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The decloseting of masturbation?

Article Excerpt
The Joy of Self-Pleasuring: Why Feel Guilty About Feeling Good? By Edward L. Rowan. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000, 226 pages. Paper, $19.00.

Masturbation as Means of Achieving Sexual Health. Edited by Walter O. Bockting and Eli Coleman. New York: Haworth, 2002, 147 pages. Paper, $17.95.

Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror. By Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck (Translated from the French by Kathryn A. Hoffmann). New York: Palgrave, 2001, 239 pages. Hardcover, $24.95.

Freud wrote much about masturbation, perhaps most quotably in his wrap-up of the 1912 symposium on "Onanie" for the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. After summarizing at length the group's agreements and disagreements, he concluded (almost throwing up his hands, we might imagine), "But I think the time has come to break off. For we are all agreed on one thing--that the subject of masturbation is quite inexhaustible" (Freud, 1912/1958, p. 254).

Masturbation may be inexhaustible as a topic, but there has not been any inexhaustible outpouring of books about it. Since the 1960s, only around 30 have appeared (this total includes 7 works of either fiction, jokes, or photos; Cornog, 2003, pp. 321-323). This is a paltry showing, considering the publishing torrent about sex during those decades--both scholarly and popular--and considering that masturbation is surely the second most common human sex act.

Of those 30 books about masturbation, 13 appeared in the 1990s and 5 since 2000. This bodes well. As we all know, the Kinsey reports and feminism opened up the topic toward the beginning of this period. Later, the Joycelyn Elders and Pee-Wee Herman scandals of the 1990s pushed the "M word" into the media, joining with the Bobbitt and Clinton-Lewinsky scandals that put penis and oral sex (perhaps even fellatio!) into public discourse. How many people thought that instead of firing Elders, Clinton should...