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whole human race was going to degenerate. In Tissot’s schema, women were at risk, too, since they too suffer from expiring life force in sweat and breath, and need to breathe it in from a partner to equal things out. Tissot’s book was translated and published in New York in 1832 and found its way to John Harvey Kellogg. As we saw earlier, Kellogg was raised in the pro-grain, anti-sex movement, but Tissot gave him what felt like proof. Kellogg took Tissot’s doctrine one step further: shared sex was almost as bad as masturbation. Once again, why did the doctrine catch on? For one thing, people feel tired a lot. After sex (alone or otherwise) a lot of people fall right asleep. They guessed that sex causes general tiredness, too.

Kellogg was severely motivated against masturbation and was vicious about it, recommending “cures” that included surveillance, special clothing, and even surgery. In his words:

A remedy for masturbation which 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. In females, the author has found the application of pure carbolic acid to the clitoris an excellent means of allaying the abnormal excitement.3

Kellogg was against all sex, even bragging that he and his wife never consummated their marriage. He counseled that parents should surprise at night even the most innocent-seeming child and check for moist genitals. Since the vice could cause so many enfeebling symptoms, any enfeebling symptom was a sign of the vice. Acne and sleeping a lot were understood as caused by masturbation. It was an unkind use of calling a correlate a causation. In his historical study of Kellogg, John Money reveals that he himself had been raised according to these principles, and that Kellogg’s ideas made his young life awful. When he decided to write a book on Kellogg, Money was director of the Johns Hopkins Medical School Psychohormonal Research Unit, professor of medical psychology, and professor of pediatrics, emeritus. In the preface to his otherwise impersonal scholarly work, Money explained the origins of his work on Kellogg:

This book was conceived…on Tuesday, October 6 1981, [when] my cousin Meredith Money, who is my own age, showed me an old “doctor’s book” he had retrieved from his mother’s estate. It was J. H. Kellogg’s The Ladies’ Guide in Health and Disease…. My cousin thought I would be interested in what the author had to say about vicious habits and solitary vice in the section on “The Little Girl.” Indeed I was! Here in my own hands I held, and with my own eyes I read, the very words that had shaped the sex-phobic child-rearing policies of the generation that had reared the both of us.4

I am trying to convince you that people really believed such things. And there are things about our present-day beliefs that will seem just as outlandish to the future. Which beliefs? Most of them. It matters that you notice how culture works and not be its slave.

All this anti-sex talk wasn’t really a flight from sex. Kellogg managed to use anti-sex to create an experience that was at least what we might call “displaced eroticism.” At his Battle Creek spa, people were hosed down by strong men and palpated by stern and pretty women. Clients came to him because they thought themselves too thin (too fat was a less frequent complaint, since that was still mostly a sign of wealth and health), and he would feed them hearty diets and, as a treatment, strip them down and cover them in sandbags to force their bodies to accept the nutrients. Also, Kellogg was interested in enemas of all sorts and prescribed aggressive innovations in this realm. In the movie The Road to Wellville, based on the novel by T. Coraghessan Boyle, you can see Bridget Fonda’s character on the receiving end of a nervous treatment sometimes called a womb massage, which was essentially a hand job. The film is about the Battle