Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation [Paperback]

Thomas W Laqueur (Author), Thomas W. Laqueur (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 1890951331 | ISBN-13: 978-1890951337 | Publication Date: September 1, 2004

At a time when almost any victimless sexual practice has its public advocates and almost every sexual act is fit for the front page, the easiest, least harmful, and most universal one is embarrassing, discomforting, and genuinely radical when openly acknowledged. Masturbation may be the last taboo. But this is not a holdover from a more benighted age. The ancient world cared little about the subject; it was a backwater of Jewish and Christian teaching about sexuality. In fact, solitary sex as a serious moral issue can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history; Laqueur identifies it with the publication of the anonymous tract Onania in about 1722. Masturbation is a creation of the Enlightenment, of some of its most important figures, and of the most profound changes it unleashed. It is modern. It worried at first not conservatives, but progressives. It was the first truly democratic sexuality that could be of ethical interest for women as much as for men, for boys and girls as much as for their elders. The book's range is vast. It begins with the prehistory of solitary sex in the Bible and ends with third-wave feminism, conceptual artists, and the Web. It explains how and why this humble and once obscure means of sexual gratification became the evil twin--or the perfect instance--of the great virtues of modern humanity and commercial society: individual moral autonomy and privacy, creativity and the imagination, abundance and desire.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud is a classic work in history and gender studies, and a regular on syllabi around the world. In his latest study, the UC Berkeley historian maps out the changing nature of Western culture's ongoing obsession with manual self-pleasuring and its effects. Not surprisingly, masturbation's history is fraught with anxiety, particularly since it was often thought to irrevocably damage its practitioners, both morally and physically. As one nineteenth century medical dictionary warns: "However secret the practice... it leaves an indelible mark." Further back, in the 18th century, when expressions of "imagination, solitude, and excess became newly important and newly worrisome," masturbation was seen as representing a lack of self-discipline, "emblematic of all that was beyond social surveillance." Beginning in the politicized, post-free love 1970s, it became "a way of reclaiming the self from the regulatory mechanisms of civil society and of the patriarchal social order into which the Enlightenment and its successors had put it." In the 1990s, it was a pop culture mainstay, a staple of Something About Mary and Seinfeld jokes. More surprising is the fact that masturbation was of great interest to major writers and philosophers: Laqueur finds Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft, Swift, Rousseau, Kant and Whitman all thinking and writing about this "solitary vice." Laqueur calls masturbation both the "first truly democratic sexuality" and the "crack cocaine of sex": at once addictive and readily accessible to all. His writing is free from embarrassment and needless jargon (though it does not shy away from complex formulations of manual sex's complexes), and, with 32 b&w illustrations, it should be a big hit on campus.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From The New Yorker

How did masturbation, arguably the safest sexual act, come to be seen as a moral aberration with ghastly physical effects? Laqueur, a historian at Berkeley, traces this view to the anonymous publication, around 1712, of a tract entitled "Onania." The dangers of onanism became a key concern of Enlightenment thinkers, whose preoccupation with social order made them see this inherently private activity as self-abuse in the most literal sense. (Kant thought that it was worse than suicide.) Laqueur is persuasive, but his belief that masturbation was not a moral problem before the eighteenth century leaves him with a lot of medieval Christian guilt to explain away. An engaging writer, he has a penchant for with-it language—masturbation is both "the first democratic, equal-opportunity would-be vice" and "the crack cocaine of sexuality"—and in the later part of his book he devotes too much attention to transgressive artists whose cultural importance is marginal. His assertion that after the "post-porn" performance art of Annie Sprinkle masturbation "will never be the same" seems, to say the least, unlikely.
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

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Product Details

• Paperback: 498 pages
• Publisher: Zone (September 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1890951331
• ISBN-13: 978-1890951337
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 6 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #688,715 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

90 of 98 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Comprehensive History of a Universal Subject, March 20, 2003

By 

R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (Hardcover)

Masturbation began in 1712. This is the surprising assertion compendiously documented in _Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation_ (Zone Books) by Thomas W. Laqueur. Of course, that's an exaggeration, because since our primate cousins masturbate, we probably did so from our earliest beginnings. But in 1712, there was a shift in thinking about masturbation which brought it to the forefront of reform by moralists, physicians, and other do-gooders. Laqueur's book scrupulously documents the writings on the subject before, during, and after the big change. He admits, "Potentially autarkic solitary sexual pleasure touches the inner lives of modern humanity in ways we still do not understand." This may be so, but this large and yet sprightly history must increase the understanding of a covert but universal activity.

