Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (review)

Thomas Laqueur has been preoccupied with masturbation for more than a decade, and Solitary Sex is the fruit of this long, scholarly incubation. This is the "big book" of masturbation, weighing in at just over five hundred pages. It may not be the final word on the matter, but it certainly presents a vast collection of citations from all times and places. The topic is an important if somewhat neglected one, and certainly the most embarrassing chapter in the history of medicine. Culturally, masturbation still has the power to induce puerile snickering, if not indignant embarrassment.

A handful of historians have documented the sudden emergence of antimasturbation literature in Enlightenment Europe, by all accounts instigated by an anonymous pamphlet: Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution (1712?). Expanding on the long-standing moral opprobrium attached to masturbation, Onania constructed a new medical disease out of the practice and gave it the biblically inspired name "onanism." Laqueur makes an important contribution by suggesting that the author of the pamphlet was John Marten, an early eighteenth-century author of medical soft-core pornography. It prompted numerous imitators, self-help pamphlets, and patent medicines, culminating with its medical legitimization thanks to the publication of L'Onanisme, ou Dissertation physique sur les maladies produites par la masturbation (1760) by the celebrated Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste-André-David Tissot. Both works presented masturbation as a life-threatening activity that debilitated the body and mind, leading to any variety of diseases and mental disorders and ending in near-certain (and gruesome) death.

The physiological rationale underpinning both works was quite orthodox, drawing on classical texts on humoral balance and economy. However, the antionanism campaign raised the medical and cultural alarm to an unprecedented level that has never entirely been silenced in popular culture. Laqueur devotes almost a quarter of his monograph to demonstrating that the antionanism phenomenon unleashed by Onania is truly distinct from earlier mentions of masturbation. Some of his citations depict masturbation as benign or even salutary, while others condemn it for moral, not medical, reasons; therefore, medical historians have grappled with explaining the phenomenon and its persistence for two centuries in medical theorizing. G. J. Barker-Benfield and Jeffrey Masson have focused on the misogynistic aspects of the antionanism crusade. John Duffy presented it as an aspect of Victorian sexual repression. Sociological explanations have hypothesized that it was a product of earlier puberty, the delay in marriage, and the rise of bourgeois sexual morals. Théodore Tarczylo in Sexe et liberté au siècle des Lumières (1983) explains the antionanism campaign as an extension of progressive Enlightenment ideology and a growing fear of declining French fertility. Michel Foucault in Histoire de la sexualité, vol. 1, La volonté de savoir (1976) presents the campaign as a manifestation of "bio-power" through the pedagogical redirection of childhood sexuality. In The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity (1997), I linked onanophobia to broader cultural anxieties about independence, pornography, and an unchecked imagination. Essays in the anthology Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourse of Autoeroticism (1995) (edited by Paula Bennett and myself) linked masturbation to other solitary and potentially antisocial activities such as reading, writing, and study.

Laqueur carefully picks apart most of these theses. He finds the strongest explanation in the Enlightenment problematization of the imagination and modernity, and he cleverly connects this to the coincident rise of credit. The connections between credit and masturbation are tantalizing, but no more than circumstantial. Laqueur tends to get so enthusiastically carried away by the wealth of his masturbatory riches that he jumps from century to century and from one country to another; he thus coalesces modern masturbation into a homogeneous phenomenon, thereby losing the chance of discovering historically and nationally specific reasons for and uses of onanophobia. It is not likely that there will be a single explanation for this powerful and persistent cultural phenomenon, but future researchers of the solitary vice will find many...