By: Thomas Laqueur (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). | 2 |
| His own theory is that “masturbation became ethically central and construed as dangerous precisely when its component parts came to be valued”: in particular, the exploration of individual imagination (p. 278) associated with the Enlightenment. Drawing on seventeenth and eighteenth-century sources, he shows how masturbation stood outside an economy of consequences and “sociability” and “went against the founding axiom of all economic life: there really might be a free lunch” (p. 292). Masturbation evidently was one private vice that not even Bernard Mandeville could turn into a public virtue | 3 |
| Laqueur goes on to argue that the compulsion to invent dire health consequences for what had been a medically and socially trivial act was linked to the rise of another threat to the moral order: the novel and its handmaiden (as it were), the spread of the practice of reading in private. The reading of novels, especially by women, was thought to inflame desire, encourage both prurient and romantic curiosity, and permit the reader to withdraw from society into a rich and seductive world in which self-absorption had no consequences or benefits other than individual pleasure. Reading and masturbation, he shows, were closely linked in the moral criticism of the period, much of which argued that one reinforced the other. | 4 |
| As Laqueur points out, the warnings against the temptation to withdraw from the material and economic world into private reading of novels (and, to a lesser extent, the theater) resonate with those heard in the last seventy years against television, the Internet, and video games. He argues that contemporaries perceived a danger that, under the weight of masturbation and novels, the social fabric would collapse as formerly productive individuals vanished into private worlds of the imagination. As the daughter of a novelist, I find this hypothesis shocking, outrageous, and irresistibly appealing. All the image lacks is the flashlight under the covers. | 5 |
| Laqueur is frank and forthright about the lacunae in our knowledge of these matters. There are, as he points out, many silences, especially in the pre-Onania period, that are difficult for a historian to interpret. He devotes a lengthy and impressively footnoted section in chapter three, “Christianity and Solitary Pleasure” (pp. 124–83), for example, to Western religious views of masturbation, which seem to have been remarkable as much for what they did not say as for what they did. Why is so little said? Was it too trivial? Too shocking? Or were religious writers concerned about giving their readers ideas they might not otherwise have had? Laqueur is right to point out that we can make little of these silences in our ignorance of their cause. | 6 |
| As history, this is a fine book. It is, unfortunately, too long to make a good textbook, but it will be widely read in the international community of scholars and scientists interested in sexuality. The lack of running heads in the endnotes makes it difficult to get around in them, but this is a criticism of the publisher and not of the author. For devotees of closely reasoned, well-documented original thinking about subjects that are difficult both to research and to discuss, this is genuinely intoxicating Laqueur. | 7 |
| Rachel MainesIndependent scholar | |
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