Brief Account of Masturbation as a Medical/Moral Disease

Supplement #1: A Brief Account of Masturbation as a Medical/Moral Disease in Western Europe & the U. S., 18^th-Early 20^th Centuries as an Aid in Understanding a Similar Obsession with Masturbation in East Asia During the Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries

Note: Soon after I wrote this chapter, the following book came out in English translation: Jean Stengers & Anne van Neck, Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror (Palgrave, 2001 [originally published in France, 1984]). Also available is Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation (Zone Books, 2003); and Paula Bennett and Vernon Rosario, eds., Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism (Routledge, 1995). See also the relevant Wikipedia entry.

This topic inevitably strikes most people as awkward, as you surely know. The notion that masturbation is a serious disease requiring medical treatment and expert intervention would seem absurd to most of us in the present day. Yet were we to go back in time only about a century, we would find medical opinion largely opposed to the practice. Going back in time still further by only a generation or two, and we would find physicians almost unanimous in the firm belief that masturbation poses a serious danger to individual and public health.

Likewise, social and political commentators frequently regarded masturbation as a threat to the health of nations. This expert learned opinion from "the West" exerted a powerful influence on reformers in Japan and China who sought to built strong nation-states. By surveying some of the major features of this strange branch of history, we can better understand the links between sexual behavior, the state, the nation, public health, and other related realms during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in many parts of the world. This topic also raises some interesting food for thought about the nature of science as a social practice and reveals much about the origins of many modern practices, products (#graham crackers and corn flakes,# for example) and prejudices. Although most of its overt manifestations are gone, traces of the Great Masturbation Scare—as I will call it—linger on in the present day.

Religious theory had long frowned on masturbation, owing to a general tendency to condemn non-procreative sexual behavior and, specifically, to the Biblical tale of Onan "spilling his seed" to avoid his duty of producing an heir. Although it is not clear whether "Onan's sin" was masturbation or coitus interruptus, Onan gave his name to the masturbatory act in the term "onanism." In short, clergy and moralists in Europe had long regarded masturbation as sin or moral shortcoming. But prior to the eighteenth century masturbation was not usually regarded as a serious matter and was generally not associated with physical ailments. Masturbation was a minor sin but not a threat to physical health. This relatively benign status began to change early in the eighteenth century.

Inducing fear is a tried and true sales strategy. Around 1710, a pamphlet appeared in England as an advertisement for the medicines "Strengthening Tincture" and "Prolifick Powder." In the style of that time, the pamphlet was entitled: Onania; or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences in both Sexes, Considered, with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those, who have already injur'd themselves by this abominable Practice. As Vernon A. Rosario points out, "Onania dramatically reordered Euro-American cultural perspectives on masturbation, transforming it from one of many forms of seminal and excretory loss into a sexual practice potentially fatal to individuals and society alike."ⁱ

The anonymous author of Onania provided a long list of masturbation-induced disorders, including blindness, gonorrhea, and insanity, with death as the inevitable consequence should the masturbator not stop in time. Yes, tragically, it seems that nearly everyone ends up dead sooner or later—perhaps we are all guilty of this terrible vice! Onania was reprinted on a regular basis during the eighteenth century, having appeared in nineteen editions by 1750, each longer than the previous one owing to the inclusion of testimonial letters by those claiming that the book had led to their salvation. By mid century, Onania had appeared in numerous languages and had spread throughout Europe. Bear in mind that the main point of Onania was to sell nostrums (medicines with secret ingredients).

Because of Onania's status as a mere piece of advertising, leading physicians often criticized it for lacking in rigor and mixing medical and moral messages. But these same critics often did precisely the same things themselves, and, in any case, rarely had any fundamental disagreement with the notion that masturbation was a serious threat to health. The most important medical work to give legitimacy to the growing popular fear of onanism was Onanism, or A Treatise upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation (1760), by the Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste-André-David Tissot. The good doctor explicitly sought to explain "the diseases caused by masturbation, not the crime of masturbation." And make no mistake about it, masturbation was deadly. Tissot described the case of a seventeen year old who masturbated up to three times a day. By his eighteenth year, he was a wretched case indeed, and having waited too long to seek medical help, there was nothing Tissot could do but describe the young man's horrible condition:

Such was the destructive power of one's hand gone awry! From the time of Tissot's book onward, medical literature routinely featured horrific case studies of masturbators as well as confessional accounts from the evil sinners—oh, excuse me, instead I should say—from the patients themselves. One such confessional account reads:

These two quoted passages are typical of the two rhetorical styles in the medical literature on masturbation: 1) detailed clinical account of actual cases and 2) confession-testimonials of masturbators themselves. Both styles sought to instill in readers a sense of urgency and fear concerning the health dangers of masturbation.

