9—PleasinG Ourselves—Solo Sex, or The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution
- jonsknowles
- 23 hours ago
- 27 min read
Two thousand years after Christians condemned all sex play except marital coitus, many of us are still shy about solo sex. This is a problem. Seymour Fisher warned, in his 1989 Sexual Images of the Self—The Psychology of Erotic Sensations and Illusions:
It is important to underscore that masturbation is more than a sexual act. It is also simultaneously a challenging statement of body ownership and therefore carries power implications.
John Ince warned, in his 2005 The Politics of Lust, that shame about solo sex is harmful:
The shameful masturbator fails to develop a slow, full-body autoerotic style. … Negativity aimed at the self is psychologically damaging. It impairs our sense of psychological wholeness and undermines our self-esteem. That, in turn, hinders our sense of independence and makes us more obedient to the control of others. … Further, a person who feels ‘dirty’ or ‘bad’ is far more likely to seek the approval of others to compensate for the lack of self-esteem. Shame about masturbation … grooms people for the political structure of dominance and submission.
Where does this shame come from? We aren’t born with it. Pre-Christian people held solo sex in high regard. The Sumerians believed Apsu created the Milky Way in a divine jerk-off session—each glowing star resulted from a splash of immortal seed. Here is an early text about his creation of the world:
I am he who copulated with his fist, as Apsu clasped the neck of his Mummu (phallus)
I excited pleasure in my shadow,
Semen resulted out of my mouth
What I ejected was Shu (Atmosphere)
What I spat out was Tefnet (Moisture)
My father Apsu (the Abyss) sent them.
In the Rig Veda, sexual desire created the universe. Egyptians considered it might have been autofellatio. For the Greeks, solo sex was a gift from the gods: Hermes taught his son, Pan, out of pity for the misery he felt because the nymph, Echo, rejected him. Pan learned the lesson well, was relieved, overcame grief, and taught the trick to human shepherds.
The third-century BCE philosopher Diogenes had solo sex in the agora to make the point that all human activities were worthy of being done publicly—none were so shameful that they required privacy. His fellow citizens disapproved of jerking off in public, but second-century CE doctor, Galen, admired him for that. He believed that orgasm from solo sex was good for guys, otherwise the buildup of semen could lead to madness.
The Old Testament doesn’t mention solo sex, and it wasn’t until the Christian era that it became taboo. Even though it is also not mentioned in the New Testament, Christians hated it as well as all other forms of sex play so much they warped the meaning of the story of Onan, claiming it was about God’s indictment of solo sex and not a punishment for violating a kinship tradition.
In 325, Christian hatred of sex took over the western world when Emperor Constantine and his Catholic Council at Nicea made sins and crimes of solo sex and fornication (sex outside marriage); young and old began to lie about sex play. Less than a century later, Augustine of Hippo’s most lasting legacy was his doctrine that solo sex was worse than rape because it was not reproductive.
Even wet dreams became suspect. Fifth-century Desert Father, John Cassian, dedicated a whole book in “Conferences” to ‘nocturnal illusions’—wet dreams. “Too much food or drink, a wandering mind, or a trick of the devil” caused them. They weren’t avoidable; although the natural humors of a man’s body build up, Cassian hoped monks could keep emissions down to one every two months.
Wet dreams, spontaneous erections, and the desire for solo sex constantly reminded abstinent Christians that their bodies were so weak that they were sinful no matter how hard they tried to not be. The more they abstained from sex, the more wet dreams they had. No matter how hard they tried to be chaste, sexy dreams and fantasies plagued them. Wet dreams, or the demons that caused them, victimized them and made them passive—like women.
Their idea that their bodies were out of control survived well into the 20th century. An older priest in my parish told me in the mid-60s how he and other priests avoided sins of the flesh and the buildup of fluid, which not only caused wet dreams, but also gave them prostatitis. Once a month, they’d all drive to the doctor, one-by-one they’d drop their pants to their ankles, and bend over the examining table. The doctor would insert a gloved and lubricated finger deep into each priest’s rectum and massage his prostate until he ejaculated.
No one touched a penis, so it didn’t count as sex—at least not to them! The priest’s monthly appointments kept them from needing solo sex and from having wet dreams. So everything was OK—from a medieval point of view.
By the 11th-century, Muslim doctor Ibn Sina (Avicenna) and a few Christian theologians taught solo sex was good for you if you couldn’t have coitus and tried to be reasonable about wet dreams. Ivo of Chartres taught they were inevitable for men who had no other kind of sexual release. If a guy got off without dreaming or fantasizing about a woman, it was okay:
For it is necessary that the natural humour inborn in the body, when it has filled its own receptacles, be drained by its own channels and thus it is not counted as sin.
