"sex with somebody i love"
3:24 a.m.

from sunday's s.f chronicle...

Master of his domain:

UC Berkeley professor studies how the stigma of masturbation has evolved

Sam McManis, Chronicle Deputy Living Editor Sunday, May 18, 2003

Books line every inch of wall space in Thomas W. Laqueur's office at UC Berkeley. They spill onto the floor in some spots, too, making the room feel more cloistered than cozy. But the tenured history professor behind the desk, wearing a tweed coat and thick-rimmed glasses, seems comfortable burrowing into this dusty academic setting.

Serious scholarship is done here, the feng shui of the place suggests. And just what weighty subject has the learned Laqueur exhaustively researched and pondered for much of the past 10 years?

Masturbation.

Stop snickering. Laqueur's 501-page tome, "Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation" (M.I.T. Zone, $34), released in March, is a high-minded academic study of how, since the 1700s, masturbation has been seen as a medical condition to be "cured" or a moral failing to be avoided. Even today, masturbation is not a polite topic of conversation; remember, speaking the M- word even cost former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders her job in 1995.

Despite the practice's enduring stigma, Laqueur's book has won rave reviews in the New Yorker, New York Times and Los Angeles Times. Still, he admits to feeling slightly frustrated that some in academia discount his work as frivolous and some in the book industry don't believe it's appropriate to promote his book because of the subject matter.

"If I were to write a bad book about the origins of the first World War, no one would laugh at it," Laqueur said. "But if you write a good book on this subject, people will say it's weird. . . . I couldn't have written this as an untenured faculty member. It's not serious enough. Bookshops, even in big cities, have told me, 'Listen, we can't have you be interviewed or make an appearance because this is a family bookshop.'

"The stigma lives. It's either treated as a super joke, like on 'Seinfeld,' or it's an outrage."

Laqueur's response to critics?

"I'd suspect that in human history, and in the development of how we feel about ourselves, it's as important a topic as what most historians write about, " he said.

Or, as comedian Woody Allen once said, "Hey, don't knock masturbation. It's sex with somebody I love."

Don't misunderstand. Laqueur's interest in the subject is anything but prurient. He is not interested in the act itself -- though he does present a hilarious catalog of 19th century anti-masturbatory medical devices, such as "erection alarms, sleeping mitts and . . . hobbles to keep girls from spreading their legs" -- but rather the demonization of the sexual practice starting in the 1700s.

At times, it bordered on hysteria. Respected medical professionals of their era were convinced that the practice of solitary sex depleted mind and body. Samuel Auguste Tissot, one of the most respected physicians of the Enlightenment, preached that masturbation was "much more to be dreaded than smallpox." Laqueur writes that doctors in the 1700s believed masturbation "could cause spinal tuberculosis, epilepsy, pimples, madness and other mental infirmities." Popular medical journals in Victorian England described masturbators thusly: "Pale, desiccated limbs, hollow chest, powerless, sunken head, dead white face, eyelids falling powerlessly over his dying fading eyes."

Freud, of course, would have his say a century later. Laqueur writes that "Freud traced anxiety neurosis, obsession, narcissism, hysterical vomiting, repressed memories of infantile sexuality and, arguably, guilt itself to the psyche's confrontation with its primal force of sexual satisfaction."

And don't forget that masturbation can make a person go blind, too.

That theory, Laqueur says, came from the 1752 edition of Robert James' famous "Medicinal Dictionary." James told of a case study in which a boy who, because of this "preposterous entertainment," wrote in exceedingly smaller and smaller handwriting until he nearly went blind.

Laughable as those diagnoses seem today, they were deadly serious at the time.

"These were not crackpots," Laqueur said. "It wasn't just fringe people. It was the mainstream founders of modern thinking who got wild about this stuff. Kant and Rousseau and Voltaire."

The genesis of the masturbation hysteria was the 1712 English tract "Onania; or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences in Both SEXES, Considered, With Spiritual and Physical Advice to Those Who Have Already Injur'd Themselves by This Abominable Practice." It was written, Laqueur speculates, by a quack doctor named John Marten in order to sell bogus "cures."

But the anti-masturbation theory caught on and thrived in 18th century society. He posits that it was a response to rapid industrialization and the growing commercial economy that "promised undreamed-of abundance." Masturbation was linked with abundance, and its self-gratification used as a metaphor for unbridled freedom.

"Masturbation hijacked some of the central virtues of civil society and transformed them into evils," Laqueur writes.

That this attitude endured, in some form, into the 20th century is a testimony to the anxiety surrounding the practice. In the past 50 years, even as the medicinal and moral fears of masturbation has ebbed, the stigma remains.

Now, Laqueur says, masturbation is used as a metaphor for any form of self- indulgence. An inward-looking film director, for instance, is said to practice "cinematic masturbation." It's become a word of derision.

"Masturbation is embarrassing to many because, unlike other forms of sexuality that are studied -- like pederasty or age-of-consent laws -- we can't really distance ourselves from this," he said. "It hits close to home. We talk about every other form of sexuality in public but this."

As a historian, Laqueur is sometimes asked to predict masturbation's role in future generations. He paused a long while, then cracked a slight smile.

"I suspect it'll be still around," he said, "but I don't know how it'll be moralized."