Put What Where? (7 page)
Authors: John Naish
MASTURBATION MANIA
From the early 1700s onwards, the innocent practice of self-love became synonymous with crippling illnesses, moral decay and hideous death. Why?
We can thank an anonymous quack from about 1710 for first pointing the finger of suspicion at the hairy palm of lone vice. Whoever the author was, snappy titles were not their strong point. Their pamphlet was called
Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution, And in all its frightful consequences, in both sexes, considered with physical and spiritual advice to those who have already injur’d themselves by this abominable practice. And seasonable admonition to the youth of the nation [of both sexes] and whose tuition they are under, whether parents, guardians, masters or mistresses.
In it, the author simply invented a new cause of widespread diseases by making a spurious connection between masturbation and the biblical story of Onan.
In
Solitary Sex: a cultural history of masturbation
, the historian Thomas Laqueur alleges that
Onania’s
author was an amateur doctor and surgeon called Dr
Marten (not he of footwear fame). Once Marten had invented the scourge of Onanism-related illnesses, claims Laqueur, he started to offer a range of steeply priced cures, such as ‘strengthening tincture’ and ‘prolific powder’. If that is true, it makes Marten an early pioneer of the widespread modern pharmaceutical company marketing trick of creating a new disease, scaring people about it in the press, and then launching (fortuitously) a costly cure. Newly minted health problems such as Social Anxiety Disorder and Information Fatigue Syndrome may thus be merely latter-day versions of masturbation.
The biblical Onan gets a bad press from here onwards. It’s not justified: in the Old Testament story, he was instructed by God to impregnate the widow of his recently dead brother – an ancient Hebrew tradition that aimed to ensure there were family heirs. Onan wasn’t keen on perpetuating his brother’s bloodline, so he pulled out of his sister-in-law at the last minute. God struck him dead ‘for spilling his seed on the ground’ but he had committed coitus interruptus, not masturbation. Society was not prepared to let the facts ruin a good scare story, though, and masturbation mania swiftly began to take off. Marten’s pamphlet became wildly popular, disseminating the belief across Europe that Onanism was the cause of diseases ranging from tuberculosis to third-stage syphilis. By 1750, it had been published in 19 editions and sold 38,000 copies.
Soon came the copycats. In 1717, a hugely popular free handout,
Practical Schemes for the Secret
Disease and Broken Constitutions
, was published with a new section on self-abuse by the most popular contemporary advisor on painkillers in Great Britain, the self-styled Mr Anodyne Necklace. He subsequently published similar rants:
The Crime of Onan, Eromania
and a further follow-up,
Eromania; on the crimes of those two unhappy brothers Er and Onan.
Other publishers’ titles included
Onania displayd
, in which the word Onanism was originally coined.
In 1758, Samuel Tissot, a Swiss doctor, threw more fuel on the fire by publishing,
L’Onanisme, ou dissertation physique sur les maladies produites par la masturbation
, which, through its hundreds of editions, variations and imitators spread further fear of the evils of self-pleasure and ‘postmasturbatory disease’ throughout the Continent. He argued from the perspective of ‘medical science’ that the unnatural loss of semen weakened mind and body and led to insanity. The book was still in print as recently as 1905. Along with Marten’s work, Tissot’s writings moved like some terrible contagion across the Atlantic to America. Their influence there, as we shall see, was of another magnitude entirely.
Loose Women
Blondes
Giovanni Sinibaldi,
Rare Verities, the Cabinet of Venus Unlock’d
(1658)
ALL women are Lascivious, but auburn blondes the most ... A little straight forehead denotes an unbridled appetite in Lust.
Actors’ wives
Kama Sutra
of Vatsyayana (3rd century), translated by Sir Richard F. Burton and F.F. Arbuthnot (1883)
The following are the women who are easily gained over:
Women who stand at the doors of their houses
Women who are always Looking out on the street
Women who sit chatting in their neighbour’s house
A woman who is always staring at you
A woman who looks sideways at you
A woman whose husband has taken another wife without any just cause
A woman who hates her husband, or who is hated by him
A woman who has nobody to look after her, or keep her in check
A woman who has not had any children
A woman whose family or caste is not well known
A woman whose children are dead
A woman who is very fond of society
A woman who is apparently very affectionate with her husband
The wife of an actor
A widow
A poor woman
A woman who likes fun
The wife of a man with many younger brothers
A vain woman
A woman whose husband is inferior to her in rank or abilities
One who is proud of her skill in the arts
A woman mentally disturbed by her husband’s stupidity
A woman who has been married in her infancy to a rich man, and not liking him when she grows up, desires a man possessing a disposition, talents, and wisdom suitable to her own tastes
A woman who is slighted by her husband without any cause
A woman who is not respected by other women of the same rank or beauty as herself
A woman whose husband is devoted to travelling
The wife of a jeweller
A jealous woman
A covetous woman
An immoral woman
A barren woman
A lazy woman
A cowardly woman
A humpbacked woman
A dwarfish woman
A deformed woman
A vulgar woman
An ill-smelling woman
A sick woman
An old woman
Women only want one thing
Perfumed Garden
of Sheik Nefzaoui (16th century), translated into English by Sir Richard F. Burton
The woman loves the man only for the sake of coition. His member should, therefore, be of ample dimensions and length. Such a man ought to be broad in the chest, and heavy in the crupper; he should know how to regulate his emission, and be ready as to erection; his member should reach to the end of the canal of the female, and completely fill the same in all its parts. Such a one will be well beloved by women.
