The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript

Studying 'Solitary Sex': A Discussion With Thomas W. Laqueur

Wednesday, March 5, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time

Thomas W. Laqueur, author of Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, responds to questions and comments about his book, which explores the reasons that sexual self-gratification became a major issue of moral concern in the 1700s.

In Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (Zone Books), Thomas W. Laqueur explores the reasons that sexual self-gratification became a major issue of moral concern in the 1700s, after not being treated as a serious problem for centuries. He argues that society's view of it as "self abuse" reflected not just attitudes about sex, but anxieties about growing individual autonomy -- particularly women's new access to the unsupervised reading of novels. Not surprisingly, the topic of Solitary Sex makes some people uncomfortable. Several bookstores have declined to have Mr. Laqueur speak about his work, and press coverage has been minimal -- despite his reputation as a leading scholar of the history of sexuality.

» Knowing Thyself (3/7/2003)

Thomas W. Laqueur is a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to writing Solitary Sex, he is the author of the acclaimed Making Sex: Body and Sex From the Greeks to Freud (Harvard University Press). Mr. Laqueur serves on the editorial boards of the journals Representations and Sexualities. He has won fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the National Humanities Center, among others. Mr. Laqueur will respond to comments and questions about his new book and his research on Wednesday, March 5, at 2 p.m., U.S. Eastern time. Advance questions are encouraged and may be posted now.

A transcript of the chat follows.

Jennifer K. Ruark (Moderator):
Welcome to our live, on-line discussion with Thomas Laqueur. My name is Jennifer Ruark and I edit the Research section at The Chronicle. Professor Laqueur, thank you for joining us. We have lots of questions already, so let's go ahead and get started.

Question from Peter Monaghan, The Chronicle of HIgher Education:
You've addressed one of those questions that makes some people blush and plenty of people indignant. We've received one letter already expressing shock that the Chronicle would report on a book about masturbation. As you prepared the book, were you worried about reactions, or of being branded "immoral" or "smutty" yourself? Were you ever embarrassed to tell colleagues what you were working on?

Thomas W. Laqueur:
I was a little embarassed, although not for fear of being labeled smutty or immoral. In some circles the source of my embarassment was that I was not writing the book I was "supposed to be writing," a book on death and memory. Among other colleagues my embarassment--irritation might be a better word--came from feeling that I had to explain myself, that somehow what I regarded as a work of serious scholarship to which I had devoted considerable energy in writing and research had to be justified far more than a book on other topics. A bad book on British naval policy gains a certain gravitas from the magnificence of its subject; anything about the Holocaust is assumed to be deep and thoughtful. A book about masturbation seems to be burdened with the jokes of several millenia and the moral suspicions of the past three centuries.

Question from Scott Jaschik, The Chronicle of Higher Education:
You've written two major works on sex-related topics, but you are a tenured professor at a top university. Can graduate students or professors without tenure safely tackle these topics without endangering their career prospects?

Thomas W. Laqueur:
Yes, if they can make the case that their topics shed light on larger historical questions. There will be some people who might look unfavorably on a job or tenure candidate who works on questions of sexuality because the topic is peripheral; but there will be others who think that diplomatic and military history is old fashioned and intellectually impoverished. Perhaps I am being too optimistic, but I think that most people at good colleges and universities judge work by its merits. That said, a history of masturbation among all possible topics about sexuality probably does push the envelope.

Question from Winston Barclay, University of Iowa:
Just to clear one thing up at the beginning. The Chronicle's teaser for this discussion used the word "onanism." In the Bible, Onan's crime was not masturbation. It was his failure to fulfill his kinship duty, by intentionally avoiding the impregnation of his brother's widow. His obligation was to create heirs for his brother, but he spilled his seed on the ground -- coitus interruptus -- to avoid impregnating her, so that HE could inherit his brother's property. A different matter than masturbation, entirely.