The 12th-century monk, John Zonaras, agreed in his essay, “To Those Who Regard the Natural Flow of Semen as Unclean.” Wet dreams were okay unless they resulted from “desire for a woman that has been nursed to the point where it satisfies itself in a dream”.
But the medieval Christian world mostly condemned solo sex. Benedictine abbot, Guibert of Nogent, for example, was convinced that men sealed pacts with the Devil with semen from their solo sex. Even 12th-century Hildegard von Bingen could tell when sleeping women consented to receive the demons of lust by the way they moved their bodies erotically while dreaming.
Hugh of St. Victor, closeted lover of closet queen Bernard of Clairvaux, warned that the penis was so dangerous it was untouched by the soul. People with penises had to be very careful:
The other members of the body which follow the dominion of reason can operate without sin, but this member in which concupiscence especially reigns, since it does not follow the inclination of the will, does not operate without sin.
A demon succubus could seize warm, “wasted” semen from solo sex and shape it into a male human body. Then an incubus would use it to impregnate a woman. Satan could enter her body through any empty cavity to start a Satanic pregnancy. Gullible, emotional, self-indulgent, stubborn, and horny teenagers were the most vulnerable. Good parents would marry a son off as soon as puberty set in to keep him from spilling seed. After the wedding, they’d bring in a priest to recite the “Benedicio thalami” to defend the marriage bed from such evil forces.
Abbot Caesarius of Heisterbach saw the devil’s hand in every act of solo sex. His 1223 Dialogue of Great Visions and Miracles claimed the Devil and his demons shape “wasted” semen into the bodies of women and men to disguise themselves and go out unseen in the world to torment and seduce innocent Christians. His ten-volume book, the most popular in the German world, didn’t help readers feel better about their sex lives, but its ghost still haunts: Trump’s ‘spiritual advisor’, Paula White-Cain, still preaches about the dangers of Satanic pregnancy!
Albert the Great also maintained dangerous church doctrine on solo sex. He claimed semen held in the body could cause illness. The only solution to get rid of it was the “friction of the genitals”, but that was still a sin to which young women were particularly prone:
… the more she has sex, or even rubs herself with the hand, the more she wants sex, … since the female body is cold and suffers from a closure of pores, it does not quickly emit the seed of coitus: and this is the reason that certain girls around the age of 14 are not able to be satisfied by coitus ...
Medieval nuns and monks ate very little on their strict diets to keep themselves from sexual desire, fantasy, and solo sex. Albert the Great warned women who let themselves fantasize about sex:
… sometimes a person deliberates about coitus, making the genitals and other parts inclined to concupiscence with the intention and zeal of exciting the heat of concupiscence and delighting in it, … I say that such a person loses her virginity since that completed pleasure corrupts the body.
Albert warned that Christ would reject any woman who defiled herself this way. She could never be his bride. But all was not lost. She could become his concubine! Albert is now the Catholic patron-saint of natural science.
Thomas Aquinas taught that wet dreams were Satan’s scheme to keep a guy from taking communion in the morning. But nocturnal emissions could be sin-free because it was the thinking, not the emission, that was polluting—one couldn’t sin in one’s sleep. But 13th-century Thomas of Chobham taught wet dreams were sinful and men could control them if they really wanted to: They could get someone to beat them. They could fast. They could take cold baths or wear wool against their skin.
If they didn’t do these things and lust visited them in their sleep, it was all their faults, and they must confess and do penance—there was no excuse for emitting semen while awake. It was always sinful because it couldn’t happen unless a guy manipulated his body with “filthy movement of the flesh”. There was one exception: An ill man might have emissions day or night, whether or not he wanted to:
[Some men] are so lascivious that if their virile member is moved by any touch or any casual rubbing, as in riding or walking, immediately, through the impatience of desire, semen flows out. And all such men sin morally unless they guard themselves as much as they are able from every rubbing of their member, that is to say by means of nettles or by cold water or some other means.
In the early 15th century, Jean Gerson taught that solo sex was a grave sin. But a priest had to ferret it out because men lie about it in confession.
If he says no, … he is lying and he wishes to tell but fears being caught, because this happens to every boy not physically defective….
To lead them to confess “this foul sin”, the confessor should ask: “Friend, did you never stroke or rub your rod, just as boys are accustomed to do?” Priests should ask this of boys as young as three or five.
By the 15th century, civil courts supported the church’s ban on solo sex. Even if one had it to satisfy the “needs of nature and of health”, it was still a crime. Even when a doctor prescribed it, the bator committed a crime and courts of many countries punished him. Court cases were rare, but there were extreme civil penalties, including exile. Some cities, like Venice, went easy on people who had solo sex. They did not approve of it, but they thought it was normal. A century later, Charles V supported Martin Luther’s campaign against solo sex and called for the death penalty for jerking off. He wanted the guilty burned alive.
