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By Root 1211 0

after century, the assumption was that he was having a good time. Today, if you like to eat, you are filling an inner void that, presumably, thinner people do not have. Likewise, if you have a lot of intimate encounters, you are seen as quintessentially alone, closed off to other people. So it is the well-fed one who is empty! And the one with all the partners is lonely! Of course, there is some truth here, and all historical periods have caught a glimpse of sadness in extreme behaviors—but today’s rendition is pretty heavily skewed toward this peculiar, inverted interpretation of things. Most historical eras have guessed that a big part of the reason that Casanova was a Casanova was that he was good at it, that he could do it. For us it’s a syndrome. As strange as it is that we pathologize anyone who has lots of sex, it may be even stranger how we associate sexual happiness with not talking about sex or doing anything noticeable about it.

There are periods in history that abound with rules about sex. There have been countless lists of instruction about what people ought not to do, and there have been many forms of social pressure about what people ought to be doing. You are likely aware of some of the strict religious opinions on the subject, and of some people’s extreme habits: from conjugal sex through a hole in the sheet to metal chastity belts. Let’s look at an equally weird behavior, but closer historically: the mid 1800s to the mid 1900s in America. I want to show you the reasoning of the people of those times, the way they made their arguments, because though their convictions were very different from those dominant today, the weakness of the logical links and the bold certainty of the assumptions is familiar indeed. The key sexual anxiety of the second half of the nineteenth century, in America, was one we hardly entertain at all today: worry over the practice and effects of masturbation. Homosexuality was barely discussed by comparison. In fact, homosexuality was often mentioned only because it could mean men showing boys how to masturbate. Pundits and parents did not justify or excuse homosexuality. Rather, they ignored it—essentially the way masturbation is ignored in our culture today. Why despise masturbation? The line in the Bible about onanism is tiny, and rejects an instance of birth control, not solitary sex.1 The real classical worry about masturbation was biological. When a farmer gelds a rooster, or a bull, or a dog, the animal grows less belligerent and softer of cheek—in short, more feminine. Why? Well, what was in those things? Sperm, right? The quite reasonable assumption was that sperm, sitting in the testes and reabsorbed into the body, made a man a man. Cut off the testes and the creature will grow womanly. We know now that the testicles also produce testosterone, and that this hormone, not reabsorbed sperm, triggers the development of masculine qualities. Still, we can comprehend the old logic: dump too much semen and you will have the same effect as gelding. The subject lent itself well to worry over masculine strength. Of course, an occupation so solitary and intense is a ready site for anxiety, but women’s self-pleasuring went largely unmentioned.

The modern terror began in the 1750s, when Swiss physician Simon André Tissot put together his Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism from a variety of odd diatribes gathered from across history. Tissot’s explanation of why masturbation was so harmful was as follows:

A person perspires more during coition than at any other time. This perspiration is perhaps more active and more volatile than at any other time: it is a real loss, and occurs whenever emissions of semen take place…. In coition it is reciprocal, and the one inspires what the other expires. This exchange has been verified by certain observations. In masturbation there is a loss without this reciprocal benefit.2

A most incredible deduction. The effects of the “loss” were the symptoms of syphilis and gonorrhea; or just weariness, weight change, and irritability. At worst, the