Invisible Hands
Elizabeth Lunbeck
Masturbation, at least in the United States, is back atop the social conservatives' agenda, classified along with bigamy, prostitution, adultery, obscenity, bestiality - or, more colourfully, 'man on dog' sex, as the Republican senator Rick Santorum infamously termed the practice in a recent interview - and, most pressing, same-sex marriage as offences against morality, threats to the existence of what the right likes to call 'strong, healthy families'. Conservative Supreme Court justice Antonin Scalia, dissenting from the majority opinion in the landmark case of Lawrence v. Texas (decided in June 2003), which overturned a lower court's conviction of two men for engaging in consensual sex in their home and established for the first time a broadly-defined right to sexual privacy, pointedly included masturbation on his personal list of proscribed sexual practices. As a consequence of the decision, Scalia warned, 'every single one' of the many state laws 'based on moral choices' was now 'called into question' - 'the courts will be very busy indeed', he predicted, unintentionally nurturing hope among progressives across the land. Notwithstanding one [End Page 278] wag's asking in what cave Scalia has been living, given the scarcity of recent prosecutions for masturbation, as well as more generally the high-spirited hilarity with which so many have responded to the linkages conservative commentators proposed among a range of sexual crimes (not to mention newly-visible cracks in the façade of family values - notably, objections issuing from Utah's polygamists that Senator Santorum's lumping together of buggery and polygamy constituted 'an insult to Christianity'), masturbation, as Thomas Laqueur demonstrates convincingly and exhaustively in Solitary Sex, has long been serious business.
Or, more precisely, it is modern masturbation, born 'in or around 1712', with the publication of Onania; or The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, with all its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice ...,a short tract that constituted in Laqueur's characterization a 'nearly universal engine for generating guilt, shame, and anxiety', that is serious business. In or around 1712, the long ignored practice of solitary sex, formerly the province of adult men and cloistered monks, assumed the shape of at once a discrete disease and a pressing ethical problem. A disease, because it caused serious physical harm - epilepsy, madness, wasting, pimples. A troubling moral issue because its secret, solipsistic pleasures, now recognized as freely available to men and women, boys and girls, insistently lighted on conflicts at the very heart of Enlightenment conceptions of individuality and liberty. How to nurture sociability and a taste for relationship - to spouses, to the social order - in sexually-autarkic individuals, capable of procuring 'the sensations of orgasmic intercourse' for themselves? How to ensure that the philosophers' newly-prized innerness - the realm of imagination, solitude, and privacy that lay within - and exploration of the self that were constitutive of modern individuality operated in the service of transparency, not secret filth? How to nurture the wellsprings of desire upon which not only individuality but also capitalism depended without encouraging excessive venery of the sort to which masturbation - 'the crack cocaine of sexuality', Laqueur calls it - inevitably led? At the dawn of the Enlightenment, masturbation was condemned not by moral conservatives but by spokesmen for the emerging bourgeois order. It had more to do with the anxieties occasioned by the market than with the strictures of the church. It was, Laqueur tells us, 'born of a new secular moral world', a democratic sexuality for a putatively democratic time. Masturbation became so suddenly problematic because in its secret rituals commentators could see the thoroughly modern problem of the dynamics of self-governance usefully - and dangerously - highlighted. At the dawn of the modern era, masturbation offended because it was linked to excess, not of pleasure - Laqueur sees little hostility to sexual pleasure as such in Enlightenment condemnations of it - but of self.
As all this suggests, Solitary Sex is a deeply serious work of scholarship, not the book to be read with one hand - the phrase is Rousseau's - that its title and striking cover (featuring a naked Hedy Lamarr luxuriantly adrift in solitary ecstasy) and inspired array of provocative illustrations, among them a wickedly langourous 'dog on woman' scene dating to the eighteenth century, might appear to have promised. Even Laqueur appears intermittently unsettled by the depths of his own scholarship, repeatedly advising readers he imagines as impatient and bored to skip ahead where they will find the good stuff. He needn't have done so. Scholarship in this instance offers deep satisfactions, and I don't think it's too much to suggest that the working out of the book's central arguments makes for some quite thrilling reading. His [End Page 279] starting point Kant, on why masturbation is worse than suicide (because, he tells us, the former mocks the 'law of preservation of the species', while the former involves only the destruction of an individual), Laqueur moves confidently between high and low throughout this capacious, often witty account, reconstructing masturbation's public fortunes as he provides a richly-nuanced history of what he calls the morally-autonomous modern self. Some 400 pages later we are treated to his reading of the militant solipsism on display in Seinfeld's 'The Contest', the well-known 1992 episode of the show 'about nothing' in which the characters place bets on who can resist masturbating the longest. In this, Laqueur sees the threats to sociability and the moral order announced by the author of Onania played out in an ironic register.Kramer, Elaine, George, and Jerry, for all their jaded sophistication, are still plagued by 'the demons of guilt and obsession the eighteenth century let loose'. From Kant and Rousseau on the one hand to National Masturbation Month - 'think globally, masturbate locally' admonishes the poster, produced by a commercial purveyor of sex toys - and the web's 'virtual world of onanists' on the other: Laqueur's account offers something for everyone, from cloistered scholar to randy voyeur, or, differently put, something for all the different parts of our modern selves.
