Someone Was Watching

Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. Thomas W. Laqueur. New York: Zone, 2003. 501 pp.

I never did learn precisely what Hedy Lamarr has to do with the thesis of Thomas W. Laqueur's massive history of masturbation, but I was glad to see her there on his cover. In a film appropriately titled Ecstasy, she swam naked, incandescent, and alone through a lake and into cinematic iconhood, and on the cover of this lavishly designed book by the ever erogenous Zone, her bliss seems to lend to the black-and-white film still a new and effulgent blush that gives her wake and wavelets a singularly labial ruddiness and glow. I was reminded of my own favorite masturbatory spectacle in the history of cinema, surely its climactic one, though Laqueur does not mention it: Essy Persson's sustained and solitary self-pleasuring in the 1968 lesbian schoolgirl classic Therese and Isabelle. For a good five minutes of screen time the camera never cuts, never so much as blinks, and neither do we—rather, it joins the girl in caressing her breasts, her face, the folds of her linen, panning left and right and left again, unsure where at first to look, following her hand as the fingers twitch to life and burrow among the sheets as if motivated by some spectatorial fantasy that exceeds her solitude. A lush orchestral score brings her to a climax we could only call triumphal. She is purged of repressive social conventions. She literally comes into being as herself, by herself.

This is a lot of symbolic weight for a wank, which is Laqueur's general point. He also helps explain why such a scene would make perfect sense in 1968, about the time when the "not-so-private vice" (419) went proudly public and the so-called sexual revolution learned how to refigure the medical panic about masturbation for its own political ends, turning a pathology into a healthy form of erotic self-realization, ideal for the liberation of women and gay men in an age that celebrated a peculiarly consumerist brand of personal autonomy. Someone was watching, after all, but then again, someone always was. Betty Dodson is cited, Annie Sprinkle is displayed with finger and cigarette at her clit, jack-off clubs and Internet sites are discussed; however, it is evident that, despite our depathologization of masturbation, we still exploit it for a certain communal hygienics of the self that is not wholly unlike the one pursued in paranoid form in the 250 years that preceded us. Laqueur traces the history of this particular mode of sexuality in Western discourse, linking it to the socioeconomic history of the self and tracking its striking paradigm shifts at the beginning of the Enlightenment and in the middle of the twentieth century.

One of Laqueur's most valuable contributions to theory in this book is his corrective to Foucault's discussion of the appearance in the nineteenth century of the "masturbating child" as a distinctly modern erotic persona. In a very Foucauldian refinement on Foucault, Laqueur demonstrates that the great historian of sexuality was right about a paradigm shift but that it came much earlier and was motivated more by Protestant anticlericalism and plain old quackery than by "biopower" or a shift to a more "mobile and multiple field of force relations" (13). With truly Foucauldian elegance, Laqueur announces that modern masturbation was invented "in or around 1712" (13). He traces it to the publication of the best-selling antimasturbation tract Onania and the panicky reworkings it spawned over the next two centuries. He argues cogently and voluminously for the triviality of masturbation in the centuries before 1712: "The authors of major seventeenth-century works of English pedagogical and normative literature were clear on what it was. They simply had almost nothing to say on the subject: I could find less than three pages of print, in toto, before the eighteenth century compared...