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The enlightenment as genesis of 18th-century masturbation degeneracy hysteria.

Article Excerpt
Solitary Sex." A Cultural History of Masturbation. By Thomas W. Laqueur. New York: Zone Books, 2003, 496 pages. Cloth, $34.00.

Why did social hysteria about masturbation appear so dramatically in Europe at the beginning of the 18th-century? Thomas W. Laqueur examines the history of masturbation in search of the answer to this question in Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. Scholars researching the history of masturbation in the West usually point to the early 18th-century anonymous publication of Onania: or the Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes Considered, as the first significant published source of misinformation that launched 2 centuries of medical and moral terror over masturbation. Laqueur agrees with this analysis, but views Onania simply as a seed that could only germinate and bear its destructive fruit if nurtured in the soil of a cultural climate vulnerable to its propositions. Laqueur argues that it was not just Onania's pronouncements and popularity that stigmatized masturbation and launched a new era of sexual fear, but it was also the philosophical environment of the Enlightenment that allowed social attitudes to evolve in a way that put masturbation in an entirely new light.

According to Laqueur, masturbation was no longer seen as simply an issue of sin, as it had been previously, but it also became a new form of secular social threat that Western societies desperately needed to control. "Beginning in the eighteenth century, solitary sex came to represent the relationship between the individual and the social world" (p. 22), says Laqueur, where the individual might...