SINCE no subject today seems to be wanting for a cultural history, no
subject is unimaginable. Not even masturbation, even though it is as close
to a sexual taboo as you can get in the 21st century.
Thomas Laqueur, a history professor at the University of California,
Berkeley, delivers his most penetrating observation in his penultimate
footnote (and there are 70 pages of them). "In general, masturbation is
that rare thing in modern talk about sexuality: something best left
unspoken and so discomfiting that it can only be broached by a joke," he
writes. Bill Clinton sacked his surgeon-general for saying the dread word
at a press conference, which is a joke, surely.
Mr Laqueur reports that, in the experiences of pollsters, only personal
income provokes as much reticence. Yet masturbation is a common, if not
shared experience, in both men and women. The author covers everything
there is to say about the subject, often saying it twice or even three
times. We learn that to describe it as onanism is to misread Genesis. Onan
spilled his seed on the ground, not as an act of solitary sex, but because
he did not wish to impregnate the wife of his late brother. The biblical
reference gave his name to a book published in 1712 and titled "Onania", a
clever concoction of salacious case studies of the act, coupled with stern
disapproval of it. The book went through many editions; both author and
publisher made a decent profit; Mr Laqueur identifies it as a landmark in
masturbation studies because its publication defines the moment when
solitary sex "moved from the distant moral horizon to the ethical foreground."
The University of California at Berkeley hosts a biography for Thomas
Laqueur. AfraidToAsk.com hosts a masturbation guide with a medical viewpoint.
Masturbation was denounced by teachers, doctors and churchmen as the vice
of vices, punished by dreadful physical symptoms, from desiccated limbs to
blindness. To prevent it, specialist manufacturers offered erection alarms,
penis cases, sleeping mitts and hobbles to stop girls from spreading their
legs. Freud was exercised by it throughout his life. But the medical case
against masturbation did not survive beyond the 1920s, and by the end of
the century it had become, in some circles, "a model of self-sufficiency,
moral autonomy and freedom from the overweening power of patriarchy and
heterosexuality." It was especially respectable in feminist and gay circles.
At the start of a new millennium masturbation supports profitable
businesses selling pornography and vibrators. One thing cultural history
shows is that there really is nothing in the world from which ingenious
people won't make money.
http://www.economist.com/books/displayStory.cfm?story_id=1632177
