Masturbation in History

My father, who was born in 1902, didn't have a lot to tell me about masturbation, but I do remember when I was thirteen or fourteen (and a regular practitioner)  he told me what I suspect to be an apocryphal story about a coming-of-age ritual practiced by some Native American tribe.

During this ritual, supposedly, the adolescent boy was asked whether he practiced masturbation.  If he admitted that he did, he promptly received 10 lashes for his lack of self-discipline and restraint.  If he said he didn't, on the other hand, he was given 20 lashes for lying.

This pretty much sums up attitudes towards masturbation in most cultures that we know of.  Most societies throughout history seem to have regarded masturbation as weak-minded, embarrassing and perhaps a bit disgusting, even while acknowledging that it's an extremely common practice.

We can do better than that today by recognizing how valuable masturbation is for learning about your individual sexuality, and for experimenting with new things (see the masturbation page).  Nobody has to feel apologetic about masturbating any more, and with a little effort, most people can get over their embarrassment about it.  Surprising numbers of people have found they like to watch their partners masturbate sometimes!

On the face of it, then, the idea of a history of masturbation seems strange — people masturbate, people have always masturbated, lots of animals masturbate, the whole thing is entirely natural.  What more is there to say? 

For most of recorded history, there isn't much more to say.  What is worth knowing, though, is how masturbation became the focus of sex phobias and hysteria in Western culture during the 18th and 19th centuries — there is nothing natural or obvious about that phenomenon, and enough of its toxic residues remain in our culture to make its history definitely worth knowing about. 

Fortunately, several excellent books have recently appeared (see our Links and Resources page), particularly Thomas W. Laqueur's recent Solitary Sex. If you're interested, you can now get a detailed picture of the peculiar phobias of the last three hundred years.  Below, I sketch in a very brief introduction to the subject.

Snake oil, medicine, and "purity" porn

The whole thing started, amazingly enough, as a money-making venture.  Around 1712, a quack and soft-core-pornographer named John Marten published a pamphlet entitled Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in both SEXES Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice. Those who admire shrewd marketing must regard John Marten as something of a genius, because his pamphlet succeeded wildly on several levels at once. First of all, it fulfilled its primary purpose in advertising the very expensive powders and potions that Marten was hawking to those who just couldn't stop. 

Secondly, it made money in its own right, going through printing after printing and eventually being translated into most of the languages of Europe, because you couldn't find such graphically suggestive descriptions of sexual practices except in the wholesome pseudo-medical literature claiming to condemn them. In a society that was already tending towards the censurious prudishness that would peak a century and a half later in the Victorian era, you had to take your pornography where you could find it.  Nice, moral, upright, people, moreover, could admit to reading such literature not because it was exciting to them (of course not), but because they were so concerned about the principles of purity. 

Marten was the first to characterize masturbation as the crime of Onan, whom the book of Genesis 38 reports to have been smitten dead by God because he spilled his seed on the ground. It's worth noting in passing that Onan's problem had nothing whatsoever to do with masturbation — he was actually shirking his obligation to impregnate his dead brother's wife by practicing early withdrawal as a form of birth control. 

In fact, there is no explicit mention of masturbation anywhere in the Bible, and it doesn't seem to have been a subject of concern until you get to the phobic Roman church fathers in the 3rd century, to whom any form of sexual activity seemed filthy and horrible. 

Where quacks rushed in, doctors quickly followed

What started as a low-brow mass-media campaign around 1712 (pamphlets being an early mass-media channel)  soon caused echoes in the more respectable halls of medicine.  This is not very surprising, given how little science was involved in medicine at that time, and how little real benefit it could offer the sick, much less the healthy.  In 1760, the emminent French physician, Samuel Tissot, published L'Onanisme; ou Dissertation physique sur les malades produites par la masturbation, in which he joined the pamphleteers in asserting that masturbating produced terrible illnesses.

It's interesting that the case being made against masturbation throughout this period was articulated almost entirely in "medical" rather than religious terms.  The message was that masturbation would weaken and kill you, not that it would send you to hell.  During the 18th century at least, this anti-masturbation message was not combined with a condemnation of sex in general.  "Real" sex, even with a prostitute, was considered healthy. 

American sex phobia in the Victorian period

By the time the likes of Sylvester Graham and John Kellogg picked up the anti-masturbation banner in 19th century America, however, it had become conflated with a general view that any and all sex was bad for you.  Indeed Graham, Kellogg and their followers were violently sex phobic — Graham asserted that marriage was beneficial because it utterly deadened desire, and Kellogg claimed never to have had sex with his wife at all!  For a summary of their careers and movements, see the erotic phobias page. 

At the same time, medicine in the late 19th century was gradually becoming more rigorously scientific in its approach, and doctors were beginning to realize that no causal relationship had actually ever been found between masturbation and any maladies beyond chafed skin.  Voices of reason began to be heard suggesting that there was nothing wrong with the practice.  It was only as sexual attitudes became less fearful in general during the 1920s that masturbation ceased to be regarded as horribly dangerous among the general public. 

Feminism and sanity

Finally, with the rise of feminism in the 1960s, women like Betty Dodson began pointing out that for women at least, masturbation was not merely harmless, but actually lovely and highly beneficial.  Men were slower to catch on, but have gradually come to recognize that what applies to women's masturbation also applies to their own.  One of the many debts we owe to feminism is its help in breaking free at last from a social pathology that had dominated Western culture for two and a half centuries.