Nevertheless, 16th-century Gabriele Fallopio urged boys to pull on their penises vigorously and stretch them out despite doctrine. He believed solo sex would make the penis stronger and bump up a guy’s sperm count. Even Samuel Pepys used porn for solo sex in 1688:
I read through L’escholle des Filles; a lewd book … (…my prick para stand all the while, & una vez to decharger); & after I had done it, I burned it, that it might not be among my books to my shame … .
Some 17th century physicians thought that solo sex had certain health benefits, (which it does), but the church declared that even if it were true, it would not allow it. At the Fourth Lateran Council, Pope Innocent III declared:
… since the soul is much more precious than the body, we forbid any physician, under pain of anathema, to prescribe anything for the bodily health of a sick person that may endanger his soul.
Priests used the confessional to police thought. They began to teach that sexual desire and fantasy were even more evil and sinful than squandering semen. Women and men had to describe their most intimate thoughts to the priest, whispering every detail. The theologians at the School of Salamanca put it this way:
It should indeed be noted that if while masturbating one delights in sexual fantasies, whether in the form of desire for another person, consecrated, married, or single, or in the form of simply enjoying the power of that desire, or whether one voluntarily slips toward it through indecent thoughts, these circumstances must be explained in confession. … the circumstance must be detailed.
Discomfort with solo sex exploded in 1715 when the greatest “quacksalver” of his time, Pierre Varenne, put out Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution… . Masturbation was a crime against God; it caused illness and death. But he could sell you a potion to stop it, setting off a deluge of quakery.
In 1750, failing to morally persuade men to give up solo sex, the Vatican got Samuel-Auguste Tissot to argue “degeneracy”. In his version of Varenne’s Onania, Tissot declared the brains of those who did it would dry out and rattle in their skulls like nuts! This furthered the claims of Catholic doctrine and convinced irreligious thinkers such as Voltaire, Kant, Rousseau, and Benjamin Rush that solo sex led to illness, madness, death and suicide.
A signer of the Declaration of Independence, Dr. Rush warned in “Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind” that solo sex caused brain rot. Rousseau gave parents pointers on how to prevent solo sex in his novel about parenting—Émile: Or an Education:
… watch carefully over the young man; he can protect himself from all other foes, but it is for you to protect him against himself. Never leave him night or day, or at least share his room; never let him go to bed unless he is sleepy, and let him rise as soon as he wakes.
Solo sex was also a danger for women. French physician, D.T. de Bienville, drew the spotlight of quackery upon it with a pamphlet on ‘furor uterinus’ that claimed solo sex led women to nymphomania and queer sex. His cures were blood-letting and purging. If those didn’t work, he was certain that a strait-jacket would.
Scam artists and quacks all over the western world made livings by frightening people with fakery about solo sex. An 1828 article by Joseph Henri Réveillé-Parise claimed it would even cause the end of the world. Jerking off was more disastrous for society than plague, smallpox, or war! Lots of responsibility for 14-year-olds alone in bed at night!
Nineteenth century purity campaigns conjured moral panics against solo sex In 1834, Russian homeopath, H. Kaan, warned that “onanism” was a degenerate disease, leading to a long list of illnesses of the mind and body. The Rev. John Todd’s popular U.S. self-help guide, Student’s Manual, warned solo sex used up energy by wasting sperm. And in France, Léopold Deslandes published Manhood: The Causes of Its Premature Decline, which advised doctors to warn men who confessed to solo sex that they would be dead in three months: “Do not regret it, it is not by encouragement that you will save him from himself.”
The taboo against solo sex led ultimately to the invention of a disease that combined the ill effects of gonorrhea and tuberculosis—spermatorrhea. Symptoms were dribbling from the penis, coughing blood, anxiety, impotence, lassitude, nervousness, and, finally, insanity and death. Claude-François Lallemand began publishing a three-volume work on it in 1836 that stayed in print for 60 years and convinced the medical world of the myth that many men who had solo sex suffered from spermatorrhea.
Doctors began to teach that having it was a lack of self-discipline and manliness. One physician reported two-thirds of his male clients thought they had it. It was evidence of solo sex, so, feeling guilty, men were eager to submit to the cost and pain of getting rid of it, and turned to diuretics, enemas, laxatives, and leeches; suppositories of belladonna, camphor, and opium; piercings of metal rings coated with irritants; and circumcision, as well as cautery of the urethra to deaden sensation.
