The History of Masturbation: An Essay Review

Thomas W. Laqueur. Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. New York, Zone Books, 2003. 501 pp., illus. $34.

In the last two decades, the history of masturbation has received a good deal of attention, especially from European scholars. Théodore Tarczylo, Jean Stengers and Anne van Neck, Karl Heinz Bloch, Karl Braun, and Michael Stolberg have, up to now, contributed the major studies in the field. ¹ Although Thomas Laqueur undeniably owes something to this scholarship, his Solitary Sex is a much more ambitious work than anything written previously on the subject. Not only does he cover several millennia in considerable detail, but he also links the history of masturbation to a much wider problem: the history of the self. As such, Laqueur's book will be of interest to people who are not directly concerned with the history of masturbation or sexuality.

After a short introductory chapter that sets up Solitary Sex's main argument, the following two chapters give a descriptive account of the history of masturbation. In reverse chronological order, Chapter 2 tells the story of "The Spread of Masturbation from Onania to the Web," and Chapter 3 describes "Masturbation before Onania." The main conclusion, demonstrated with a profusion of examples, is that "solitary sex was not much of an issue for several millennia, and beginning in the early eighteenth century it swept the Western world" (p. 185). As the titles of these chapters already indicate, the most fundamental text in Laqueur's story is the anonymous Onania, published "in or around 1712." For Laqueur, it is this book that made masturbation into a modern and secular issue.

Chapter 4, "The Problem with Masturbation," shows that this problem was in fact threefold. Three things were regarded as "the core horrors of sex with oneself: it was secret . . . ; 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" (p. 21; see also p. 210). Each of these elements of modern masturbation is treated in Chapter 4.

The long fifth chapter, drawing directly on the preceding chapter, is probably the central moment in Solitary Sex. It is in these pages that we fully understand why "the history of masturbation is part of the history of how the morally autonomous modern subject was created and sustained" (p. 21). Laqueur's argument is rather straightforward and is particularly well summarized in the following passage:

Never in world history had the imagination figured more importantly in so wide a variety of realms . . . . Never had excess been so praised and democratically sought after. Never had solitude and privacy come so sharply into focus in contrast to the state and to society . . . . In other words, all the elements of what was so terribly wrong with masturbation were themselves widely valued, praised, and discussed. But this made their abuse all the more threatening; one might almost think that if the solitary vice did not exist, it would have had to be created, a kind of Satan to the glories of bourgeois civilization. (p. 278)

If masturbation is "the sexuality of the [modern] self par excellence" (p. 21), it is so in the sense of its "nasty bad brother or sister" (p.357).

In his introductory chapter, Laqueur divides the history of modern masturbation into three stages: the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; the Freudian revolution; and from the 1960s to the present, masturbation as an experience of self-esteem or self-love. It is only in the sixth and last chapter of his book that he treats briefly the last two stages. From Laqueur's point of view, these stages are only modifications of the first one, and this justifies his primary focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Before making some critical comments, I would like to add that...