Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror (review)

Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror is a modest contribution to the history of sexuality and medicine. Stengers and Van Neck make the unconventional argument that antimasturbation theories developed independently of contemporary social values, "an illustration of the force of ideas as well as an illustration of the role the individual can play within phenomena reputed to be collective" (p. vii). This is a difficult case to prove, especially in a text of less than 200 pages, excluding endnotes. The authors are not successful, and their book is hampered by serious weaknesses, both stylistic and historical.

The book describes how masturbation changed from a practice in which Samuel Pepys could indulge with only moderate guilt during the 1667 Christmas Eve service in Queen's Chapel, St. James, to a plague threatening the future of the nineteenth-century West, to a pleasure deemed (in the twentieth century) unhealthy only in excess. The authors' focus is French-speaking Europe, but episodic examples are given from other European nations and the United States.

The first half describes the progress of the theory that masturbation is unnatural and unhealthy. Stengers and Van Neck guide the reader from medieval religious debates on the sinfulness of nocturnal emissions to the late-eighteenth-century influence of Tissot, the Swiss physician whom the authors credit with launching the West into an antimasturbation fervor. Although interesting, particularly to those studying the creation of medical dogma, these chapters fail to prove that the connection between masturbation and illness arose independently of social values. A slightly broader reading of the quotations gives the impression that Tissot and his predecessors reflected antimasturbation prejudices held generally in their societies, albeit their feelings were stronger than most of their fellows.

The second half describes the collapse of the connection between masturbation and disease. Remarkably, the authors largely neglect French-speaking Europe and focus on England, Russia, Austria, Germany, and the United States. This is a strange choice, as they provide too little background in the first half of the book to demonstrate that other Western nations followed the same path to the terror of masturbation as the French. The authors' attempt to extend their thesis to the West fails.

Masturbation is difficult to read despite being engagingly written. Stengers and Van Neck jump between decades (and centuries) with too little regard for chronological order. The reader is frequently left at the end of a narrative thread, hoping the next piece will arrive soon. The chapter on the height of the terror in French-speaking Europe (between 1815 and 1875) curiously precedes the chapter on the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It would work better alongside the nineteenth-century chapter later in the book. Most frustrating is the authors' habit of acknowledging gaps in their argument and doing nothing to rectify them. Although the lack of a specific answer from the sources is some defense, enough has been written on the history of masturbation to make this excuse untenable. The two-and-a-half-page concluding chapter is insufficient. The proposed similarity between antimasturbation prejudices and current antimarijuana beliefs is a familiar idea, and nothing is done to flesh out the likeness. It is distracting this late in the text.

This is a disappointing book. Although the authors' analysis of how masturbation became a harbinger of disease in French medical literature is interesting, they fail to prove their thesis. The combination of this failure with the numerous stylistic flaws severely limits the usefulness of this history.