Englishman Richard Dawson warned of the horrors of this “seminal weakness” in “An Essay on Spermatorrhoea” (1848). He said that it was easy to recognize a man who got spermatorrhea from having solo sex:
… [his] general deportment undergoes a remarkable alteration. His temper, for instance, is extremely irritable, and he is fretful, peevish, discontented, and his appearance shows a marked degree of melancholy. … they are timid, fearful, and apprehensive, and endure injuries which they have neither the spirit nor courage to resent.
John Skelton's 1857 A Treatise on the Venereal Disease and Spermatorrhea defined it this way:
Frequent emission of the seminal fluid occurring independently of the will. … The symptoms of spermatorrhoea are very various, and as the disease advances, the mental condition of patients generally undergoes a marked change. They become fretful and peevish; their memory fails; they lose their courage, and indignities, which they would formerly have resented, they now endure with patience. Occasionally it assumes a much more serious aspect, and they become confirmed hypochondriacs, are unfit for either business or serious reflection, and are disagreeable to themselves and the whole earth.
Some eminent 19th-century doctors treated mythical spermatorrhea with genuine castration. Thomas Curling reported in A Practical Treatise of the Diseases of the Testis and of the Spermatic Cord and Scrotum:
Persons troubled with seminal emissions which no effort of the will can prevent their provoking, or which persist in spite of medical treatment, have in some instances been solicitous for the removal of their testicles, to get rid of the disgusting complaint; and individuals have even been known to perform the operation of castration on themselves.
Quacks today still profit from this stream of bullshit about spermatorrhea, now confused with too-rapid ejaculation! Some men today still believe this claptrap and turn to quacks offering herbal medicines for cures.
Doctors offered lots of cures for solo sex. In 1842, J.C. Debreyne made several suggestions for people with “the disease of onanism”. They should sleep on their sides, never on their backs, should eat and drink only things that are cold, suck on ice, and wash in salted melted snow. If they were female, they should have a clitoridectomy, which would be fine because a woman didn’t need her clitoris for procreation—it only served lust!
François-Vincent Raspail’s 1845 health guide, Manual Annuaire de la Santé, recommended camphor as a preventative. A parent could just sew a bag of camphor in the crotch of the kid’s bathing suit. In 1849, a doctor named Demeau urgently requested the French Minister of Culture to keep students’ trousers free of pockets. He also wanted to equip beds in boarding schools and colleges with walls running across the middles of each of the sleeping students so they couldn’t touch their sex organs!
In 1848, Sylvester Graham published Lectures to Young Men, Intended also for the Serious Consideration of Parents & Guardians. He was a leading anti-sex fanatic. He warned sexual desire was a fiend that would always haunt men’s lives. His book further Americanized Samuel-AugusteTissot. It went through 10 editions in 15 years and brought down an avalanche of books and articles against solo sex! He urged circumcision to cut off “all superfluity of naughtiness”, advising people to eat bland food, like his ‘Graham Crackers’, and sleep on hard wood beds to cleanse themselves of sexual desire.
Louis Bauer had a way to stop wet dreams in 1850s: Pierce the foreskin, thread a silk cord through it, and tie it closed at bed time. If a guy began to get erect, the pain would wake him. Frederick Hollick’s “The Marriage Guide” urged women who couldn’t stop to have their clitorises cut off.
“Pricking rings” were also popular in the U.S. A circlet worn around the penis with spikes on the inside edge kept a boy or a man from getting erect and having wet dreams. The first patent for it, in 1856, went to L.D. Sibley of Northampton, MA. He said his ring was
For the purpose of pricking the penis only sufficiently hard to awaken the patient and warn him of danger, as soon as the organ begins to distend and erect itself and before any evil consequence ensues.
La Roy Sunderland got a patent for a Spermatorrhea Ring in 1862 to prevent too-frequent emissions via solo sex as well as erection by “inordinate amative desire”. He also invented a truss that would strap the penis between the legs to keep it from getting erect. Others took out patents for tubes that fit around the penis and gave off alarms if erection began. From the Civil War to World War I, the U.S.
Patent Office granted 21 patents for such devices. In 1863, DC’s The Daily Morning Chronicle carried this ad:
Manhood: How Lost! How Restored! Just published in a sealed envelope. Six cents. A lecture on the Nature, Treatment and Radical Cure of Spermatorrhea or Seminal Weakness … and Involuntary Emissions … by Robert Culverwill, M.D.
Officials urged parents to be on the look out for any sign that their kids might be having solo sex. They were to be especially vigilant at bed time and could buy full-body orthopedic sleeping suits to prevent it. Other methods included:
Terrify their kids into abstinence: brandish knives, scissors, or surgical instruments at them while threatening to cut off their sex organs.
