested the entirety of Laqueur's massive treatment, I cannot now discern whether my narcissistic brand of masturbation would be more or less disturbing to the pre-20th century morality police than the diddler with the vivid imagination.

By now, you may be confused. Well, welcome to the wanking world of cultural history. I was confused until halfway through "Solitary Sex." Form meets content with Thomas Laqueur, and so the layman might be wise to take him at his word when he writes, "There may be more detail here than some readers will find necessary ... ; skip to Chapter 4 to get back to the story of sex with oneself from the eighteenth century on."

Those of us who aren't as turned on by history's daisy chain of names and dates can skip all his poking and stroking and go right for the money shot, the gist of which is this: Around 1712 in London, a quack named John Marten anonymously published a book on the subject so as to market his own remedies for the alleged epidemic of onanism. "Onania" was a shrill, salacious and blatant bit of hucksterism. And yet it hit a nerve. It went into multiple printings, launched a cottage industry of torturous curatives and sent the Western world's intellectual establishment into an anti-onanistic fit. The famed French physician, Samuel Tissot, claimed that the newly coined "self-pollution" was the cause of any number of diseases. Rousseau thought it a fatal addiction. Kant called it worse than suicide. And so on through Freud, who "traced anxiety neurosis, obsession, narcissism, hysterical vomiting, repressed memories of infantile sexuality, and, arguably, guilt itself to the psyche's confrontation with" masturbation.

The hysteria was new. Prior to the 18th century, no one was all that bothered by masturbation. What with wives and prostitutes and boy tutees at hand, the Greeks thought it below the average (read: male) citizen, but if one must, one must. Talmudic scholars, reflecting Jewish anxieties about the survival of the tribe and the coming of the messiah, worried themselves over procreation. The Biblical rebel, Onan, refused to come inside his widowed sister-in-law because the resultant child would be considered his dead brother's and not his. But, despite lending his name to a term for solitary sex, his sin was not masturbation but the spilling of the family seed. The church was so in a froth over sodomy that masturbation got short shrift.

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