Solitary Sex: A Cultural History
of Masturbation
Thomas W. Laquer Zone Books, New York,
2003
Distributed by the MIT Press
Cambridge, MA 02142-1493 USA
ISBN 1-890951-32-3 cloth, 501 pp.
Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State
University, University Center MI 48710 USA.
mosher@svsu.edu
When the United States Supreme Court
turned down Texas' Sodomy Law, Justice
Scalia predicted "a massive disruption
of the current social order"
as "state laws against bigamy,
same sex marriage, adult incest, prostitution,
masturbation...are likewise...called
into question." That the seemingly trivial, personal and
victimless matter of solitary sex
is numbered among this jurist's concerns
means the subject merits serious examination. In “Solitary Sex”, author and historian Thomas
W. Laquer of the University of California
Berkeley examines its cultural importance.
Though the story of Onan "spilling
his seed upon the ground" rather
than taking the wife of his deceased
brother gives scriptural origin to
solitary matters, ensuing generations
of rabbis were less concerned with
any possible pleasure he derived than
issues of idolatry, pollution, procreation,
and only then the defilement and improper
handling of semen rendering its possessor
unclean.
In Christendom, Theodulf, of
Charlemagne's court in the late eighth
century, condemned it. To several late medieval popes, even a
married man's sex with his own wife
was suspect. Churchmen set the proper punishment for monks, priests and
bishops (most stringent!) caught masturbating.
Yet not surprisingly, at the
parish level priests were more troubled
with cases of rape, incest and adultery
they found among their flock. At the start of the Protestant Reformation
Martin Luther condemned the men's
practice of solitary sex, unfair "to
excite the woman, and to frustrate
her that very moment". John Calvin and other Puritan divines
found the practice between fornication
and adultery in severity. The seventeenth-century Protestant author
of “The Anatomy of Melancholy”
Thomas Burton linked its practice
to Popery, evidence of the decadent
practices of Catholicism. That same century Samuel Pepys recorded
in his diary his practice of masturbation
during church services, and wondered
if he should curb it.
Lacquer locates the beginning of serious
cultural attention to masturbation
hand in hand with modernity.
The activity was first deemed
problematic in a bestselling mid-eighteenth-century
pamphlet published in London called
“Onania” that hawked cures
for venereal ailments, then soon picked
up by a similar treatise in Bern. Immanuel Kant decided it was a selfish
crime against the race and society.
The publication of these polemical
writings on the topic were contemporaneous
with the growing publication of novels,
often salacious and impassioned bodice-ripping
tales "to be read with one hand"
by indolent ladies seeking release.
In an interesting theoretical
twist, Laquer proposes that the modern
era's condemnations of masturbation
were tied to the rise of capitalism
and the commodity economy, which the
physician Bernard Mandeville expressed
poetically in "Fable of the Bees"
1714.
Where the socially sanctioned
pleasure was the acquisition of commodities,
the cheap thrill of solitary sex became
subversive to a conformist ethic of
working, saving and postponing pleasure.
Alas, there is no body of Marxist
literature on solitary sex.
A physician named Samuel Auguste David
Tissot and his colleagues saw masturbation
"a peculiar vice born of three
paradoxes". One, it is the solitary vice but learned
from others.
It is THE secret vice, yet
those guilty weren't shamed by it
until they learned to be. Third, it was thought to be antisocial
to normal sex yet it was all too social
in that it thrived in communities
out of authorities' control.
There were occasional stirrings
of a popular and provincial counter-tradition
against solitary sex, which Laquer
seems to avoid. Bishop Francis Kenrick advised confessor priests in 1843 that
it was a married woman's right to
climax "by touches" if she
didn't experience orgasm during intercourse,
which was her husband's duty to provide.
In fin-de-siecle Europe Sigmund
Freud found youthful masturbation
dangerously and powerfully serving
to establish "the future primacy
over sexual activity exercised by
the erotogenic zone", but Wilhelm
Stekel disagreed and proposed that
autoerotic activity could be benign.
Sometimes when solitary sex
was condemned by experts, it was for
its deleterious effects on eugenic
plans--the fit kept diddling while
the unfit had babies. One notes the
experts relative disinterest in female
practices, but this changed when women
took charge for themselves. In 1971 the book “Our Bodies, Ourselves” by the
Boston Women's Health Book Collective
affirmed the activity as beneficial,
followed by Betty Dodson's “Liberating
Masturbation: A Meditation on Self
Love” (1974).
Urban gay men's clubs like
the SF and NY Jacks were formed to
masturbate safely as an alternative
to other forms of sexual congress
in the age of AIDS.
While well-researched and meticulous
(perhaps because of those virtues),
some of Laquer's middle chapters are
as relentless and exhaustive as the
curly blond ephebe incessantly masturbating
beneath his robe remembered from one
of Andy Warhol's movies.
The volume perks up when attention
turns to artists.
It is not surprising that an
activity that is usually solitary,
metaphoric of both (pro)creation and
time-wasting futility would merit
the attention of visual artists.
Satyrs decorating Greek vases
were shown erect and self-pleasuring,
and Japanese printmakers occasionally
depicted men or women so involved. In his relentless examination of self
Egon Schiele depicted himself gripping
genitals in self-pleasure. Novelist Raymond Queneau defended the
practice to the surrealists.
Vito Acconci created a performance
piece where he masturbated hidden
from sight under a ramp upon which
gallery visitors stand in 1972, and
David Wojnarowicz photographed a friend
in the act while wearing a mask of
the face of poet Arthur Rimbaud. Lydia
Benglis' 1974 ad in Artforum posed
her nude and brandishing a massive
double-headed dildo, and Annie Sprinkle
exposed and pleasured herself in performance
throughout the 1990s. This reviewer recalls reading of one artist
in the 1970s who issued a series of
one hundred "drawings",
each a spurt of semen upon paper,
entitled "Wanks for the Memory".
Perhaps contemporary art conservators
today, trying to protect the faint
organic stains, lament his fugitive
medium's "inherent vice".
This reviewer also remembers a hippie
at a Detroit party about 1971 arguing
"Hey, Iggy Pop masturbated onstage
long before Jim Morrison of the Doors
ever did!".
A few years later the Rolling
Stones' show featured Mick Jagger
astride a giant inflatable phallus
that spurted white balloons.
Madonna mimed bringing herself
to climax as she sang "Like a
Virgin" prone and writhing at
the televised 1985 MTV Awards. Michael Jackson and various entertainers
clutched their crotches suggestively
from the stage since, yet the realm
of Pop music is notably absent from
this book's concluding chapter on
self-sex in contemporary culture.
Also absent from “Solitary Sex”
is the trope of teledildonics, the
idea of sexual stimulation by computer
that originated (like so much else)
three or four decades ago in the theoretical
computer writings of Ted Nelson.
About 1990 it bloomed brightly
upon the early promise of virtual
reality in online discussion groups
and in glossy magazines of the moment
like MONDO 2000 and FUTURE SEX. Instead, the Internet has served--like
the videotape market before it--as
a distributor of all flavors of erotica
and exploitative pornographies.
This reviewer wrote of teledildonica
in the Fetish issue of Bad Subjects:
Political Education in Everyday Life
http://eserver.org/41/mosher.html. Teledildonics' place in the contemporary
imagination is a redolent locus of
many unspoken ideas about our personal
interfaces with technology; think
about what it is that we (really)
talk about when we talk about sex
with computers. A critical history of solitary sex, even one as scholarly and
generally satisfying as Laquer's,
somehow seems wanting in our time
without this cyberlubricious subject
meriting even a light and slippery
touch.