Me, Myself, and I


Two years ago, when I was chairing a large Harvard undergraduate program called History and Literature, I had what seemed to me at the time a bright idea. We had a regular forum in which we scheduled lectures by distinguished visiting scholars whose work boldly crossed disciplinary boundaries. I would invite my friend and former Berkeley colleague Thomas Laqueur, who was, I knew, working on an ambitious new book that brought together the history of medicine with cultural history, psychology, theology, and literature.

It wasn’t only a question of friendship; Laqueur’s celebrated 1990 book, Making Sex—on the medical discovery or invention of sexual difference—had a significant impact on a wide range of fields, from the history of science to gender studies, from literary criticism to art history. Discovery or invention: the shared understanding of the difference between men and women was transformed, Laqueur argued, less because of empirical discoveries than because of a complex social reevaluation. His book showed that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries people gradually shifted from a one-sex model—in which the woman’s body was viewed as a providentially inferior version of the man’s—to a two-sex model, in which the organs of generation were understood to be quite distinct. That is, they gave up the ancient idea that the vagina was in effect an unborn penis and grasped that what they had thought were the woman’s undescended testicles were in fact something quite different, something they called ovaries. In literary terms they moved in effect from Shakespeare’s plucky boyish heroines—Rosalind or Viola—toward Dickens’s strange angelic creatures—Agnes Wicklow or Little Dorrit—who seem to be made of different stuff from the men or to have grown up on a different planet or, more precisely, to have different insides.

Laqueur’s most recent book, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, shares with Making Sex the same startling initial premise: that something we take for granted, something that goes without saying, something that simply seems part of being human has in fact a history, and a fascinating, conflicted, momentous history at that. Small wonder then that he seemed a person whose writings and lecture would enliven the semester for the undergraduates in History and Literature. In fact he did enliven the semester, but a strange thing happened along the way: there was a tremendous outbreak of the jitters. Panic set in not among the students—a large number of whom must have come of age watching There’s Something About Mary—but among the core of instructors who lead the seminars and conduct the tutorials. Though sophisticated and highly trained, when they were faced with the prospect of discussing the history of masturbation with the students, many of them blanched. Coprophagia wouldn’t have fazed them at all, sodomy wouldn’t have slowed them down, incest would have actively interested them—but masturbation: please, anything but that.

After a flurry of anxious conversations, I called a staff meeting to discuss the Great Masturbation Crisis. The first thing that I noticed was that everyone had developed overnight an intense sensitivity to double-entendres, as if language itself had become feverish. “When is Laqueur coming?” (chuckles). “His visit raises a number of issues” (giggles). “What do we hope will emerge from this discussion?” (snorts). “I am sorry if his visit rubs some people the wrong way” (loud guffaws). Perhaps in response to this burst of silliness, an experienced and ordinarily quite sensible instructor got up and made an urgent speech. “I have taught sexually charged subjects before,” she said gravely, “and there is one thing that I believe is absolutely crucial: there must be no humor at all. Once you allow the students to laugh, it is all over.”

Given the fact that the subject of masturbation tends to awaken laughter, this was awkward enough, but more awkward was the response of another instructor: it was, he declared, against his conscience to assign students readings from Laqueur’s new book or to require them to attend the lecture. It wasn’t, he conceded, that the subject—the relationship between the medicalization of human behavior and the imagination—was unimportant, but it should only be discussed in what he chose to call “a non-coercive framework.” In this it was different from virtually every other subject that we might assign. Wishing not to violate his conscience, I excused him from the task and told him that, should any students (to whom I would give the option) share his feelings, he could teach them chapters from Laqueur’s fine early book on Victorian Sunday schools and working-class culture. In the event, none of the students chose this option.

Finally, I had a phone call from a giggling Newsweek reporter who told me that she had gotten word of the forthcoming lecture. “Great,” I said, “I would love you to write about the whole series of lectures that History and Literature had scheduled this year.” No, no, she replied, she was only interested in this one. I understand now, I said with defensive coolness, you have a special interest in eighteenth-century nosology—the scientific classification of diseases. She sounded disappointed, and the magazine contented itself with a brief mention that the “modern master of masturbation” had come to talk at Harvard.

I now fully grasped that Laqueur was on to something both weird and important. How could I not have anticipated it? Had I not read Portnoy’s Complaint or watched Seinfeld? During the last administration, the surgeon general, Jocelyn Elders, was fired, or so it was claimed, for her apparent endorsement of the public health values of masturbation. At a Miami news conference, President Bill Clinton said that her views on the subject reflected “differences with administration policy and my own convictions.” Masturbation is virtually unique, in the array of more or less universal human behaviors, in arousing a peculiar and peculiarly intense current of anxiety.