The nineteenth century was the most intense period of anti-masturbation hysteria in Europe, with medical doctors virtually unanimous in condemning the practice as dangerous. The two rhetorical styles of case description and confession-testimonial continued as before, with additional dangers and concerns being added to an already long list. Here we examine several of these additional concerns that are historically significant.

One development was equal opportunity for women. During the eighteenth century, although the literature on masturbation condemned the practice for both women and men, the focus of most attention was on the male masturbator. During the nineteenth century, great concern about the ills and evils of female masturbation developed. By 1850 or so, the medical establishment regarded male and female masturbation as approximately equally frequent and equally harmful. Here is part of an 1881 document entitled "Onanism and Nervous Disorders in Two Little Girls:"

Such behavior would soon lead to a wretched death if not stopped, and severe measures might sometimes be prescribed in the battle to stop this deadly vice, but sometimes even the most extreme "treatments," cauterization, for example, sometimes provided only partial "relief," as in the case of X's sister Y:

Cauterization was one variation of clitoridectomy and female circumcision. Today it is common to regard these operations as part of especially oppressive societies, usually located in Africa or the Middle East. But it was in the United States that they became popular medical procedures, typically preformed for the purpose of correcting female "mental disorders" (vaguely defined conditions), often directly connected with masturbation in some way. G. J. Barker-Benfield explains as follows:

There is much that one could say about these grotesque examples of medical "treatment." For one thing, notice the tendency to assume that female sexual desire was inherently destructive--to both self and society--and to describe female masturbation as if it were a variety of nymphomania. The basic logic was that masturbation allegedly stimulated sexual desire, which let to more masturbation, creating a vicious circle. The decline of the health of the masturbator was one obvious effect, but there was a deeper, more subtle male fear potential social disruption. #Click here# for more on this topic. Moreover, masturbation of any kind came to be viewed as a severe addiction, similar to opium addiction, for example, though with worse consequences. Another development reflected in these passages was an increasing concern about children and masturbation. Even before Freud formally postulated that children are sexual beings, physicians were warning parents to be ever alert for subtle behaviors that may signal the start of this potentially deadly practice in children, even small ones.

When confronted with passages like those quoted throughout this essay, it is hard for many contemporary readers to understand how physicians could possibly have seen such things. Surely they must have been lying or otherwise dishonest, we might think. Strange as it may seem, however, there is no good reason to doubt that most physicians performing, for example, female circumcision, were anything but sincere in thinking that the operation could be of benefit. Most people (except possibly for some visionaries and critics) are steeped in our own cultural milieu and take its assumptions for granted as obvious truths. Today we tend to think that the process of observation is, or at least can be, objective. In other words, we are capable of seeing (or otherwise perceiving) something simply as it is, without the mediation of emotions, biases, fears, greed, past training and knowledge, and other such influences. But such "objective" observation is impossible. We necessarily filter what we perceive through a complex network of personal and social screens. If we did not, everything would be random and nothing would make sense. In the case of the Great Masturbation Scare, there were a number of factors at work, perhaps the most important being that we tend to see what we have been conditioned to expect to see.

Let us take a quick example, not directly connected with the Masturbation Scare. Christian missionaries from the United States who volunteered to go to China in the nineteenth century arrived there with a strong, powerful set of beliefs about how the universe works and about Chinese culture and civilization. Thanks to their prior training, they "knew," for example, that "the Chinese" worshipped idols. They also "knew" (i.e., believed) that idolatry was a craven, debasing sin—the ultimate offense against "Him." They knew that idolaters had so debased themselves as to have, for all practical purposes, renounced their humanity. The depravity of such people, would, of course, make itself manifest in various ways, most notably in the form of sexual debauchery. And sure enough, wherever most missionaries went in China, they reported acts of mass "diabolical ecstasy" such as midnight orgies in the streets or in temples.

