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Masturbation
Condemned in Onania.
London, 1710. An anonymously published
pamphlet, Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and all its Frightful
Consequences in Both Sexes, Considered appeared in print to caution the
unwary against the dangers of "self-pollution". Apparently convinced that
many practiced self-pollution without recognizing its dangers, the author, who seems to
have been a doctor, sounded an alarm, warning that onanism
"destroys conjugal Affection, perverts natural Inclination, and tends to extinguish
the hope of posterity". That is, masturbators lose sexual interest in their wives and
tend to become sodomites, with a resultant failure to propagate. Not only does
"self-pollution" threaten the reproduction of the race, the author wrote,
but onanists suffer dire health effects as well.
The anonymous author argued that Biblical prohibitions
against sodomy apply to masturbation. He complained that while capital punishment
for sodomy effectively suppresses it, the absence of legal proscriptions against
masturbation leads its practitioners to imagine that no harm will befall them. In
truth, he wrote, the effects are grave indeed. Onanists can expect to suffer
blindness, insanity, stunted growth, and, unless they reform, death.
No one knows who Onania's author was, but the
evidence suggests that he was a quack. The first edition included
advertisements for "Strengthening Tincture" and "Prolifick Powder"
which were said to cure the ills of onanism when combined with strict sexual abstinence.
Whether the author sold much powder or tincture is unknown, but he sold a lot of
books. By 1750, nineteen editions had been printed. At least one edition, in 1724,
was published in America.
The first edition of Onania was just a booklet,
but later revisions got longer. Testimonials from people who claimed to have been
helped by the book and defenses against critics took up many pages. The author was
vexed by one particular criticism: by talking about the vice of onanism, his critics
argued, he was encouraging it. Innocents were being corrupted and taught a new vice
that would, perhaps, have never occurred to them had they not read Onania's
explicit description of it. In his defense, the author claimed that his effort to
"promote Virtue and Christian Purity" required a certain amount of plain
speaking. If he thought a subject too salacious, he wrote in academic Latin, a
language that a non-professional could not read.
Onania was not the first book to warn of the
dangers of onanism. In 1670, a German physician wrote that
"manstuprationem" could be the cause of gonorrhea and in 1708 Hermann Boerhave
cautioned that the the excessive loss of any bodily fluid, be it blood, semen, or even
sweat will cause ill health. Another doctor, an Englishman, conjectured that
masturbation causes impotence. But none of these were so vehement - or so popular -
as Onania.
The emerging opinion that masturbation causes illness
marked the beginning of a new era. Medieval commentators like St. Peter Damian had
warned of the wrath of God and eternal damnation, but Onania had more temporal
worries. Non-procreative sex, once a sin best left to the priests, had become a
serious medical problem, the special province of doctors.
Later writers, especially Tissot, jettisoned the religious
arguments and highlighted the putative medical threat of "spending one's seed".
They were no less alarmed, though, and greatly expanded the list of medical complications
that they were sure masturbation causes.
References and Further Reading
Quotations from Onania are from Katz, 1983.
The first edition of Onania probably appeared in 1710, but the date has is not
certain. Bennett and Rosario, 1995, provide the history of the publication of Onania
(pp. 4-8). Porter, 1995, describes the criticisms of the book in detail.
The quotation of the German doctor's reference to "manstuprationem" is from
Bennet and Rosario, 1995, p. 5. For medieval conceptions of non-procreative sex see
Jordan, 1997 and Boswell, 1980.
Bennett, Paula and Vernon Rosario II, 1995. "Introduction: The Politics
of Solitary Pleasures" in Paula Bennet and Vernon Rosario, Solitary Pleasures:
The Historical, Literary, and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism. New
York: Routledge.
Boswell, John, 1980. Christianity, Social
Tolerance and Homosexuality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Encyclopedia Britannica, 1910-1911. "Galen".
Jordan, Mark, 1997. The Invention of Sodomy in
Christian Theology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Katz, Jonathan Ned, 1983. Gay/Lesbian Almanac.
New York: Harper and Row.
Porter, Roy, 1995. "Forbidden Pleasures:
Enlightenment Literature of Sexual Advice" in Paula Bennet and Vernon Rosario, Solitary
Pleasures. New York: Routledge.
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© 1998
Andrew Wikholm
All Rights Reserved |
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