| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Thomas Laqueur. Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. New York: Zone Books. 2003. Pp. 501. $34.00.
No one interested in the history of sexuality can afford to ignore a book by Thomas Laqueur. His groundbreaking Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (1990) brought a new conceptual order to our understanding of sexual anatomy and its historical construction. This new book makes just such a contribution to the vexed issue of why masturbation abruptly became an issue in the Western world in the early eighteenth century, and why it remains at the center of discourse about the psychological and political implications of sexuality.	1
Laqueur presents copious evidence of a relative indifference to the subject of masturbation in Western thought prior to the publication of two works in the early eighteenth century, the anonymous Onania (probably authored by John Marten around 1712), and Samuel Tissot's L'Onanisme: Ou, Dissertation physique sur les malades produites par la masturbation (1760). Both medical and popular writers seem to have seized eagerly on these two works and within a few decades managed to elevate masturbation into a life-threatening affliction. In addressing the sudden appearance of masturbation as a medically dangerous depravity in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, Laqueur comes up with some ingenious and well-supported ideas about a field that has been plowed many times with little to show in the way of convincing intellectual harvest, most recently by Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck in Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror (2001), and Michael Mason in The Making of Victorian Sexuality (1994). Laqueur's critique of these and other earlier works is thorough and trenchant (pp. 247–76).	. . .

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