When theologians commented on Genesis 38 at all, it was to condemn Onan not for what he did but for what he refused to do: thus Saint Augustine interpreted Onan as the sort of person who fails to do what he can to help those in need. As befits a religion that rejected the strict rabbinic obligation to procreate and instead celebrated monastic chastity, the argument here has slipped away from the obligation to be fruitful and multiply and changed into a more general moral obligation. Church fathers could not share in particularly intense form the Jewish anxiety about Onan, precisely because the Church most honored those whose piety led them to escape from the whole cycle of sexual intercourse and generation. Theologians did not permit masturbation, but they did not focus sharply upon it, for sexuality itself, and not only nonreproductive sexuality, was to be overcome. A very severe moralist, Raymond of Peñafort, did warn married men against touching themselves, but only because arousal might make them want to copulate more often with their wives. It may be better to marry than to burn, but that sort of thing should be kept to a minimum. Only one early-fifteenth-century text—a three-page manual “On the Confession of Masturbation,” attributed to the chancellor of the University of Paris, Jean de Gerson—instructed priests on how to elicit confessions of this sin, and this text does not seem to have circulated widely.




Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thyself thy beauty’s legacy?


For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone:
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?

  Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,

  Which usèd, lives th’executor to be.





It all began here, Laqueur argues. The question, of course, is why this shameless piece of mercenary quackery, instead of being thrown in the rubbish where it belonged, should have served as the foundation stone of a serious medical tradition that transformed cultural assumptions that had been securely in place for thousands of years. In part the answer was a clever marketing trick: subsequent editions, and they were many, included titillating letters from readers who breathlessly disclosed their own personal initiation into masturbatory addiction and testified to the liberating power of the patent medicines. But marketing alone cannot explain why “onanism” and related terms began to show up in the great eighteenth-century encyclopedias or why one of the most influential physicians in France, the celebrated Samuel Auguste David Tissot, took up the idea of masturbation as a dangerous illness or why Tissot’s 1760 work, L’Onanisme, became an instant European literary sensation.

Tissot was not peddling tinctures or titillation, and he was not taken in by the earlier work whose name and concept he appropriated: the English tract, he wrote, “is a real chaos…one of the most unconnected productions that has appeared for a long time.” But far from rejecting its central idea, Tissot “definitively launched masturbation,” as Laqueur puts it, “into the mainstream of Western culture.” It was not long before almost the entire medical profession attributed an inexhaustible list of woes to solitary sex, a list that included spinal tuberculosis, epilepsy, pimples, madness, general wasting, and an early death.

Whatever was driving his intense anxiety—Tissot thought that masturbation was “much the more to be dreaded” than smallpox—it was not, Laqueur argues, the consequence of an empirical increase in masturbation. No one in the eighteenth century claimed that there was more masturbation than ever before—how, in any case, would they have determined this?—and even if statistics proving such an increase miraculously turned up, the terrible anxiety around the issue would still need to be explained. Moreover, there were no new medical observations, discoveries, or even hypotheses that would account for what came to be regarded as so dangerous about the act. And the startling vision of its terrible consequences was not the work of churchmen and cultural conservatives. Their position had not changed.


Confirmation of this surprising conclusion comes from someone who can hardly be accused of prudery: Giacomo Casanova. The great Venetian lover and adventurer recalled a conversation he had in Istanbul in the 1740s with a distinguished Turkish philosopher, Yusuf Ali. “He asked me if I was married.” Casanova, who was still at that time contemplating entering the priesthood, replied that he was not and hoped never to be. “What!” Yusuf Ali answered. “Then I must either believe that you are not a complete man or that you want to damn yourself, unless you tell me that you are a Christian only in show.” “I am a complete man, and I am a Christian,” Casanova answered, adding candidly, “I will further tell you that I love the fair sex and that I hope to enjoy many conquests among them.”

Your religion says that you will be damned,” said the Muslim sage. “I am sure that I shall not, for when we confess our crimes to our priests they are obliged to absolve us.” In the same spirit of candor, Yusuf Ali replied that he found this idea idiotic, and then he asked, “Is masturbation a crime among you too?” “An even greater crime than unlawful copulation,” the Venetian answered. “So I know,” Yusuf Ali continued, “and it has always surprised me, for any legislator who promulgates a law which cannot be enforced is a fool. A man who has no woman and who is in good health cannot but masturbate when imperious nature makes him feel the need for it.”

Casanova’s response goes to the heart of the history that Laqueur has written, for in it we watch Christian moralism give way to medicalization:

We Christians believe just the contrary. We claim that young men who indulge in the practice impair their constitutions and shorten their lives. In many communities they are closely watched, left absolutely no time to commit this crime on themselves.