The ancients were nearly silent on the subject. Galen said that masturbation was a method of simply getting rid of excess sperm. In Jewish law, spilling seminal fluid was much debated by the rabbis. The only reference in the Bible that could relate specifically to masturbation does not. Christianity has sometimes used Onan's crime as an injunction against masturbation, although the wiser commentators note that masturbation was not Onan's violation (coitus interruptus, and thereby refraining from being fruitful and multiplying, was). Early Christian teaching was that masturbation was nonreproductive, and was thus to be avoided, but it was not a big source of worry. But then John Marten produced his masterwork; his authorship is revealed here for the first time. Marten was a quack who had written on venereal disease and had been clapped in irons for such an obscenity. In 1712, he published _Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution and all its Frightful Consequences_, and masturbation was never to be the same. Marten's book was a big advertisement for Marten's potions, which would cure the horrid vice. Marten's new anxiety filled a need, which Laqueur shows was due to the philosophy of the enlightenment. It was not until well into the twentieth century that physicians stopped blaming masturbation for all sorts of illness, and now it is advocated as part of self-discovery. The famous sex shop Good Vibrations declares every May to be National Masturbation Month, and the poster last year had the slogan, "Think Globally, Masturbate Locally."

Those who want warnings on the evils of the practice can still find many religious leaders who will oblige them. Laqueur closes this comprehensive study, which is academic but entertaining, with the incident of Joycelyn Elders, who was surgeon general until 1995, when she answered a reporter's question saying that sex education should include teaching about masturbation. In the minds of some moral persons, this seemed equivalent to teaching techniques of masturbation. She had not previously pleased them with her outspoken views on AIDS or pre-marital sex, but she used the M word, causing a rift with that moral beacon, President Clinton, who said that her view of the benefits of masturbation reflected "differences with administration policy." While it amused many that there was an administration policy on masturbation, Elders was out, and the two century legacy of quack John Marten continued.

36 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Only the Lonely?, March 4, 2003

By 

Panopticonman "panopticonman" (Brooklyn, NY USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (Hardcover)

If you can have sex by yourself, and you're not either procreating, or making money at trying to arrest or rechannel such behavior, you pose a threat -- or at least you did back in the 17th and 18th centuries. Heck, even the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. Exploring how masturbation was viewed in different eras according to the ontological horizon of each era, LaQueur gives a kind of x-ray of the politics, morals, and economic assumptions of each age. In the early Enlightenment days when Bentham's utilitarianism held sway, for instance, there could be no justification for solitary sex as it did not lead to anything "productive"(except, of course to pleasure). Four hundred years later, it is still policed as a "guilty pleasure," but since pleasure has been liberated as a virtue unto itself in the consumption society, thus masturbation has been transformed. And if it has not been fully transformed into a social good, then it has been been promoted as a valid personal choice, though still suspect. Well and simply written for an academic title with great illustrations.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elaborate Portrayal of the Western Anti-Masturbatory Frenzy of the Last Three Centuries, December 15, 2008

By 

Bonam Pak (Berlin) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation (Paperback)

I read the 2008 German edition of the 2003 book written in English.

This is a more elaborate scholarly work than the previous Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror. In contrast to the latter, Thomas W. Laqueur dares to identify the anonymous author of the infamous "Onania", written around 1712, as the quack John Marten. Before that fatefull book, which single-handedly changed the attitude of stroking boys' penises to either make the latter grow or to keep the kids quiet to the notion that masturbation would be worse than suicide.

The book presents us with the history of the diverse anti-masturbatory reasonings from Classical Greece to the 1990s career killers of famous Americans. It also touches upon general sex hostilities in the West: Sexuality in marriage being considered a mortal sin, if practiced for any other reason than procreation. Marital sex for fun getting called sex against nature. In that context, masturbation was believed even by French anarchists to lead in logical consequence to bestiality.

To get a thorough impression of the subject matter, the before mentioned book may be read as well, even though there is a bit of overlap. For masturbation accounts themselves read First Person Sexual: Women & Men Write About Self-Pleasuring. An interesting coffee table book is Sex Machines: Photographs and Interviews. If you want to do something medically BENEFICIAL, get informed with Prostate Orgasm, Prostate Cure.. But read AYOR, I only recommend this booklet for current lack of anything better.