Why, in or around 1712, was masturbation so suddenly problematic? Humans have always masturbated. Theologians, doctors, and writers spoke of the practice, and ordinary folk joked about it, long before the eighteenth century. Satyrs depicted on Greek vases - on one Terpekelos, 'shaft pleasure', flanked on the one side by Dophios, his name referring to his kneading of himself, and on the other by Psolas, his penis quite erect [psolos], engage in perhaps the earliest recorded circle jerk - are evidence the Greeks had the concept of, if not the term for, masturbation. The words masturbate and masturbator come from the Latin, dating to the first century C.E., but they appear only rarely in texts. Solitary sex had little moral resonance in the Greek and Roman world; associated with low status - slaves were cast as expert masturbators - and a pathetic shortage of other options, it was a subject for comedy, not for ethical reflection and condemnation. Early Christian writers defined a range of sexual offences, among them incest, bestiality, fornication, and adultery, and subjected them to sustained moral inquiry and condemnation. But masturbation was not among them, a second-order offence that only came under intense scrutiny as the individual's relationship both to the social order and to his or her own innerness emerged as pressing concerns. Before that moment, Laqueur asserts, masturbation simply didn't threaten anything fundamental. By the eleventh century it was beginning to be yoked to sodomy as an 'unnatural' act, but for a long while it only mattered - like marijuana as the opening stage in heroin addiction - as the precursor of something far worse. By the fifteenth century, we have the appearance of a manifestly modern tract on masturbation, De confessione mollitiei (On the confession of masturbation), a strident brief for the necessity of constant surveillance that, notably, assumes the vice is universally practised. Even little boys are wont to engage in it, prompted by an 'unknown itch when their member stands erect, and they think they are allowed to rub and stroke and touch that place like they do when they feel itchy in other places.' We are warned that with age the delectation only increases. Those who would force confessions must interrogate their subjects doggedly but circumspectly, for boys, even grown men and women, will lie and prevaricate, shamefacedly claiming they'd forgotten ever having masturbated (altogether implausible, the author assumes) or, owning up to the practice, claiming they hadn't known 'that this kind of touch is sinful'. Written in 1427, this three-page manuscript, [End Page 280] probably written by Jean de Gerson, Chancellor of the University of Paris, survived only in manuscript form, secreted away until landing in the Bibliothèque Nationale in 1796. In terms of 'the articulation of ideas', Laqueur writes, 'Gerson got there first', anticipating the Enlightenment commentators' framing of the problem. That so few paid him any notice - this Laqueur finds remarkable in an age that saw a flood of print unleashed, in which every manner of sexual sin had its pamphlet - is yet more evidence in support of his contention that masturbation could not be cast as a pressing ethical issue before the birth of the modern, desiring self.
This brings us to in or around 1712, when everything changed. Masturbation, pretty much ignored for millennia, 'swept the Western world'. It was not that there was suddenly more of it. Nor was it that it was so pleasurable; sexual pleasure was itself subject to revaluation, recast as sublime. Medicine was little implicated, talk of a spermatic economy - semen, like money, being in short supply ought therefore to be carefully husbanded, not squandered - notwithstanding; while agreeing that the historical moment is one when plenty appears to replace paucity as the political economist's ruling trope, Laqueur argues that seminal loss is too constricted a concern to account for masturbation's discursive hegemony. It is the masturbating woman, he suggests, who in her solitary reveries produces only desire, not sticky substance, and in whom the practice couldn't by definition threaten the depletion of precious fluid but, rather, held out the possibility of unbounded excess, pleasures without constraint, who offers a way into decoding the newly announced dangers of solitary sex. A matter of mind not flesh, masturbation represents the triumph of imagination over reality, fleeting phantasm over real thing. As an obscure contemporary put it, 'Imagination is the artisan for the fatal rage of Masturbation'. Dispensing with the socially prescribed Other, masturbatory orgasm 'was a sham version of the real thing', its satisfactions secretly available, 'without any Body's Assistance, Leave or Knowledge'.