Have a doctor infibulate the foreskin of their son’s penis; pierce it, pull it beyond the glans, and close it shut with an iron ring.
Have a doctor infibulate their daughter’s clitoris; stitch the labia together with metal sutures or amputate the clitoris.
The makers of myths about solo sex knew no limits. In the 1860s, J.B. De Bourge, wrote a diatribe against it. Hoping to shock, he claimed:
This abominable practice has put to death more individuals than all the great wars, joined to the most depopulating epidemics.
Some even wished bators would die. Henry Maudsley, in 1868, published “Illustrations of a Variety of Insanity” in Britain’s Journal of Medical Sciences:
The sooner he sinks to his degraded rest the better for himself, and the better for the world which is well rid of him.
Solo sex was the Civil War’s secret vice. Doctors claimed soldiers’ mania for it led to their death. Some of those who survived lost pensions because they jerked off. And by the 1870s, Christian myths about the horrors of solo sex had spread like wild fire. All kinds of quacks, charlatans, and medical doctors exploited them. The State Lunatic Hospital in Worcester, Massachusetts, even claimed that one out of three of its patients had gone insane from it—“masturbatory insanity”!
An 1870 Lancet published an anonymous editorial suggesting irritating the penis would cure solo sex. Doctors could burn the skin of the penis. They could do it with blistering liquid, tartar-emetic ointment, nitrate of silver, or cautery:
The only general rule that can be laid down is to err, … in the direction of caution; and not to lay aside the blisters.
One patient died after seven cauterizations of the urethra to stop solo sex.
Some people were made to feel so guilty about sex they tried to stop other people from having it. Margaret Sanger’s arch-enemy, Anthony Comstock, father of the 1873 Postal Act to ban information about abortion and birth control, had a horror of all things sexual and kept a journal of his struggles with the Devil’s enticements. Here are two of the entries:
Again tempted and found wanting. Sin, sin. Oh how much peace & happiness is sacrificed on the altar. Seemed as though Devil had full sway over me today, went right into temptation, and then, Oh, such love. Jesus snatched it away out of my reach. How good is he, how sinful am I.
I am the chief of sinners, but I should be so miserable and wretched, were it not that God is merciful and I may be forgiven. Glory be to God in the highest. This morning were severely tempted by Satan and after some time in my own weakness I failed.
Corn-flake impresario John Harvey Kellogg may have done the most harm. After its 1877 publication, rural Americans used his gilded-edged Plain Facts about Sexual Life for Old & Young People as a household medical guide. In it Kellogg warned that people who had solo sex were “below the meanest brute that breathes”. Like the “most loathsome reptile”, they ought to be “ashamed to look into the eyes of an honest dog”.
In this 644-page diatribe, which Americans kept next to the bible, cures for solo sex ranged from cornflakes to clitoridectomy, and circumcision. They would also prevent acne, bed wetting, fingernail biting, insanity, paleness, shifty eyes, swearing, nervous shock, and tobacco use. Kellogg advised:
A remedy [for solo sex] is almost always successful in small boys is circumcision … . The operation should be performed by a surgeon without administering an anesthetic, as the brief pain attending the operation will have a salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment, as it may well be in some cases. The soreness which continues for several weeks interrupts the practices, and if it had not previously become too firmly fixed, it may be forgotten and not resumed.
Kellogg also offered other cruel and useless cures. He also believed in stitching the foreskin closed. For women, he suggested the use of carbolic acid on the clitoris. His other treatments included electric current, hot and cold spinal compresses, saline sponge or sitz baths, and vaginal douches. In extreme cases, he suggested clitoridectomy.
Like Comstock, Kellogg feared and hated sex. He adopted 42 kids with his wife, but never had coitus, loved enemas, and aggressively supported sterilization of the “mentally defective”. But he was so persuasive that Americans overcame their anti-semitic bias and cut off their boys’ foreskins to keep them from jerking off.
All in all, girls got the worst of it. In 1882, Demetrius Zambaco published “Onanism & Mental Disturbance in Two Little Girls” in a French medical journal:
It is reasonable to concede that cauterization with a white-hot iron gets rid of the sensitiveness of the clitoris, indeed, that with repeated cauterization, one is able to remove it completely … It can be readily seen that children, after they have lost feeling through cauterization, are less liable to sexual excitement and less inclined to touch themselves.
In 1883, the YMCA created a White Cross Army to teach about sex with special focus on the dangers of solo sex. Like the Y, Social Purity feminists also wanted to prohibit solo sex. They expected men to limit sex to fulfill only the procreative needs of the family. Unlike quacks stamping out solo sex for profit, feminists did not point to dire consequences. Instead, they preached that men would reach salvation through renunciation.