Masturbation is a crime not because it violates a divine edict—Casanova is far too worldly to brood on that possibility—but because it is for him what smoking or obesity are for us.

This vision of the health risks of solitary sex entirely failed to impress Yusuf Ali, who was equally contemptuous of the attempts to stop it by surveillance:

Those who watch them are ignoramuses and those who pay them to do so are fools, for the prohibition itself must increase the desire to break a law so tyrannical and so contrary to nature.

This observation seems self-evident, yet for the Western doctors and philosophers whose up-to-date views Ca-sanova reflects, what was contrary to nature was not the prohibition but the act itself.







There is a second modern innovation that similarly focused the anxieties attached to solitary sex: solitary reading. “It was not an accident” (Laqueur again) that Onania was published in the same decade as Defoe’s first novels. For it was reading—and not just any reading, but reading the flood of books churned out by the literary marketplace—that seemed from the eighteenth century onward at once to reflect and to inspire the secret vice. The enabling mechanism here was the invention of domestic spaces in which people could be alone, coupled with a marked increase in private, solitary, silent reading. The great literary form that was crafted to fit these spaces and the reading practices they enabled was the novel. Certain novels were, of course, specifically written, as Rousseau put it, to be read with one hand. But it was not only through pornography that masturbation and the novel were closely linked. Reading novels—even high-minded, morally uplifting novels—generated a certain kind of absorption, a deep engagement of the imagination, a bodily intensity that could, it was feared, veer with terrifying ease toward the dangerous excesses of self-pleasure.

The revealing contrast here is with an earlier cultural innovation, the public theaters, which were vigorously attacked in Shakespeare’s time for their alleged erotic power. The theaters, moralists claimed, were “temples to Venus.” Aroused audiences would allegedly rush off at the play’s end to make love in nearby inns or in secret rooms hidden within the playhouses themselves. The charge, of course, reveals nothing about what theatergoers actually did (and nothing, for that matter, about the structure of Elizabethan playhouses), but it does reveal something about the fears associated at the time with an art form that seemed in touch with powerful sexual forces. Perhaps, after all, the fears had at least a grain of truth. In the late seventeenth century John Dunton—the author of The Night-walker, or Evening Rambles in Search After Lewd Women (1696)—picked up a whore in the theater, went to her room, and then tried to give her a sermon on chastity. She vehemently objected, saying that the men with whom she usually went home were far more agreeable: they would pretend, she said, that they were Antony and she would pretend that she was Cleopatra. The desires that theaters awakened were evidently understood to be fundamentally social: irate Puritans never charged that audiences were lured into an addiction to solitary sex. But that is precisely the accusation leveled at the experience of reading imaginative fiction.


Pornographic images of women masturbating—Solitary Sex reproduces several—frequently feature an open book, dropped on the ground at the moment that the overwhelming excitements of reading provoked the urge for immediate relief. In the Nausicaa chapter of Ulysses, James Joyce at once deftly sums up and ridicules this history of male anxiety about women, novel reading, and masturbation. Bored, annoyed by her friends, and half-listening to the liturgy being sung in the nearby church, the teenaged Gerty MacDowell sits on the rocks on the Sandymount shore, pleasantly aware that she is being watched by a stranger—Leopold Bloom. In a dreamy state, she begins to flirt with Bloom, whom in her imagination, filled with the clichés of cheap fiction and popular entertainment, she transforms into a brooding, haunted romantic hero:


We are in the overheated mind of the masturbator, but as the parodic sentences, at once ecstatic and banal, pour forth, the gender shifts, and Joyce discloses the male stake, as it were, in the whole fantasy: “Mr Bloom with careful hand recomposed his wet shirt.”



I confess I find most of this silly and disagreeable, but lurking behind these adolescent attempts to shock is one of the greatest artistic triumphs of modern literature. Conjuring up his childhood in Combray, Proust’s narrator recalls that at the top of his house, “in the little room that smelt of orris-root,” he looked out through the half-opened window and



It is, to paraphrase Laqueur’s book, no accident that this scene appears in the modern novel most centrally committed to probing the deepest inward spaces of the self, throwing over embarrassment and shame, and disclosing the truth, including the sexual truth, that lies hidden in the darkness. Proust does not encourage us to exaggerate the significance of masturbation—it is only one small, adolescent step in the slow fashioning of the writer’s vocation. Still, Laqueur’s courageous cultural history (and it took courage, even now, to write this book) makes it abundantly clear why for Proust—and for ourselves—the celebration of the imagination has to include a place for solitary sex.