But nobody could possibly have seen such a thing in China then--nobody did such things. Yes, of course there were various forms of sexual activity and entertainment to be had in China, but never in public and never in the manner described in many of the missionary accounts. It was a case of these missionaries "seeing" what they expected to see by projecting images from their own minds onto China as if that far off land were a blank screen. On a more general level, the same phenomenon is how Orientalism was produced: by projecting mental images onto the lands of the "Orient." And, likewise, nineteenth-century physicians "knew" that masturbation was widespread, addictive, and dangerous.

A stock set of images portraying *"the masturbator"* had become well established in medical and popular literature by mid century. S/he was characterized, among other things, by a lack of vigor and energy, a pale complexion, nervousness, inability to concentrate, excessive sensitivity to certain stimuli, deterioration of mental capabilities, and proneness to a variety of more serious illnesses including blindness and insanity. Driven by an uncontrollable urge to masturbate, the wretched addict would eventually succumb to one or more of these illnesses. There was even a physician who quite seriously reported that a male patient had become so badly "drained" by uncontrollable masturbation that his brain had dried up and shriveled to the point that the doctor could hear it rattling around inside the man's skull. It is as if the vitality of his brain had escaped through his penis (which surely could not be possible—right, ladies?).

What other factors may be at work in this medical discourse on masturbation, which, when seen from today's perspective, often appears so absurd? What was the ability of physicians in 1750 or 1850 to explain most disease conditions by means of identifying specific microbial pathogens, genetic conditions, transformations in cell metabolism, and so forth?--not much by today's standards? It was only in the 1840s, for example, that physicians began to wash their hands before and after surgical procedures. This change significantly reduced deaths in hospitals by infections transmitted by the foul hands of examining physicians (talk about "self pollution"!). In this context of relatively hazy medical knowledge, masturbation was a godsend, because it could help explain nearly any disease otherwise unexplainable. And, after all, we know you've done it—don't be in denial! As Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz points out:

It may be no coincidence that as the causes of many of the allegedly masturbation-induced ailments known, physicians gradually began to downgrade the threat of onanism. By the 1920s and 30s, masturbation had quietly slipped out of the respected medical journals, but popular belief typically lags well behind changes in scientific knowledge. Thus, for example, we can find questions to doctors from that time by parents worried about the possibility that their children may have masturbated. Might lingering anxiety from this era have been one reason for the vigorous public outcry against then Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who was quickly fired in 1994 for publicly suggesting that school sex education should speak positively of masturbation? (Incidentally, she was accused of saying that schools should teach children how to masturbate—which she did not say. Another case, perhaps, of people seeing/hearing what they expect to see/hear?). In any case, let us return to the nineteenth century to examine several other important developments.

Fear of masturbation combined with embarrassment about it helped nourish a sub-section of the medical devices and pharmaceuticals industries. By the turn of the twentieth century, a concerned parent could select from a wide #array of anti-masturbation devices# that worked on several different principles. Incidentally, is it possible to buy anti-masturbatory devices even today?--#click here for a humorous example#. What may be the first audio book sold in America was a set of wax cylinder recordings (ca. 1900, before the days of vinyl records) called What a Young Boy Ought to Know. The cylinders contained twenty-four sermon-like talks by Rev. Dr. Sylvanus Stall, a great crusader against the scourge of "solitary vice." (#more details#). Mail order houses sold patent medicines claiming to reduce the urge to masturbate (along with "cures" for smoking, opium use, alcohol, etc.).

By the late nineteenth century, public health had become a legitimate area of involvement for governments and corps of specialists. In addition to such measures as regular trash pick up and disposal, governments in Europe and different parts of the United States began to regulate prostitution, gambling, and other vices. In the twentieth century, the federal government even got involved in the act. Prohibition is most famous (or infamous), but it was also in the early twentieth century that the feds discovered the evils of marijuana, and later, the opiates and a variety of other recreational drugs. The legal prohibition of these substances, which most of us assume is essential for maintaining the social order, is a twentieth-century phenomenon. One could make a good case that the prohibition of marijuana, for example, is and was a case of government trying to legislate a combination of morality and culture, but the main official justification is and was personal and public health. One characteristic of most modern societies is a pronounced intermingling of political, cultural, and health issues. Why, for example, is marijuana so much less "healthy" than alcohol? Presumably because, during the early twentieth century, it was the recreational drug of choice among immigrants from Central America and among jazz and blues musicians.

