| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 107.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Comparative/World

Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck. Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror. Translated by Kathryn A. Hoffmann. New York: Palgrave. 2001. Pp. ix, 239. $24.95.

A fact cunningly concealed by the copyright page of this book is that it was originally published in 1984 and has not been significantly updated. Appending less than half a page alluding to the exclusion of questions about masturbation from the British National Sexual Attitudes and Behaviour Survey of the early 1990s, and to the 1994 dismissal of Joycelyn Elders as U.S. Surgeon-General for advocating masturbation as safe sex, is hardly adequate. Since 1984, there have been a number of significant articles on the history of masturbation specifically, a discursive explosion in the history of sexuality more generally, illumination of the world of eighteenth-century medical ideas and practice and doctor/patient relationships, studies of medical quackery, and research on the history of childhood, as well as work on the history of masculinity (since men were always the major target of masturbation panic), all of which surely need to be taken into account when writing a history of this "great terror." . . .

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