An Unmanly Vice: Self-Pollution, Anxiety, and the Body in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The campaign against masturbation offers one of the outstanding success stories in the history of medical popularization. This paper seeks to identify the reasons for this success, focusing on the campaign's early stages, from the late seventeenth century onwards. It first identifies a series of often quite explicit political, ideological, and economic motives such as religious notions of 'uncleaniness', bourgeois concerns about self-control, marriage, and population growth, and the financial interests of the London veneral trade. Drawing, in particular, on the 'confessions of self-declared victims of masturbation in eighteenth-century patient letters, it then shows that the physical and mental symptoms attributed to masturbation very successfully addressed some of the deepest anxieties in contemporary society, anxieties about virility, gender identity, and physical selfhood. Finally, applying Bourdieu's notion of 'habitus', the central role of a new, implicitly male, more solid, closed and self-contained dominant body image is underlined. Framing the interpretation and the very experience of the body among the proponents and the recipients of anti-onanist discourse alike, it helped to make the dangers of masturbation an almost irrefutable, objective truth.

Masturbation in a Generational Perspective

“…In the texts of Simon André Tissot (1974), first published in 1758, masturbation was fully medicalized. Tissot paid special attention to the effects of masturbation on the nervous system (Stolberg, 2000). He claimed that masturbation caused an excessive blood flow to the brain that can result in impotence and insanity (Kay, 1992).…”

“…The Western medical profession created the concept of postmasturbatory disease that could cause impotence (Stolberg, 2000). Masturbating women were said to develop an unnaturally enlarged, penis-like clitoris, or to lose their attractiveness.…”

“…According to the masturbation neurosis hypothesis, excessive masturbation was claimed to cause draining of sexual energy that could give rise to neurasthenia or neurosis (Kay, 1992). And still, physical damage caused by masturbation was argued to make a person engaged in masturbation incapable Osmo of consummating the marriage or of having children (Stolberg, 2000). The aim of these invented threats was to prevent masturbation via fear and guilt.…”

Sexuality And Soldiery Combat & Condoms, Continence & Cornflakes

“…Debates about the link drew on explicit political, ideological and economic motives of the time and included moral, religious notions of 'uncleanliness' and bourgeois concerns about self-control, marriage and population growth. In this way some of the physical and mental symptoms attributed to masturbation successfully addressed deep contemporary societal anxieties about virility, gender identity and physical selfhood (36).…”

Body, Mind and Spirits: The Physiology of Sexuality in the Culture of Sensibility

“…In his study of masturbation in eighteenth-century medical writing Michael Stolberg observes that 'fears of semen loss in ejaculation were indeed an important and persistent feature'. 64 This fear was predicated on 'mechanical philosophy and physiology', which, as Sutton expounds, 'provided newly explicit mechanisms to explain why those partial to the expense of spirits in sexual activity would inevitably lose their intellectual vigour'. 65 These interpretations dovetail with Laqueur's description of a prominent 'moral physiology' pertaining to sexuality at that time.…”