And now to the really good stuff. Masturbation was newly problematic at the dawn of the commercial age, Laqueur argues, because in it contemporaries could see played out, in the register of corporeality, the defining tensions of the marketplace and civil society. Masturbation, he proposes, 'became ethically central and construed as dangerous precisely when its component parts came to be valued'. It was not only that the pleasures of the imagination were becoming the celebrated common coin of Europe's educated middling sorts. More significant, the very existence and functioning of market society depended on the unbounded desire that was so disturbing a feature of solitary vice. Mandeville famously asserted, in his 1714 Fable of the Bees, that private vices produced public virtue, and, while noting that he did not explicitly invoke 'the private vice', Laqueur situates this anti-moralist of modernity, an Adam Smith avant la lettre in his celebration of the market's ability to transform private greed into public good, in a fascinating conversation about capitalism and desire. Theorists of the new order realized that 'real need' was insufficient to sustain the market, rehabilitating formerly condemned luxury goods of all sorts as they cast them as motors of the new economy. False wants of the sort that moralists had long condemned - in the form, for example, of sumptuary laws - would be turned to the service of the greater good. The endless desire for things was reconfigured as a benefit to all. Excess, private satisfaction, fantasy, and desire - the defining dangers of masturbation - were transformed from threats to the body social into the very conditions of the commercial economy, irrationalities domesticated under the sign of rationality. Whether writing in the register of the material or of [End Page 281] the flesh, theorists perforce limned the problematics of desire. Theories of consumption were theories of fantasy and lust, of private satisfactions and selfishness. Sometimes the registers were explicitly mixed; Mandeville's Defence of Public Stews, for example, was a brief for the commercialization of vice, an argument for the inevitability of male satisfaction and self-rape, or masturbation. But even if they were not, the logics of masturbation and of the new economy were remarkably resonant. Laqueur astutely notes that the excess and selfishness that in the former prompted dire warnings in the latter led to high praise. Credit was the limit case, cast almost uncannily as akin to masturbation in its disregard for reality's strictures. Addison and Steele's Spectator portrays the state as onanist, 'addicted to false needs'. Credit and masturbation, Laqueur observes, 'traveled in the same linguistic circles'. Both were invisible phantoms, both - to employ the words of one commentator on the bursting of the South Sea bubble in 1719 - highlighted 'the dangers of "evancescence" versus "the weightiness of the real"'. Both flouted the proper limits of reality. Modern masturbation mattered, in short, because contemporaries construed it as commercial society's evil twin, the darker expression of the excessive desire and dicey transcendence of the real that made the new economic system possible.
There is much more to Solitary Sex. Laqueur brings his story up to the present, along the way treating the reader to smart readings of a range of issues, from the dangers of the novel reading - and possibly masturbating - woman's self-absorption, to the more recent feminist appropriation of porn and performative advocacy of masturbation. But I think it would be fair to say that his argument for considering masturbation alongside of political economy, which unfolds over the span of fifty remarkable pages, constitutes the conceptual core of the book. There is no one who has tracked the interplay of individual and social, personal and political, the ephemeralities of human interiority and the very foundations of the modern state to such good effect, and with such relentless curiosity and sparkling intelligence, as Laqueur has in these pages. It takes a bold and imaginative historian indeed to coax masturbation from the historiographical netherworld and situate it at the heart of the Enlightenment and, of all things, political economy. In this, Laqueur has succeeded admirably.
Laqueur shows there is no dislodging masturbation's centrality from conceptualizations of modern selfhood, however coolly ironic we might imagine ourselves to be. Even if masturbation is now widely valorized not condemned, seen as a means to self-knowledge and even connection with the other, we are still on terrain first charted in or about 1712. Neither left nor right can escape its terms. The self-proclaimed transgressiveness of the masturbating performance artist is premised on wellsprings of guilt that Rousseau and his confreres attached to the solitary vice in the eighteenth century. Sexual conservatives envision themselves differently but are caught in the same discourse of modernity. The Eagle Forum of Georgia (www.georgiaeagle.org), for example, which fashions itself as a bulwark against the depredations of the liberal 'tax-and-spend', feminist-friendly state and whose mission it is 'to enable conservative and pro-family men and women to participate in the process of self-government and public policy making so that America will continue to be a land of individual liberty, respect for family integrity, public and private virtue, and private enterprise', speaks in the idiom of the eighteenth-century political economists. Liberty, self-governance, public and private virtue - what could be more foundational? Only private enterprise, their website asserts, 'can produce prosperity, [End Page 282] more jobs, and economic progress'. Not surprisingly, masturbation comes under condemnation as one of any number of immoral acts newly dignified by Lawrence v. Texas. To them, it is anathema that persons should 'have unrestricted liberty in their private lives'. Championing one sort of Invisible Hand, the Eagle Forum rejects the many busy others. Among the burdens of Laqueur's analysis is to show that the hands will not be so easily separated.