1895 Edgar J. Spratling lived in fear that solo sex led to queer sex. In 1895, his “Masturbation in the Adult” for the “Medical Record” warned it went
… hand in hand with its boon companion, sodomy, it stalks through every ward, entangling its victims more hopelessly w/each passing night.
Edward Lyttleton agreed and warned against friendships between older and younger boys—they might teach each other how to do it. The USA’s first authority on adolescence, G. Stanley Hall, warned that folks who had solo sex seduced others into it and it was a major cause of ‘sexual perversion’ as well as causing “early physical signs of decrepitude and senescence”.
People also believed it was a class issue: servants taught solo sex to kids. In 1896, French judge, Prosper Georges Marcelin Bouniceau-Gesmon, wrote Servants and Masters: Social Issues. He warned that a servant would bring ‘contamination’ to the home:
It is hard to believe just how fatal daily contact w/vicious servants can be for children, and just how much corruption is introduced in this manner into the bosom of the family.
Others believed kids inherited it. Still others blamed foreigners. Rev. Edward Bouverie Pusey, in a letter to the Medical Times and Gazette, advised that no one had solo sex in Britain until the French introduced it after the victory over Napoleon. His letter set off a debate about whether people should even talk about solo sex and launched a discussion about whether it was safe to send a boy to an all-boys school.
Christian condemnation of ‘self pollution’ overwhelmed the century, and Dickens invented Uriah Heap to epitomize its effects. In 1896, E.C. Fowler’s Life—How to Enjoy and How to Prolong It claimed a single ejaculation wasted away as much as two ounces of blood and too much sex led to nine out of 10 deaths from tuberculosis. In 1857, William Acton warned it led to stunting, immorality, and acne! Abraham Jacobi, the father of American pediatrics, warned that infants who played with their sex organs could develop infantile paralysis or infantile rheumatism!
Doctors ascribed all kinds of medical problems to solo sex. Pierre-Jean-Corneille Debreyne listed:
… palpitations, weakened vision, headaches, dizziness, tremors, painful cramps, convulsive epileptic movements, often genuine epilepsy, general pains …, great weakness of the kidneys, general paralytical phenomena ...
1897 Lutheran minister Sylvanus Stall made a name for himself opposing solo sex in the U.S. In 1897, he published What a Young Boy Ought to Know. He blamed solo sex on the existence of the hand!
Man is possibly the only animal which persistently pollutes and degrades his own body, and this would not have easily been possible if God had not given him hands, …
It would lead to “idiocy … early decline & death … consumption … total mental and physical self-destruction”. Men should not have “too much sex”. They only had so much semen. When gone, their bodies would erode.
And there were many causes of solo sex. In 1853, Robert Brudenell Carter warned the use of the speculum could lead a woman to ideas that she should not have and to solo sex—only a husband should open a woman’s body. And not all doctors warned against solo sex. For example, James Paget gave a lecture on sexual hypochondria in London. He agreed that an insane man might have solo sex, but it was not the cause of his dementia.
… masturbation does neither more nor less harm than sexual intercourse practiced with the same frequency in the same conditions of general health and age and circumstance, … but practiced frequently by the very young … masturbation is very likely to produce exhaustion.
All in all men were led to feel so guilty about solo sex some kept journals about it. Henri Frédéric Amiel called his “Journal Intime”. It was 12 volumes about jerking off, his stress about frequent wet dreams, and his efforts to stop them after a ‘specialist’ told him that “every pollution is a dagger in your eyes”, so he ate ground glass, took cold baths, slept only four or five hours a night in a chair, and washed his abdomen with vinegar. It didn’t work.
The English sent ‘inveterate’ men who had solo sex to Bedlam. Asylums in the U.S. used all kinds of restraints to keep patients from touching themselves. Day and night, they kept patients on box beds with straps, in cages, tied to fixed chairs, and wrapped in straitjackets. They also used handcuffs, hobbles, iron chains, straps, and wristlets. English psychiatrist John Charles Bucknill suggested that authorities use the same restraints on women and men who had solo sex as they would use on clients who were suicidal, wouldn’t stay in bed, or would strip off their clothes.
Havelock Ellis published his major work on solo sex, The Evolution of Modesty, the Phenomena of Sexual Periodicity, Auto-Eroticism, in 1899. He attacked Tissot and his followers as “unscrupulous quacks” who were responsible for:
the suffering, dread, and remorse experienced in silence by many thousands of ignorant and often innocent young people.