Thomas W. Laqueur:
Absolutely right, and the book goes into both Jewish and Christian interpretations of this passage at some length. The remarkable thing is that John Martin in the early 18th century managed to connect the punishment that God inflicted on Onan apply to a very different act, and managed to give this act Onan's name without any Biblical authority. That said, there are a few examples in the exegises of this passage in Genesis that does actually claim that Onan masturbated.

Question from Judith Spicksley, University of Hull:
To what extent can the moral concern about masturbation be linked to a perceived decline in marriage rates, given the idea that it was most frequently practised by single individuals?

Thomas W. Laqueur:
That's easy. Marriage rates did not decline; a considerably lower percentage of people never married in the eighteenth century than before. And, in England at least, all indicators suggest that access to heterosexual intercourse was easier than ever before. I spend some time considering, and ultimately rejecting, the substitution effect argument for the rise in worry about masturbation.

Question from Peter Monaghan:
Have there been cultures in history where it was considered perfectly okay to talk about and admit to masturbation?

Thomas W. Laqueur:
There have been cultures in history in which masturbation was part of a creation myth -- the Navajo have such a creation myth. the Egyptians have such a creation myth as well. But these are sort of special cases of gods producing worlds without women. In all of the cultures that I know of, masturbation in general has been seen as an act of abjection or poverty, if not necessarily an act that's immoral or dangerous.

When Diogenes the cynic said that masturbating in public was no more odd than having your breakfast in public, this was thought to be radical and not the norm.

Question from Erika Laquer, Smith College:
Any evidence that midwives gave advice about masturbation?

Thomas W. Laqueur:
Well, the answer is yes. There's a famous incidence in Galen, in which Galen, the great Roman physician, counsels midwives to in turn counsel their patients that if they have a version of hysteria, or "green sickness," which was caused by retention of the seed, then rubbing the vulva would release it. That made it into numerous discussions of Galen during the middle ages, and later in manuals that were written by and for women. We don't know what midwives actually said to their patients in the privacy of the home, but we do know that the printed literature certainly included masturbation as a way of relieving the symptoms of sexual abstinence.

Question from Gita Manaktala, MIT:
So why is it that we became and remain so uncomfortable with masturbation? Why is it still a taboo subject (and practice) -- particularly in a culture that values other forms of self-sufficiency?

Thomas W. Laqueur:
That's a very good question. The only answer I can give is that its history is not so easily sloughed off. That is, we can acknowledge the virtues of self-sufficiency, and we can even practice some of these virtues, but the danger that self-sufficiency will lead to social collapse or the belief that self-sufficiency of this sort is a sign of failure is not so easily abandoned.

Question from Jennifer K. Ruark:
You argue that the 18th-century anxiety about masturbation in part reflected anxieties about privacy-- and in particular, new opportunities for private reading by women. Do contemporary condemnations of masturbation correspond to other, unspoken worries?

Thomas W. Laqueur:
I think that the fact that the 18th century created masturbation as the prototypical private sexual act, as something that was deeply interior, has colored discussions ever since. Newspapers can discuss blow jobs in the Oval Office, but not as a form of advocacy for sexual education classes. It is a subject whose history makes it almost literally unspeakable.

Question from Jennifer K. Ruark:
If Freud was a little "Victorian" about masturbation, has a really convincing psychological analysis of the subject been done since? Or is it, finally, not really a subject that invites psychological explanation as much as simply acknowledgment of its reality as a physiological (near-)universal?

Thomas W. Laqueur:
That's a very hard question. What's interesting about Freud to me is less his Victorian condemnation of masturbation and his belief that, if continued into adolescence it would have ill effects, than is his recognition of masturbation as the earliest form of human sexual expression. Therefore, Freud is on the right track when he associates one's relationship to masturbation with some of one's deepest psychological characteristics -- one's relation to obsession, guilt, the freedom of the imagination, and resolution of oedipal conflict. So Freud's great insight is that whatever else masturbation might be, it's more than just a casual release of sexual energies, at least in the modern world.