Masturbation did not receive the same formal legal attention as did some of the other vices, probably because of the impossibility of policing it given the technology of 1900 or so. By "policing," I mean the formal sense of inspection by agents of the state. The medical community and its related industries, however, did a good job of inspiring and equipping parents (and to a lesser extend educators) to police masturbation in the home and school. And there was a new urgency in the late nineteenth century as masturbation became linked with decline of nations and a rising tide of "feeble-minded" people who threatened, in the eyes of alarmists of the day, to overrun society with idiots (more below).

Lasting about two centuries, the Great Masturbation Scare started with a clever sales pitch for nostrums but was sustained in large part by concerns of a more noble sort: the health of the nation. England was among the earliest places in which modern national consciousness developed. Still, in the early eighteenth century when the furor over masturbation began, national consciousness was relatively weak. By the start of the nineteenth century, however, national consciousness was strong throughout the British Isles and was rapidly developing in most parts of western Europe. Although nationalist writings often tie the nation closely to a specific geographical region, nations are groups of people more than anything else. Therefore, the health of specific members of the national community may potentially have an impact on the health of the national body as a whole.

Recall also that nationalist thinking was often interconnected with notions of "race." In the nineteenth century, therefore, the following terms, though differing slightly in nuance, would typically have been very close in meaning: "the French people," "the French race," "the French nation," "La France" (but not "the French government"). Indeed, by about 1860, the notion that there is a physiological basis for culture, and thus for "national characteristics" of various people had become common sense among educated people throughout most of the western world. Two decades later, Social Darwinism added a sense of dog-eat-dog competition to the whole mix. Not surprisingly, it was during the late nineteenth century that we find the emergence of a variety of plans and proposals for "improving the race" or "improving the nation." Generally termed "eugenics," such proposals were almost always grounded in physical improvements, even if they also contained broader educational components. Hailed as "progressive," "modern," and/or "scientific," states gradually began to enact parts of these race/nation improvement schemes—as we see in more detail in the next section.

The way of thinking indicated by this set of equations became common in the nineteenth century. As a result, masturbation became not only a threat to personal health, but to national health as well. Masturbation, quite literally, rotted the social fabric of nations, as the following passage from a medical dictionary of 1819 explains:

In addition to the broad point about masturbation now (in the nineteenth century) being a threat to the nation itself, two other points strike me as interesting about this passage and the many others like it. Notice here that the masturbator is less a victim to be pitied than a threat to be contained. As a French physician pointed out in 1852, masturbation is a "potent cause of depopulation, whose effects are all the more fatally disastrous since, although it may not kill, it tends to bastardize, bestialize, degrade, and degenerate the species."^vii In other words, were masturbation to kill its perpetrators/victims quickly, it would be less dangerous to the whole of society (or the whole human species). But because masturbators usually live, albeit wretchedly, for a considerable span of years, their pernicious influence degrades everyone an everything around them.

Notice also in the longer passage quoted above the characterization of the masturbator as existing in a state of "languor and exhaustion." It was precisely such terms that so often characterized the "Orient" in European writings. Just as the societies of the Orient (allegedly) exhausted themselves and have long been stagnant, so too, are the (assumed) dynamic societies of western Europe susceptible to the same fate should masturbation continue in its current epidemic proportions.

Indeed, according to many nineteenth-century experts, there existed no greater threat to civilized societies than masturbation. According to public hygienist Joseph Henri Reveillé-Parise, for example, "Masturbation . . . is one of those scourges that attack and soundly destroy humanity. . . . In my opinion, neither the plague, nor war, nor smallpox, nor innumerable other such evils produce as disastrous results for humanity as this fatal habit. It is the destroyer of civilized societies, and all the more active since it operates continually and saps the generations."^viii One wonders how any of us today even has the energy to stand up with all the masturbatorial sapping that must have gone on until now! Or, perhaps public hygienists, physicians, and other nineteenth-century exerted enough influence to have arrested the masturbation epidemic, thus allowing us to live vigorously in today?(!)