Solo sex relieved stress and had a sedative effect, but if ‘excessive’ it could lead to ‘neurasthenia’. And there was a market for it. In 1902, the Lindstrom Smith Company of Chicago introduced its White Cross Electric Vibrators, taking the name of the British social purity organization to suggest that they were pure and for the chaste. It sold them into the 1930s when they became shamefully linked to porn. Until then, manufacturers ran ads for electric vibrators in “Hearst’s”, “Home Needlework Journal”, “McClure’s”, “Modern Women”, “Needlecraft”, and “Woman’s Home Companion”, and by the ‘20s, officials in reform schools for boys thought solo sex was relatively harmless and began to agree that “Masturbation as a rule does not much harm beyond that which we believe it to be wrong.”
But most authorities refused to accept solo sex as normal. Officials in Palmer, Massachusetts, castrated a man in 1901 for ‘persistent masturbation’. In 1902, Harry C. Sharp bragged about castrating a guy to cure solo sex in 1899. He did 450 more castrations to regulate sexual desire in men in prison. Some believed vasectomy would do just as well and reported on its success.
In 1901, Albert Todd began to get patents for devices that would apply electric shock to anyone who tried to have solo sex. One, a cylinder put over the penis would give off an alarm if the guy got a hard on. The Patent Office’s last patent for stopping solo sex was granted in 1932. Allan P. Risley of Indiana won it for a unitard with adhesives that stuck the clothing to areas around the sex organs.
In 1905, Robert William Taylor’s A Practical Treatise on Sexual Disorders of the Male and Female warned against bike and horseback riding. Sewing machines with foot pedals were also dangerous aides to solo sex. Robert Baden-Powell opposed solo sex in his Boy Scout manuals. He told boys to wash the penis in cold water every day to avoid it. “If you still have trouble about it…go to your scout master and talk it over with him.”!!!
1909 Edward Steichen and his wife, Clara, had their servants tie his little daughter, Mary's, wrists to her bedposts with silk scarves to keep her from having solo sex. She, as Dr. Mary Calderone, would become the first woman medical director of Planned Parenthood.
Even Sigmund Freud believed solo sex could “short-circuit” love. He acknowledged that it could be beneficial: relieve stress and avoid infection. But it could also cause neurotic disorders, especially neurasthenia & reduce potency. The harmful psychic effects included:
· a character change short-circuiting desire and satisfaction, by-passing the external world
· an anti-social loosening of the individual’s connection with his fellow men
· fantasy life overwhelming reality, making reality unsatisfying
· an inability to tolerate sexual restriction
· a preservation of the ‘infantile condition’, a basis for psychoneurosis when meeting conflict and rejection
· a general debasement of sexual life, which can lead to an inability to have intercourse with loved and esteemed persons — only with the disdained
People in the 1930s & ‘40s thought solo sex was bad for you, In 1937, studies showed that caregivers severely threatened nine out of 10 children they caught doing it. They punished and often terrorized them with threats that they would go insane or blind. They bullied kids by saying that they would cut off their penises or sew shut their vaginas! That’s why more than 8 of 10 college freshmen believed that solo sex was dangerous.
The 1938 Diseases of Infancy and Childhood’s offered a long list of treatments for stopping solo sex that still included: circumcision, corporal punishment, mechanical restraint, cauterizing the clitoris, horror stories, separating the clitoral hood from clitoris, and blistering of foreskin, thighs, and vulva. Celebrated psychiatrist, Karl Menninger, convinced the US Navy to reject candidates who had ‘evidence of masturbation’!
1946 Hühner’s final edition of The Diagnosis and Treatment of Sexual Disorders in the Male and Female, Including Sterility & Impotence in 1946 carried the hysterical, anti-solo sex teachings of Tissot, Graham, and Kellogg into the middle of the 20th century. Hühner admitted that most teens had solo sex, but he still considered it a disease. He thought the ‘confirmed masturbator’ was
apt to be a physical coward, a man who will stand all sort of insult, who will run away rather than fight or stick up for his most obvious rights … After a while … he masturbates, not because he likes it, but because he has to. He has that awful irritation in his deep urethra, and he simply must masturbate. The periods of previous excitement [pleasure] become less and less, as does also the amount of fluid ejaculated. Then there comes a time when he cannot masturbate. … no matter how he manipulates his penis or how he excites his brain, he can neither obtain an erection nor an ejaculation. He is indeed in a most wretched condition.
Alfred Kinsey found in 1948 that married men had fewer than half their orgasms with their wives, more than nine out of 10 men had solo sex to orgasm, so he ended up defending it, along with premarital coitus, and petting—they all made sex better after marriage. In 1953, Kinsey showed it was normal among women. More than six out of 10 did it at some time in their lives, and nearly half had done it to orgasm. In fact, solo sex was the most reliable way for a woman to have an orgasm, whether or not she was married.
