Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror (review)

Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror is one of a number of books devoted to masturbation and to the history of discourse on masturbation that have been published in France during the past decade or so, including a welcome republication of the most famous anti-masturbation tract, Tissot's 1760Onanisme. Stengers and Van Neck's work was first published in 1984, then reissued in a mass-market edition, slightly updated, in 1998, and it has now been translated into English. Let me say right away that this book is utterly fascinating, a treasure-trove of material for anyone working in related fields, as well as for the casual reader interested in the remarkable story of how masturbation came to be seen, for some two hundred years, as a harmful and even deadly act. The amount of research consolidated here is staggering, and the student of the history of sexuality will find in this slim volume a rich vein of documentation ready to be mined.

The bad news is that, in terms of theoretical framework and historical contexualization, this book is remarkably naive. The material presented by Stengers and Van Neck is more comprehensive than in any other treatment of the subject that I know of, but one must look elsewhere for a coherent explanation of the narrative they recount. Stengers states the authors' central aim in his introduction: "In this book, we will attempt to show how certain ideas, seemingly inexplicable in terms of social context, were launched by several men, and how these ideas triumphed without that social context serving as the key to their success" (vii). As a historiographic project this would seem to be inauspicious, to say the least. The authors are inexplicably determined to prove that the anti-masturbation fervor which held sway in Western Europe and the English-speaking world for well over a century was an unfortunate but isolated anomaly, unconnected to anything else and almost entirely due to the persuasive powers of a few influential men. It is as though one were to try to explain the success of the telephone by citing Alexander Graham Bell's personal charisma.

What is especially disconcerting—although refreshing as well—is that Stengers and Van Neck exhibit impeccable intellectual integrity, never hesitating to cite material that clearly undermines their stated goals. Perhaps the most striking instance of this is their account of the exchange between Tissot and Rousseau. Since the latter's condemnation of what he famously termed "this dangerous supplement" first appeared in the Emile in 1762, two years after the first French edition of Tissot's magnum opus, "Rousseau might thus seem to be one of the Swiss doctor's disciples," the authors note hopefully (58), only to acknowledge that in fact Rousseau knew nothing of Tissot until the latter admiringly sent him a copy of Onanisme. Two clear implications emerge from this anecdote, both of which the authors resolutely ignore: first, that anti-onanism was in the air at that time, for various complicated reasons, and therefore that Tissot did not impose his idiosyncratic view so much as exploit an idea whose time had come (and the same can also be said of the anonymous author of Onania, Tissot's British precursor); and second, surely it is not an irrelevant coincidence that so many of the major figures in this story are either Swiss or English: Protestantism would seem to have played a not inconsiderable role in all this, one left unexamined by Stengers and Van Neck.

The book is in fact strangely devoid of any concerted attempt to account for the history of anti-onanism in terms that go beyond the narrow confines of the documents they cite. It is written as though in a theoretical vacuum, with no reference to other historians of sexuality. One glaring omission is symptomatic: it is not clear how the authors, working on...