Vernon A. Rosario may well be the foremost expert on the history of masturbation in Europe. He makes the following generalization about the nineteenth century:

This passage may need brief explanation. Rousseau has been immensely influential—right up to the present day—as an advocate of the notion that nature is benign and society is corrupting. Rousseau saw masturbation as a terrible evil and described in detail his own activities in this realm in his Confessions. He argued that it was the corrupting influence of society that led to such unnatural acts as masturbation and that humans living a simple life amidst nature would never do such things. Rousseau, as it turned out, was wrong about this point and many others. So what Rosario is saying is that in the nineteenth century, while the negative view of masturbation continued or intensified, the causal sequence came to be reversed in the minds of most experts. Instead of it being the case that society destroys people through such things as masturbation, they tended to argue that masturbators destroy society through their deeds. Not surprisingly, this latter way of thinking became a rallying cry by which society's institutions, especially the family, schools, and the medical community, sought to combat masturbation.

Notice in the various quotations from expert literature the claim that masturbation enfeebles not only the body, but the mind itself. Notice also in the nineteenth-century examples, the implication that such enfeeblement might be passed on into future generations. During the late nineteenth century, a number of additional factors began to inform the discourse on masturbation. As you probably know, #Charles Darwin# began publishing his work on natural selection in mid century, and #Gregor Mendel# did his seminal work in genetics in the 1860s. Soon thereafter, in 1883, these new areas of knowledge gave rise to eugenics, the science of human (sometimes other species as well) improvement through genetic manipulation or control.

There are two points that should be emphasized right from the start of any discussion of eugenics in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. First, compared with today, the scientific knowledge of genetics in those days was extremely crude and inaccurate (as, no doubt, will today's knowledge appear to later generations). Science tends to work in a pragmatic fashion. If there are pieces of a puzzle that are missing, it is common to fill them in with seemingly reasonable assumptions and see of there is any useful application from the resulting model. But what is "reasonable" is a function of culture, and, of course, differs with time and place. The same applies to what is "useful." In other words--and this is the second point--science never operates in a rarified vacuum, insulated from culture and politics. Instead, it is one of the social practices. This point should not imply that science is somehow deficient or unworthy because it is a social practice. It is simply to point out that scientists are humans and subject to the same mental and emotional processes as everyone else. Some would claim that the "scientific method" insulates the process of science from human shortcomings, but it has demonstrably failed to do so throughout human history thus far. Eugenics is closely related to scientific racism and Social Darwinism, all of which were legitimate, indeed, cutting-edge bodies of scientific knowledge in the late nineteenth century (for a lucid account of scientific racism, eugenics, and related matters, see #Gould, The Mismeasure of Man#).

One other important point to bear in mind is that Charles Darwin's theoretical work was terribly complex, and many interpreters of it based their findings on simplified versions—simplified to the point of error. Also, there were numerous non-Darwinian theories of evolution around both before and after the publication of Darwin's theory of natural selection. Throughout the nineteenth century, it was common in learned discourse to find Darwinian and non-Darwinian (especially #Lamarkian#) evolution intermixed. Of particular importance is the widely-held but incorrect notion that #characteristics an organism acquires# in its lifetime can be passed on to its offspring. According to Lamarkian evolutionary theory, such a thing is possible; in Darwinian evolution it is not. Although today, the Darwinian view alone enjoys scientific validity, many non-scientists still think in Lamarkian terms. A century ago, a Lemarkian-style line of thought regarding acquired characteristics was not uncommon in the writings social scientists.

Although in hindsight, the knowledge base of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century geneticists, public hygienists, "scholars of racial improvement," and the like appears terribly limited, in its heyday, eugenics was the ideal of modern, progressive knowledge. Its practitioners generally had complete confidence in the epistemological (= methods and starting assumptions about what constitutes knowledge) framework in which they worked. They sought to provide positive (= quantifiable) knowledge for the benefit of society, and they were highly influential.

Perhaps their greatest overall fear was feeble-mindedness, or, more specifically, that, "advanced nations" might be overwhelmed by people of inferior intelligence, either as a result of immigration and/or birth rate differentials (i.e., that less intelligent people allegedly have more children). Perhaps the most notorious example of this sort of science in the United States was the work of Henry Goddard, Director of the Research Laboratory of the Training School at Vineland, New Jersey, for Feeble-minded Girls and Boys. Through his reconstruction of the "Kallikak" family, Goddard argued that morons (a category of feeble-mindedness higher than "idiots" or "imbeciles") are the greatest danger to civilized society because, while idiots and imbeciles are too impaired to reproduce, morons appear normal and, especially because they tend toward sexual promiscuity, send large numbers of feeble-minded offspring into society. His conclusion was that morons should be sought out by the state, segregated from the rest of society in state-run institutions, trained to lead a semi-productive life, and sterilized before being allowed to re-enter society at large.

