Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation PDF
Preview Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation
Solitary Sex ef A Cultural History Masturbation Thomas W. Laqueur ZONE BOOKS· NEW YORK 2003 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Uni-,. Ubrary, UC Santa Cna 2003 tr> 1003 Thomas \.\'altt·r Laqueur Zont· Rooks 40 Whit<· Strt'(:t New York. NY 1001 ! All rights resen·,·,I. No part of this book may he r<'pro<lu(t·<I. stor,·<l in a retrieval s.,· st(·m. or trdnsmittc-d in an\.' form or h.v anv. means, induc.J- ing d,-c·trr)nk, mN:hanical, photo,·op~·ing, mkrolJlming, recording. or otherwise (except for that copying permitt<'d h~· St"l'tions 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copvright L,w and ex,·,·pt hy review,'rs for the puhlk press) without writt(•n permission from the Puhlisher. Printed in Canada. Oistrihutt·<l hv The i\,IIT Prt·ss, Cambridge, Massadiusetts, and London, l'ngland Library of Congn·ss Cataloging·in•Puhlkation Data Laqueur, Thomas \Valter Solitar\.' sex : a cultural historv. of masturbation / Thomas W. Laqucur. p. cm. Includes hihliographil'al refr·renc,·s. 1-890951-p-3 (doth) - 1-890951-33-1 (phk.) ISBN ISBN I. Masturbation - Historv. . 2. Masturbation in litt·raturc. 3. Sex - Religious aspects. I. Title. HQ4JJ.Lj6 1003 30&.77'1-dc11 s 20020280s Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA C ont e nt s Acknowled9ments 7 I The Be9innin9 13 II The Spread ~f Masturbation.from Onania to the ~feb 25 Ill A1asturbation Before Onania 83 IV The Problem with Masturbation 185 V Why A-lasturbacion Became a Problem 247 VI Solitary Sex in the Twentieth Century 359 Notes 421 Index 497 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Acknowledgments Books - or at least my books - are intimately connected to great blocks of life, to conversation, collaboration, and thinking with friends, teachers, colleagues, and students over decades. They are lodged in a history. Finishing is a pleasure: the task is done; the rest refreshing; the glances back to where one has been exhilarat ing; the offering of thanks a small gesture for great gifts. But the end is also melancholy: the book will not become better, friends , have died, and the inevitable changes in one's community-how ever expected and necessary - speak of finitude and loss. Lawrence Stone, my mentor and my model for intellectual seriousness and academic engagement, said in the late 1970s that someone really should find out why what he called the hysteria about masturbation appeared so dramatically in the eighteenth century at a time when, he thought, all signs pointed to great acceptance of sexual pleasure. I was past choosing a thesis topic by then and, in any case, he made clear that this was not the sort of problem a young person should take up. I cannot claim that his posing of the question began this book or that in an oedipal mo ment I set out to disprove his mistaken, if provocative, views on the subject. He was perhaps the greatest venture capitalist of the historical profession during the second half of the twentieth cen tury, but this book is not, in any direct sense, the fruit of his invest ments in ideas. It is, however, a product of his investment in me. It is buoyed by his energy and his insistence that we engage with his tory at both the level of intimate life and social change. I wish that he had lived to see my account of a problem he pondered. 7 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SOL I TARY S E X Except for a short and somewhat misguided few pages in my previous book - not so much wrong as too narrowly framed - this book really began when Roy Porter asked me in 1992 to ad dress a conference at the Wellcome Institute on sexuality and Enlightenment medicine. I delivered on that occasion a paper on the pathophysiology of masturbatory death and disease, on why doctors suddenly came to think that there was an epidemic of solitary sex that was mortally dangerous to the many who suc cumbed to it. He liked my ideas - truth be told, there were fe,\' ideas he did not like - and offered all sorts of support and infor mation. But mostly he was the genie of creativity \\'hose scores of books buoyed up my own and many, many other people's work. He died a few weeks ago and I wish that he could have seen ,vhat had come of his invitation and encouragement. To be truthful, this book did not literally take very long to write if one counts not thinking about and researching the topic or the years discussing short preliminary essays, but actually getting words on paper. I wrote the entire draft in one wonderfully happy year as the Berglund Senior Fellow at the National Humanities Center in Research in Triangle Park, North Carolina, whose librar ians, staff, and administration - not to speak of my fello\\' fellows - made it an almost unimaginably agreeable place to work. When Robert Connor, the center's genial, tolerant, and wise director invited me, it was with the understanding that I would spend my time writing a book not on this subject but on memory and mor tality. That book, The Dead Amon9 the Livin9, will come soon, but for the time being I want to thank an institution that represents all that is right and good about American academic culture for mak ing this one possible. Several generations of graduate students, many now teaching around the country, have helped me. I am indebted to: Nasser Hussain for a dossier on the imagination; Lisa Cody for some pre liminary prowling around in British libraries; Vanessa Sch,vartz for checking out some French nineteenth-century medical dis sertations in Paris; Arianne Cherncok for a dossier on late-twenti eth-century feminism; Kate Fullagar for material on American popular medicine; Catherine Gilhuly for her remarkable report on 8 