On the other hand
Dr William Acton,
Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs
(1858)
The majority of women (happily for them) are not very much troubled with sexual feelings of any kind. What men are habitually, women are only exceptionally.
And if you’re not convinced ...
George Napheys,
The Transmission of Life: counsels on the nature and hygiene of the masculine function
(1871)
Only in rare circumstances do women feel one tenth of the sexual feeling which is familiar to most men. Many of them are entirely frigid and not even in marriage do they ever perceive any real desire.
CARLILE, THE CONTRACEPTIVE CONVICT
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, conventional Christian belief still held that Onan’s true crime, practising coitus interruptus, was not the only method of contraception that might make God strike you dead – they all could.
Anything that prevented conception was banned in the belief that sex was for procreation. Fornication put you in the fast lane to the eternal flames. So who better to write the first published book on contraception than a convicted blasphemer? Even better, he composed it while in jail.
Richard Carlile, the author, was never really interested in sex books, but years later he told a rather pat anecdote about his moment of revelation. One day in 1812, when he was a young tinsmith, he was browsing at a Plymouth market bookstall and watched a serving maid arrive to pick up a book for her mistress. Carlile saw it was the
Masterpiece
, and that the maid had ‘looked up quite cunning, as if she had got a certain prize ... and scampered away delighted’. Carlile said he knew the
Masterpiece
was tosh – and that it didn’t even mention contraception.
So he resolved to produce a genuinely useful sex manual that could properly educate the poor young maids of this world.
It’s just the sort of idea that might have struck hundreds of people, but who really ever has the time or inclination? Thirteen years later, as a bookseller, radical publisher and journalist, Carlile found himself with both. He was serving six years in Dorchester prison for blasphemy (three years for the offence, three for being unable to pay the fine), having been prosecuted by the Evangelical Vice Society for selling Tom Paine’s
The Age of Reason.
But he was still working and publishing, so he wrote an article, ‘What is Love?’, for his sixpenny journal,
The Republican.
A year later, in 1826, he published an extended version as a pamphlet, called
Every Woman’s Book
, with a frontispiece featuring a full-frontal nude and unashamed Adam and Eve.
Carlile was actually a self-confessed prude, but his greatest passion was hatred of Christianity, so the book was his chance to attack the Church. It did not go into the details of techniques and tickles, but gave ordinary women clear advice on using contraceptive sponges, as well as promoting the pleasures of sex (though Onanism was, once again, a complete no-no). Birth control was, Carlile believed, a political tool – it could help to save poor families from growing too large and prevent young women falling pregnant and facing the devil’s dilemma of single motherhood or forced marriage. The book had social revolutionary aspects, too, championing free heterosexual intercourse, sexual rights for women
and male–female relationships outside marriage. Sexual intercourse should be accepted for what it is, he said, not simply as a means of reproduction but as a self-fulfilling pleasure in itself. It should, he argued, ‘be made a pleasure independent of the dread of a conception’.
The book got Carlile burned in effigy, threatened with drenching and denounced in a newspaper as the ‘pedagogue pander of lust’. It was popular, too, selling 10,000 copies in three years, with six editions published in Carlile’s lifetime and at least three afterwards. It was still selling strongly in the 1830s. Why did he get away with publishing it? Perhaps the authorities did not want a repeat of his trial for selling Paine’s
The Age of Reason.
As soon as he had been convicted and jailed, his wife committed the same crime and was jailed. Then his sister did the same. Then a steady flow of objectors followed suit, until the law effectively became unworkable and the authorities left Paine’s book alone. Carlile’s success allowed a spot of liberal rot to set in:
Every Woman’s Book
inspired several other authors. In 1832, two contraceptive tracts, Robert Dale Owen’s
Moral Physiology
and Charles Knowlton’s
Fruits of Philosophy, or the private companion of young married people
, were published. Knowlton published his anonymously and in it recommended post-coital douching. Owen, who became an American Congressman and co-founded the Smithsonian Institution, recommended coitus interruptus. Between them, the books dominated birth-control ideas in Britain for the next 40 years.