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. (Mar. 18)