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA ACKNOWLEDGM E NTS classical sources, Suzanne Jeblonsky for her reports on Tissot's letters, and Azzan Yadin for his research on the rabbis. On specific issues well beyond my scholarly competence, I also owe debts to many learned friends. I could not have written about onanism and the Jewish tradition without the help of Daniel Boyarin, Brian Britt, Naomi Janowitz, Davie Biale, and Jack Levison; Herbert Schreier, MD, Chief of Psychiatry at Oak land Children's Hospital, answered many questions about mastur bation and various neurological and psychological conditions; Guy Micco, MD, provided alternative diagnoses to some offered by the doctors I had read. I have acknowledged the generosity of particular scholars on particular points in the endnotes but I want especially to thank: Yaron Toren of St. Johns College, Oxford, for his translation and analysis of Gerson and more generally for helping me with medieval sources; Irv Schiener and Andrew Bar shay for their help with Japan generally and Sabine Friihstiick for letting me see the manuscript of her forthcoming book on Japan ese sexology in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; James Spohrer, the German bibliographer in the Berkeley library, for many years of being ready to resurrect the most obscure and incomplete of references into something findable; Cory Silver berg of Come As You Are in Toronto for information on sex toys; Robert Folkenflix of the Department of English at the University of California, Irvine for a constant stream of late-seventeenth century literary references; Seth Koven of Villanova for various nineteenth-century tidbits; and Elizabeth Dungan for introducing me to the question of masturbation in contemporary art and for her comments on Chapter 6. My daughter Hannah did research among her friends regard ing the title and suggested that I think about the work of Vito Acconci. Herb and Marion Sandler, in addition to being such good company over the decades and offering help with marketing, about which they are expert, came to represent for me the de manding general reader who might be interested in my subject but not in every twist and turn of academic debate. I hope they find the end result readable. Lee Grossman helped me to become clear that I really wanted to write this book. Meighan Gale has 9 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA SOLITARY SEX been all an author could ask for in seeing the manuscript into print; Ingrid Sterner was a copyeditor of preternatural precision who brought order to an entropic manuscript. I am also grateful to Amy Griffin and Heather MacDonald for their expert picture research. Solitary Sex would have been finished at least six months sooner were it not for a generous and intellectually demanding community of friends. Jerry Seigel alone cost me many weeks with his acute criticisms; he has read and encouraged my work since I was in graduate school and I only wish that I could have met his queries more fully in this instance; Cathy Gallagher has been an intellectual soul mate for almost thirty years, from whom I have learned so much that to thank her only for her usual rigor ous reading of this particular manuscript is far too small a gesture; Carol Clover, too, has been a longtime partner in various intellec tual pursuits, and thanking her for specific references, for insist ing on the seriousness of jokes, and for making me take the gender implications of my story more seriously does not quite capture my debt; Marty Jay offered many suggestions for expanding vari ous points and saved me from various errors; Ramona Naddaff and Michel Feher as editors, but far more importantly as friends, have worked through the arguments and organization of this book at various stages of its conception and execution right down to the last minute. I could not have written it without them. Steve Greenblatt saved me from one really embarrassing mistake but, more importantly, has been there friend for almost three as a decades. James Vernon and Thomas Metcalf of my department, although interested in very different questions than those treated in this book, kept me to their high standards of clarity and rele vance. Henry A belove and Harry Oosterhuis, both of whom gen erously read the entire manuscript, made specific suggestions, and assured me that I was more or less right on the areas in the history of sexuality in which they are expert. My best friend since college, Alexander Nehemas, has seen me through a lot and certainly did his part to help this book along. He was on call for all matters Greek - he found the Venetian Greek late-eighteenth-century translation of Tissot's epochal book on onanism; he helped v.'ith 10 Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA A C KN O WL EOGM EN TS ancient Greek words and with Plato and Aristotle. He read and commented on the entire manuscript, although not without some nudging. But what matters most is that he was almost always there to talk. Finally, the historian Carla Hesse has discussed the project with me at every stage. Her moral seriousness, clear analytic intelligence, and fearless, demanding criticism -not every wife is willing to engage a partner who is so quarrelsome in the face of truth - have made this a better work and me a better historian. I am full of love and gratitude to her for not giving up on this book and for the challenge she offers of living with a brilliant colleague. Finally, the customary release of everyone from any liability for errors of fact and judgment: those that remain are not their fault. Berkeley, CA , May 2002 II Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Google Original from Digitized by UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
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