(For Augustine the key is unwilled and unwillable. Adam’s shame at his nakedness came from an unwilled erection. The shame, she continues, is rooted in the Christian notion of concupiscence, the idea most profoundly articulated by Augustine, that the estrangement of the soul from God is marked in the flesh by the autonomy of sexual desire, and, speaking as he does from a male perspective, signaled by the unruliness of the sexual organs. Taylor accepts these claims but argues, rightly, that it does not fully account for the novel shamefulness of Onanism, the new pathology of solitude. The roots of Onanism in my account, Taylor argues, lie in ‘the predicaments of secularized subjectivity’ Different strokes for different folks The modern masturbator stands on the near side of a cultural divide whose far side is a world where the moral hazards of sex were not those of rampant individualism but violations of a hierarchical, providential order.’ In other words, a new pathology of solitude, a new and powerful engine of shame was born and flourished as a bulwark against rampant individualism and the hazards of unmoored moral autonomy.
‘Laqueur’, she notes, ‘presumes a caesura between the modern and the pre-modern. In her review of my Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, ( London Review of Books, ) Barbara Taylor argued that the book was essentially a history, writ on the body, of a new sort of self in society: ‘the sexuality of the modern self’ I called it. Onanism as a paradigmatic pathology of solitude, of the mind unmoored. Note in the description I just quoted ‘for themselves,’ ‘without the assistance of others,’ ‘yielding to filthy imagination’. ‘The solitary vice’ as the most common synonym for masturbation is an early nineteenth-century neologism, but the perceived moral and medical dangers of solitary sexual pleasure – solitary both in the sociological sense of being alone and unwatched and, more importantly, in the psychological sense of the self being alone with itself – were there at the start.
It hovers between abjection and fulfilment. It is that part of human sexual life where potentially unlimited solitary pleasure meets social restraint where habit and the promise of just-one-more-time struggle with the dictates of conscience and good sense where fantasy silences, if only for a moment, the reality principle and where the autonomous self escapes from the erotically barren here-and-now into a luxuriant world of its own creation. It is not just something that putatively makes those who do it tired, crippled, mad, or blind, but is also an act with serious ethical implications. And seasonable Admonition to the Youth of the nation of Both SEXES…. Its title: 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 injured themselves by this abominable practice. To be precise, sometime between 17 the then-anonymous author of a short tract with a long title not only named (Onan had not before been associated with masturbation), but actually invented a new disease and a new highly specific, thoroughly modern, and nearly universal engine for generating guilt, shame, and anxiety. More specifically, it is intimately bound up with the question of solitude in eighteenth century thought. It – by which I mean masturbation as a moral and medical problem that attracted the serious attention of the likes of Kant, Rousseau, Samuel Johnson, Voltaire and Samuel David Tissot, the most read medical authority of the century – is a creature of the Enlightenment. Bates, my master ’ ‘my good master Bates’.) (Readers will remember the repeated jokes – new at the time – in the first chapter of Gulliver’s Travels that Swift began in 1719: ‘Mr. It arrived in the same decade as Daniel Defoe’s first novels and the first stock market crashes. It was born in, or very close to, the same year as that wild and woolly and profoundly self-conscious exemplar of ‘our’ kind of human, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was born. Modern masturbation can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history.
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