Question from Russell Eisenman, Ph.D., University of Texas-Pan American:
Masters and Johnson found that masturbation provides more physiological intensity than sexual intercourse. So, might we not say that masturbation is the number one way that people can achieve physical pleasure? If so, masturbation has certainly been underrated.

Thomas W. Laqueur:
(Laughs) Masters and Johnson were studying almost entirely women. It's been recognized since antiquity that clitoral orgasm was the primary form of female orgasm. This was in a sense rediscovered in a reaction against Freud, and at the same time, masturbation was recognized as the most efficient and direct route to clitoral orgasm.

But Masters and Johnson in their work still argued that the masturbatory orgasm was a therapeutic means toward the more complete enjoyment of normative heterosexual intercourse.

Question from Jacqueline Asher, UC Riverside:
What do you make of recent movies like American Pie that take on masturbation as a rite of passage (especially for males)? It seems that masturbation may not be just a "solitary" pleasure but may also function as an index of homosocial (if not always homoerotic) bonding.

Thomas W. Laqueur:
I think that you're absolutely right that masturbation is an aspect of homosocial bonding, for both boys and girls, and was recognized as such by its 18th century opponents. It's paradoxical, therefore, that they thought that one of the greatest evils of the solitary vice that was it was so infectious as they thought in the communities of the young. In other words, it was solitary in the sense that it was antisocial.

The second question about the rights of passage of the young in movies: It is portrayed as an adolescent right of passage. But like many rights of passage, it's somewhat humiliating and abject. A more recent film, Adaptation, has a slightly different take on masturbation, where it is seen as an aid to the workings of the imagination.

Jennifer K. Ruark (Moderator):
By the way, readers who want to find out more about Professor Laqueur's book from his publisher can go to the MIT Press's web site, http://mitpress.mit.edu/1890951323

Question from Scott Jaschik, The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Many of The Chronicle's e-mail messages to readers -- some of which promoted this discussion -- bounced back because people use anti-pornography Internet filters to block delivery of e-mail messages with sexual content. What do you think it says about our society -- in which images of sex are everywhere -- that people feel the need to protect themselves in this way, even at the risk of blocking out information about a scholarly discussion?

Thomas W. Laqueur:
I think that it's fairly remarkable, but it's also remarkable which words count as pornographic words. I think it's remarkable that the word masturbation itself is a pornographic word. It's not just the fact that people have pornography filters, but the determination of what does and doesn't get through the filters seems remarkable.

Question from Jennifer K. Ruark:
What kinds of changes do you think the Internet sex industry is causing in the cultural understanding of masturbation, or attitudes toward it?

Thomas W. Laqueur:
I think what the Internet age does is make some sorts of long discussions about masturbation possible that wouldn't be possible before because people are willing to write about things even in real time that they're not willing to speak about. I also think that the Internet creates virtual communities of people engaged in masturbation that are larger and probably more diverse than the sort of communities that existed historically, which is largely school boys and girls.

Jennifer K. Ruark (Moderator):
It looks like the next question will be our last one today.

Question from Terence Day, Pullman, Washington:
Why has Western culture traditionally been much more concerned about masturbation in males than in females?

Thomas W. Laqueur:
First of all, Western culture wasn't terribly concerned about masturbation for anyone until the 18th century. Insofar as it was concerned with masturbation, it was more concerned with it in males than females because in ethical life, that is to say creating oneself as an ethical being, was thought to be far more important for men than women. Little more was demanded of women than that they be chaste. The West inherited a very rich and complex set of beliefs and practices about the care of the male self.

Jennifer K. Ruark (Moderator):
Professor Laqueur, thank you so much for joining us.

Thomas W. Laqueur:
Thanks for having me as a guest today. It's good to be able to speak about the unspeakable, if only in the virtual context.