Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation
Allan Graubard
autarkic solitary sexual pleasure touches the inner lives of modern humanity in
ways that we still do not understand. It remains poised between self-discovery
and self-absorption, desire and excess, privacy and loneliness, innocence and
guilt, as does no other sexuality in our era.
With these
two sentences Thomas Laqueur ends his cultural history of masturbation, Solitary
Sex. It is a
statement no doubt true and whose significance will remain with us as long as
we find masturbation pathological, neurotic, irreligious, scandalous,
problematic, a measure of gender politics, or a rebellious self-pleasuring and
the stuff of polemic.
That
masturbation still eludes us, if only by way of appearing in this or that guise
for this or that purpose, is enough on its own to draw anyone to this book.
Tracing the various attitudes toward masturbation from antiquity onward,
Laqueur provides us with an important resource.
1712 was
the date of the first treatise on onanism, published in England, Onania
style=’font-size:8.0pt;font-family:Verdana’>. It is reputedly written by an
anonymous author, later known as Mathew Rothos, perhaps the same John Marten,
noted physician and quack, who was prosecuted for obscenity in 1708. Whoever
the author was, the book was a success with many reprintings through the
decades. Onania’s
contention that masturbation was as much a disease of the body as the spirit,
the cause of numerous illnesses and deformities, to say nothing of moral
depravity, was to stay with us for nearly three centuries, despite the advances
of modern medicine, sexology, and psychoanalysis. More to the point is
masturbation’s distinctiveness as a form of play that eschews use value for
self-pleasure, and that makes a solitary monologue of fucking what is otherwise
lascivious dialogue, save for small groups who wank off together; groups whose
virtual audience has grown with the internet.
Masturbation
and art have always had a lot to say to and for each other, and it is by the
ritual and scandalous qualities of the act that Laqueur charts their
development. From Satyrs masturbating or women with dildos on ancient Greek
vases, Italian Renaissance high art nudes, 18th and 19th
century images of porn (more often than not related to the rise of the novel as
a popular medium), German Expressionists, the surrealist “dialogues on sex,” to
David Wojnarowicz and Annie Sprinkle, there is more than enough to prompt
reflection on the magnetism at play here.
We all
know what masturbation is; and most, if not all, of us reading this review have
found in masturbation a source of pleasure that guilt can never overshadow. If
there is any lesson here, we can just as easily recall the Greek philosopher,
Diogenes the Cynic, who had no problem in having his orgasms in public as
naturally as drinking wine or eating olives.
