Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (review)

Fetching though the idea would be, this is not so much a history of masturbation as of the stigmatization of the practice. Nonetheless, Laqueur has written a book that few people interested in the history of sexuality will want to miss, even though, at the end, fewer still will be convinced by all parts of it. He starts with a fact well known to cultural historians—that a true hysteria about the medical evils of masturbation arose during the course of the eighteenth century, lasting well into the early twentieth century. Laqueur's attempt to uncover the reason centers on a view of masturbation as so deeply private and so unlimited in its potential voluptuousness that it posed a threat to society. His argument is not convincing: There are other ways to account for the fear of masturbation. Yet in Laqueur's care, the pleasure is the trip, not necessarily the destination. He mounts the argument with such verve, such sheer fluency, and such comprehensive knowledge of the medical, memoir, and pornographic literature that it is riveting to watch this sheer display of virtuosity unfold.

The book is not an actual history of masturbation per se because the subjective and the experiential is left out (Laqueur also believes that masturbation's privacy obviates such a history). Laqueur never ponders why self-satisfaction was—and is—so much fun and so popular a means of expanding erotic horizons via the playfulness of the imagination. Instead, it is an account of why the secret sin became so feared. From the dawn of time until around 1712, masturbation was a sort of minor vice scarcely on society's moral radar, benignly tolerated in adult men and monks—that is, until the appearance of the anonymous tract Onania in 1712, written, Laqueur says, by the English surgeon, quack, and pornographer John Marten. When Samuel Auguste David Tissot's L'onanisme appeared in 1760, masturbation became stamped for the next hundred years as a mortal threat to health rather than merely to morality.

Why this violent reaction to self-pleasure? According to Laqueur, it was a secret practice in a world in which transparency was valued; it carried a possibility of excess like no other act of venery; and "it had no bounds in reality because it was the creature of the imagination" (21). The question is, Why did the core dimensions of the process (as Laqueur sees it)—imagination, excess, solitude, and privacy—become so problematical?

Laqueur devotes two chapters to an overview of the stigma's history. After the long millennia of gentle toleration, this history has three phases: the moral "crossroads" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in which people have the possibility of going "terribly wrong," that is, starting to do it; the Freudian revolution, in which masturbation became a developmental stage on the way to maturity; and the post-World War II (really, post-Masters and Johnson and post-Our Bodies Our Selves) view of masturbation as "an experience of self-esteem."

Laqueur next turns to masturbation before 1712, starting with the ancients, who did not seem particularly preoccupied with it. Then, in a chapter titled "The Problem with Masturbation," Laqueur muses about core features that the Enlightenment, with its confidence in individual autonomy, might have found so upsetting: "The moral desperation of two centuries of literature on the solitary sin was rooted in the sense that there might be a realm of privacy into which the civilizing process could not reach" (232). The notion that society opposed masturbation because it represented a means of evading social control is dubious, especially paired with Laqueur's contention that hostility to masturbation goes hand in hand with a supposedly new hostility to homosexuality. Laqueur backs away from this point at the end of the section. He seems to be toying with ideas about a "new heterosexuality" that he never spells...