You can read his whole study #here,# but be aware that the photographs of the feeble-minded side of the Kallikak family that Goddard presents were doctored by hand to produce the appearance of stupidity (objective science, no doubt!). Goddard's work was highly influential: nearly every U.S. state and Canadian province passed mandatory sterilization laws, which were enforced in some localities as late as the early 1970s. Among other things, these laws (and Goddard's science) were based on the belief that "intelligence" was definable, measurable, and transmitted from one generation to the next via a single genetic agent (gene). Although this notion is ludicrously simplistic by today's standards, Goddard's favorite instrument, IQ tests, are still in serious use in society.

The previous paragraphs may seem like a long digression, and in a sense, they are. But they are essential for understanding the continued furor over masturbation at a time (ca. 1890-1910) when physicians should finally have realized its harmlessness. The ideas of Darwinian struggle and racial improvement are even more important for understanding the campaign against masturbation in East Asia, where, above all else, masturbation was seen as playing into the hands of the western imperialists owing to its tendency to degrade the mental and physical fitness of "the Japanese race," "the Chinese race," etc.

Let us take a quick look at specific European pronouncements about masturbation and feeble-mindedness. Links between masturbation and mental illness were already present in the medical literature of the early nineteenth century. Indeed, throughout the nineteenth century masturbation gradually tended to be categorized as the manifestation of a mental disorder, albeit one with severe physical consequences. As Szasz points out:

Masturbation was—and, in principle, remains—the ideal mental illness. First, it is a form of behavior: that is, something people do, not something that happens to them. Second, it is a form of behavior universal to mankind, engaged in from early childhood: this makes it ideally treatable, since behaviors can be controlled, especially in children who are powerless to resist the well-intentioned brutality of adults. Third, the act makes use of a sexual organ, ideally suited for attaching fantasies of great harm (as well as great pleasure) to its uses and abuses^.^x

It also became common medical knowledge that "idiots" and other mentally deficient persons had a particularly strong urge to masturbate. Whether this (alleged) penchant for masturbation was the result of idiocy (or whatever) or the cause of it was often left unclear. A typical line explanation, however, common as late as the early twentieth century, posits first that masturbation harms the reproductive powers of men and women. For men, typically their semen is of "inferior quality," "thin," "tired," "lacking in vitality," and so forth. Owing to this reproductive harm, when masturbators do manage to produce offspring, such children will likely inherit a feeble mind and body as a result of the reproductive weakness of one or both parents. And I am sure you can imagine the rest of the sequence: personal decline, societal decline, national decline, degradation of the whole human species—the same old story.

Incidentally, rhetoric of social decline, lack of reproductive fitness, and personal illness seems to be a significant part of contemporary discussion of masturbation in many Islamic web sites, according to Brian Whitaker, in an article published in The Guardian. Consider the following two paragraphs from the piece:

It appears that the same old story still retains vitality in some contemporary circles. And it seems to me making at least something of a comeback in certain forms of Christian discourse as well.

There are a few more loose ends to wrap up in our brief history of the "solitary vice."

Writing from the standpoint of the history of medicine, Szasz points out that: "Not surprisingly, masturbation is a disease of modernity. In antiquity and the Dark Ages, people worried about real diseases, such as the plague and consumption. Only after the Enlightenment did people awaken to the possibilities of scientific medicine, assigning material (physical), rather than spiritual (religious), causes to disease, disability, and death."^xi There are other links between masturbation and modernity, though I will describe them only briefly (because I'm getting really, really tired and worn out for some inexplicable reason and want to finish writing this thing!)

Male fear of female sexuality seems to be a universal phenomenon throughout history. In many parts of the modern West, this fear became particularly pronounced as women began to demand an equal social footing with men in a world where sheer physical strength was becoming steadily less important. One manifestation of this fear in the Western world of the late nineteenth century was a tendency for men to seek to control and regulate sexuality through official and unofficial social institutions. In this scheme, masturbation was a severe problem because of the difficulty in policing it:

Male fear of female sexuality can also be found in modern Japan and elsewhere in East Asia, but it was not closely connected with anti-masturbation campaigns. Fear of national weakness was a much higher priority, owing, no doubt to the very real threat of imperialism.

