more extensive and unaffected pleasure

[lotesse]

Why, when discussing eighteenth-nineteenth(twentieth-)century anti-novel rhetoric, does no one address the discursive parallels with injunctions against onanism/masturbation? (and does anyone know of a book that does? because I would totally read that book.)

Comments

[ithiliana]

Google FU!

http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=9571

At a time when almost any victimless sexual practice has its public advocates and almost every sexual act is fit for the front page, the easiest, least harmful, and most universal one is embarrassing, discomforting, and genuinely radical when openly acknowledged. Masturbation may be the last taboo. But this is not a holdover from a more benighted age. The ancient world cared little about the subject; it was a backwater of Jewish and Christian teaching about sexuality. In fact, solitary sex as a serious moral issue can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history; Laqueur identifies it with the publication of the anonymous tract Onania in about 1722. Masturbation is a creation of the Enlightenment, of some of its most important figures, and of the most profound changes it unleashed. It is modern. It worried at first not conservatives, but progressives. It was the first truly democratic sexuality that could be of ethical interest for women as much as for men, for boys and girls as much as for their elders.

The book's range is vast. It begins with the prehistory of solitary sex in the Bible and ends with third-wave feminism, conceptual artists, and the Web. It explains how and why this humble and once obscure means of sexual gratification became the evil twin—or the perfect instance—of the great virtues of modern humanity and commercial society: individual moral autonomy and privacy, creativity and the imagination, abundance and desire.

[lotesse]

Oh my god, you - this is great! I've got, like, a whole bibliography now! *bows to your superior google-fu, scuttles off the the library*

[ineptshieldmaid]

olitary sex as a serious moral issue can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history; Laqueur identifies it with the publication of the anonymous tract Onania in about 1722

As a medievalist I dispute this assertion!

[ithiliana]

As someone who lives with a medieval historian, I know that a whole slew of people in academia tend to think that everything starts in the "early modern period" and know sod all about the Middle Ages. I don't know Laqueur's training, but I do know the book has had a lot of critical criticism (I keep telling myself I should read it, I just never get around to it--am much more drawn by the other book I mentioned above)

[oursin]

That is certainly a very weird blurb, since what happens with Onania-mania is that what used to be a sin becomes a medically-dangerous practice. It also gets a different publication date for The Big O than the book itself, which places it about a decade earlier as I recall!

[oursin]

Be aware that a lot of what Laqueur presents as his own discovery has been well-known for decades - for heaven's sake, Havelock Ellis pointed out the Onania thing in the 1900s and there has been much subsequent historiography.

He also manages to leave out the entire Victorian era, and I have a lot of other problems with that book, but will leave there as I have to go to work.

[oursin]

I was pretty sure that the late, great Roy Porter had written on the subject, but given how prolific he was, not precisely where. I have ascertained that there is a chapter on enlightenment masturbation phobia in The Facts of Life which may give refs to articles etc; plus, he may well have revisited in his work on the English enlightenment.