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Brian D. Carroll | "I indulged my desire too freely": Sexuality, Spirituality, and the Sin of Self-Pollution in the Diary of Joseph Moody, 1720-1724 | The William and Mary Quarterly, 60.1 | The History Cooperative
60.1  
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January, 2003
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Notes and Documents


"I indulged my desire too freely": Sexuality,
Spirituality, and the Sin of Self-Pollution in the Diary
of Joseph Moody, 1720–1724

Brian D. Carroll


Thurs. [July] 19 [1722 ]. This morning I got up pretty late. I defiled myself, though wide awake. Where will my unbridled lust lead me? I have promised myself now for a year and a half that I would seek after God, but now I am perhaps farther away from him than ever before.
Mon. [April] 13 [1724 ]. Pretty Cold; wind from N. W. to S. fine weather. . . . I dined with the doctor and schoolmaster Abbott. Then with the doctor I called on Captain and Ensign Allen. I stayed up with my love not without pleasure, but I indulged my desire too freely, and at night the semen flowed from me abundantly.
SEXUALITY and spirituality were intertwined in the early eighteenth-century world in which Joseph Moody lived; internalized cultural interpretations of sexuality informed his views of masturbation, as well as his identity as a man. For Moody, in the entries above and many similar ones in his diary from the 1720 s, his salvation depended on his ability to control his "unbridled lust." When Joseph mentioned defiling himself he referred to masturbation, what theologians, moralists, and medical writers of the time termed "self-pollution." It was universally viewed as an act that defiled the soul, weakened the body, and corrupted society. 1 The diary illustrates clearly what prescriptive religious and medical literature and other surviving diaries and memoirs from Anglo-American colonists merely suggest: masturbation was not merely a sexual act; it was a problem with profound spiritual, physical, and social dimensions. . . .
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