That same year, Clellan S. Ford & Frank A. Beach published “Patterns of Sexual Behavior” acknowledging that some adults in all or nearly all cultures had solo sex. After nearly 2,000 years of prohibitions, solo sex began to seem normal and natural. U.S. feds stopped warning about its evils and the diseases it caused. Their 1951 Infant Care finally began to advise ‘wise’ mothers that saying “No, no,” to children who did it might confuse them.
But many medical professionals were biased against solo sex in the 20th century. During adolescence I was so thin that people worried about my health. By the time I was 14 or 15 in the late ‘50s, I saw a shrink once a week at a clinic in the Boston Floating Hospital. During one appointment, he told me to take off all my clothes and I got a roaring erection. He told me I was masturbating too much. But I had never had any kind of sex play, including solo sex. But no other cause seemed to occur to him.
Wardell Pomeroy’s 1968 Boys and Sex and his 1970 Girls and Sex helped Alfred Kinsey normalize solo sex for kids:
… no physical harm can come of it, contrary to the old beliefs, no matter how frequently it is done.…[It is] a pleasurable and exciting experience. … [solo sex] releases tensions and is therefore valuable in many ways. … It provides a full outlet for fancy, for daydreaming, which is characteristic of adolescence. … offers a variety which enriches the individual’s sex life. … is not only harmless but is positively good and healthy, and it should be encouraged because it helps young people to grow up sexually in a natural way.
In 1972, the American Medical Association finally advised that solo sex was normal. In Human Sexuality it cited Alfred Kinsey’s once controversial findings. Two years later, Betty Dodson’s Liberating Masturbation was groundbreaking in its insistence that self love in solo sex could overcome body shame and make it possible for women to enjoy orgasm. More than 5,000 women requested it from her ad in Ms. Getting off was no longer just for men.
Nevertheless, in 1975, Pope Paul VI declared solo sex was still a mortal sin, even though he could find nothing about it in the bible, but he believed God had no love for anyone who did it so endorsed another dangerous church doctrine causing sexual shame!
Sally Wendkos Olds in her 1985 The Eternal Garden—Seasons of Our Sexuality instructed that it was harmful to teach solo sex was wrong?
Learning to masturbate is often a major sexual turning point in a person’s life—his or her discovery of the pleasures the body can yield. If this discovery is followed by a sense that the pleasures are wrong, an ambivalence about sexuality arises that can dominate a person’s entire life.
But it was still hard for many to be lucid about solo sex in the ’90s. Lesley Hall found in a 1992 “Journal of the History of Sexuality” that solo sex was “… still surrounded by a burden of derogatory association.” That year, Seinfeld ran an episode, “The Contest”, about trying to do without solo sex. The networks would not let them use the word ‘masturbation’. Nor could they openly discuss the issue. So, ‘Master of Your Domain’ became a commonplace synonym for solo sex.
In 1994, Edward O. Laumann et al. found half of those who had solo sex felt guilty about it. That year, President Bill Clinton demanded Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders resign for suggesting schools include solo sex in their sex ed courses. A year later, TipperGore, wife of the Vice President, demanded Senate hearings on obscenity in recorded music citing, among others, Prince’s mention of solo sex in the lyrics of Darling Nikki in his film, Purple Rain. The Recording Industry Association of America offered a solution—companies could choose to label a record “Parental Advisory—Explicit Lyrics”, but did not define ‘explicit’.
But by the 21st century, many had adopted solo sex as a normal part of their lives. One young women in a 2014 study of solo sex by Breanne Fahs and Elena put it this way:
Masturbation is pretty freakin’ cool. Usually I shower in the morning, and then I have a vibrator so I use that. I put music on and then I’ll do whatever feels good that day so I’ll lay down or stand up or lean over. Usually it’s my vibrator in the morning and my hands at night. I masturbate about five times out of a week, to maybe seven times a week, almost every day. Sometimes I skip days, and I’m fine with that. I guess I’ve, like, incorporated it into my schedule, so I’m just like, “Okay, time to do that,” you know? It’s just like a daily routine to me now so it’s just like, “Okay, cool, boom, my day has started.”
More than fifty years ago, Thore Langfeldt said this in his Process in Sexual Development:
The adolescent and child in Western society are almost totally left on their own with regard to management of problems and concerns about masturbation. Although many adults will admit that masturbation is normal, no instruction or direct information is likely to be given to a child.
Many Americans are at still at odds about kids having solo sex and kids still go to the Internet for information about sex. But at the end of the 20th century, Floyd Martinson had a simple solution. If a parent sees a child enjoying its sex organs, the parent should smile and say something like, “Hey, that looks like fun!”