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Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation
by Thomas W. Laqueur
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| Edition: Hardcover |
| ISBN: 1890951323 |
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Publisher: Zone Books (April 2003)
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Dimensions : 1.60 x 9.24 x 6.38 (in inches)
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Average Customer Review: 
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Description : At a time when almost any victimless sexual practice has its public advocates and almost every sexual act is fit for the front page, the easiest, least harmful, and most universal one is embarassing, discomforting, and genuinely radical when openly acknowledged. Masturbation may be the last taboo. But this is not a holdover from a more benighted age. The ancient world cared little about the subject; it was a backwater of Jewish and Christian teaching about sexuality. In fact, solitary sex as a serious moral issue can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history; Laqueur identifies it with the publication of the anonymous tract Onania in about 1722. Masturbation is a creation of the Enlightenment, of some of its most important figures, and of the most profound changes it unleashed. It is modern. It worried at first not conservatives, but progressives. It was the first truly democratic sexuality that could be of ethical interest for women as much as for men, for boys and girls as much as for their elders. The book's range is vast. It begins with the prehistory of solitary sex in the Bible and ends with third-wave feminism, conceptual artists, and the Web. It explains how and why this humble and once obscure means of sexual gratification became the evil twin--or the perfect instance--of the great virtues of modern humanity and commercial society: individual moral autonomy and privacy, creativity and the imagination, abundance and desire.
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Review : From Publishers Weekly
Laqueur's Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud is a classic work in history and gender studies, and a regular on syllabi around the world. In his latest study, the UC Berkeley historian maps out the changing nature of Western culture's ongoing obsession with manual self-pleasuring and its effects. Not surprisingly, masturbation's history is fraught with anxiety, particularly since it was often thought to irrevocably damage its practitioners, both morally and physically. As one nineteenth century medical dictionary warns: "However secret the practice... it leaves an indelible mark." Further back, in the 18th century, when expressions of "imagination, solitude, and excess became newly important and newly worrisome," masturbation was seen as representing a lack of self-discipline, "emblematic of all that was beyond social surveillance." Beginning in the politicized, post-free love 1970s, it became "a way of reclaiming the self from the regulatory mechanisms of civil society and of the patriarchal social order into which the Enlightenment and its successors had put it." In the 1990s, it was a pop culture mainstay, a staple of Something About Mary and Seinfeld jokes. More surprising is the fact that masturbation was of great interest to major writers and philosophers: Laqueur finds Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft, Swift, Rousseau, Kant and Whitman all thinking and writing about this "solitary vice." Laqueur calls masturbation both the "first truly democratic sexuality" and the "crack cocaine of sex": at once addictive and readily accessible to all. His writing is free from embarrassment and needless jargon (though it does not shy away from complex formulations of manual sex's complexes), and, with 32 b&w illustrations, it should be a big hit on campus.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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