Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The history of masturbation – self-pleasuring solitary sex – includes countless episodes of definition and redefinition. Intellectuals from Jean-Jacques Rousseau to Ludwig Wittgenstein agonized over masturbation. American social purists called for prohibitions against it. Sigmund Freud and his disciples debated it. By the early 1990s, an American surgeon general would be fired merely for suggesting that it was a worthy alternative to abstinence or unsafe sex. From the thirteenth century until the mid-twentieth century, masturbation was viewed as a moral flaw. St. Thomas Aquinas noted that masturbation signaled the beginning of a slippery slope leading to sodomy, adultery, and bestiality; thus, in Summa Theologica , he categorized it with other “luxuria,” signifying crimes against nature. Aquinas and others like him viewed masturbation as a gateway pleasure, much like marijuana is said to be a gateway to heroin: not very dangerous in and of itself, but capable of opening countless subversive possibilities. Like any sexual act other than reproductive missionary-position intercourse, masturbation was assumed to be a sin of irrational gratification – suspect because it emphasized pleasure over procreation. Medieval and early modern church leaders feared that the impure act of masturbation could overwhelm the sexual body of the laity. Thus, studies of masturbation grapple with core ... log in or subscribe to read full text