Masturbation was also linked in both Europe and East Asia with homosexuality and thus homophobia. This topic is so large that I will not discuss it here at any length, but bear in mind that like masturbation, homosexuality also became a medical condition in need of expert treatment during the nineteenth century. It, too, was linked in the popular mind with all manner of social problems. Many of the same characteristics assigned to the masturbator were also assigned to homosexuals. And this similarity was no accident, for anti-masturbation literature often characterized the practice as leading to homosexuality. Therefore, to many nineteenth-century social reformers, the control of masturbation would also, at least to some extent, assist in the control of homosexuality.

One example of the extent of nineteenth-century anti-masturbatory fears and their intersection with notions of modernity is in the sudden rise in popularity of circumcision as a routine medical procedure in the Western world performed on virtually all newborn male infants, often without anesthesia. What is especially remarkable (and indicative of the power of the masturbation scare) is that the nineteenth century was a time of strong anti-Semitism in much of Europe, and circumcision was closely associated with Jewish religious practices. Nevertheless, Europeans and Americans of all social and religious groups began to demand the procedure. Indeed, by the turn of the twentieth century circumcision had come to be regarded as an example of modernity par excellence and was rapidly losing its mental associations with a particular religion.

"But circumcision is medically useful, resulting in better hygiene," you might be thinking, and, indeed, that was precisely the sales pitch for what would otherwise seem to many a horrible procedure (and which can have significant complications). In fact, however, current medical opinion does not recognize any health benefits from the procedure except in a very small percentage of cases. Radio personality Dr. Dean Edell is a widely-know critic of circumcision (and, incidentally, he is Jewish) thanks to his widely-syndicated radio programs. Indeed, the good doctor even put a picture of an intact (non-circumcised) penis on his web site, which, he later reported, saw much traffic from curious female surfers who had never before seen an intact penis. So do you want to see it? Well, I'm too tired (and why could that be?) to go digging around for it, but if you will do the leg work, you should be able to find it somewhere in the #Circumcision site.#

From what I have heard of him on the radio (which is rather little), several times Dr. Edell expressed bafflement as to how the practice of circumcision could have become so well entrenched in both society and the medical community. Well, you have probably guessed it: the Great Masturbation Scare is the key to explaining this matter, at least in large part. Indeed, not all advocates of circumcision presented the matter pleasantly. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg, for example, medical doctor, inventor of corn flakes, and a vigorous crusader against sex, had the following advice:

More typically, the case for circumcision was made on the grounds of cleanliness and hygiene, two buzzwords of the late nineteenth century taken up with particular enthusiasm by the growing middle class. The basic logic was simply that the foreskin was prone to getting dirt and gunk lodged in it. This crud caused mild itching. Itching results in scratching. And scratching is nearly the same as masturbating. For a more rigorous examination of this matter, see the following short article: #"Male Masturbation and the Offending Prepuce."#

The prestige of western scientific knowledge became immense in Japan during the nineteenth century and in China slightly later, at the start of the twentieth century. The reasons were simple and practical: these countries were powerful and a potential or real threat. National strength became the highest priority in the context of the imperialist threat. In this context, along with western medical and social theories came a voluminous literature on the terrible dangers of masturbation. Had this literature been part of western moral or religious teaching only, many learned East Asians would have dismissed it as absurd. But because the horror of masturbation was a western medical truth, and one with direct links to the health of nations, it was accepted as dogma by nearly all medical professionals—or at least by the true elites, whose proof of superior standing was their knowledge of advanced western theory. In Japan, German medicine became the professional standard, and its anti-masturbational literature was as lurid as that of Britain, France, or the United States. So, not only did westerners have to suffer pain and guilt over this universal practice, but so, too, did several generations of Japanese and other East Asians. Hey, you scientist guys: thanks a lot!

iVernon A. Rosario, The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 17.

iiiQuoted in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl," Paula Bennett and Vernon A. Rosario II, eds., Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism (New York: Routledge, 1995), p. 142.

vThomas Szasz, "The Therapeutic State: Remembering Masturbatory Insanity," Ideas on Liberty, 50.5 (May 2000), http://www.fee.org/iol/00/0005/szasz.html

viQuoted in Rosario, The Erotic Imagination, p. 39. Italics added by Rosario.

xiiIsis Creations, Sexuality and Modernity, "Victorian Sexuality," http://www.isis.aust.com/stephan/writings/sexuality/vict.htm

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