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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.  

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Updated 1st November 2003


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