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Tissot
Declares Masturbation Dangerous
Switzerland, 1760 - The Swiss physician,
Simon-Auguste-Andre-David Tissot (1728-1787), published his influential treatise Onanism:
Or a Treatise Upon the Disorders produced by Masturbation: Or, the Dangerous
Effects of Secret and Excessive Venery in 1760. He warned of the danger of sex,
especially the dangers of sex undertaken for the purpose of pleasure rather than
reproduction, as a cause of debility and even death.
The idea that non-procreative sex is dangerous had been widely
disseminated by doctors before Tissot's Onanism (see Onania), but the book's wide
distribution and Tissot's reputation as a respected professor of medicine did much to
popularize it. Earlier warnings against onanism had focused on "venereal excess"
as a cause of damage to the nervous system through over-excitation which could cause
nervous and physical exhaustion, but Tissot's theories were more sophisticated.
He followed in the tradition of the Greek medicine when he wrote that
the body is an energy system which needs constant care to maintain equilibrium. The body,
he said, is continually depleted of the vital fluids the Greeks called "humours"
through excretion. Eating and drinking, in turn, refresh the body's vital force. The cycle
of loss and renewal inevitably ends in death since the renewal through eating and drinking
is imperfect, never quite making up for the losses of excretion.
In the context of this view of the body as an energy system caught in a
precarious balance of consumption and depletion, sex was especially troublesome. Tissot
believed that semen is a unique humour: it causes the beard to grow and makes muscles
larger. He even quantified its importance: one ounce of semen lost has the same
consequences as the loss of forty ounces of blood. The loss through intercourse is bad,
but wasting semen through masturbation, anal or oral sex, or sex with contraception is far
worse. He grouped these most dangerous practices under the term "onanism".
Onanistic practices cause a variety of symptoms including hemorrhoids, pimples,
tuberculosis, weak-mindedness, blindness, pain and death.
The analog of semen in women is the fluid of vaginal lubrication, and
this "seed" is even more precious than male semen because women's weaker nerves
make the loss of female seed far more dangerous than male masturbation. Tissot
warned that women and girls who become habitual onanists can expect to suffer many
diseases including hysteria, jaundice, and, because of excessive clitoral stimulation, a
pronounced tendency to turn to their own sex for erotic satisfaction. Tissot was convinced that onanism is a gateway
to sodomy, the worst sexual practice of all.
An "Enlightened" Approach
Tissot dismissed Onania as so many "theological and moral trivialities" because its
anonymous author depended on Biblical sources instead of the secular, mechanistic
traditions of Greek medicine. Like other French intellectuals at the middle of the
18th Century, Tissot was an enlightenment thinker. He created a theory of sexual
morality based on physical and social causes, not on divine prohibitions. Without
intending to do so, he converted traditional, religiously based moral prejudices against
non-procreative sex into a secular system that removed the divine and substituted
"nature" as its justification. The formerly sinful onanist was now seen as
the victim of a process of moral disease.
Tissot taught that the causes of moral disease are not just
physical. In three later books, Advice to common people on their health (1761),
On the Health of Men of Letters (1766), and Essays on the Diseases
of the Valetudinary (1770) Tissot argued that the lives of modern people, especially
intellectuals, favor mental work over physical with frightful health consequences.
Peasants are the healthiest people because their devotion to hard physical labor keeps
them from the boredom that comes from indolence. The wealthy, urban, and especially
the intelligentsia with their lives of luxury and idleness, are prone to fight their
boredom in a search for stimulation, a search that leads them to practices "opposed
to the usage of nature", including onanism. Once the practice begins, it
becomes an addiction leading to enervation and death.
Other doctors shared Tissot's horror at masturbation and many believed that
masturbation produces a state of excessive sexual desire they called satyriasis in
the male, and nymphomania in the female. The descriptions of the female disorder are
especially evocative. Masturbating women or girls risk "uterine fury", a
condition that turns them into "lascivious brutes".
French Family Values
Non-medical writers were almost as concerned
about the dire effects of masturbation as doctors were. In Emile, a
book Rousseau wrote as a guide to teachers, he urged his readers to take great care to
prevent their pupils from masturbating because they might prefer solitary vice over sexual
intercourse and never marry.
What possessed French intellectuals and doctors
to make them so fear a practice as innocuous as masturbation? Any response to the
question is at least a little speculative, but part of the answer lies in the traditional
Christian aversion to luxury. The sins of "Luxuria" as the Church had
enumerated them in the middle ages included onanism, gluttony and other sexual sins, all
the products of wealth and especially the leisure it allowed. The idea that onanism
is a product of idleness is probably a remnant of this medieval idea.
But why was onanism considered so dangerous?
The historian Thomas Laqueur has theorized that onanism became a special concern of
the 18th Century because of anxiety about rapid urbanization and changes in family
life. Cities like Paris were growing, and the extended family was becoming less
important than it had been when France was a more agrarian society. The government
was changing, and a new merchant class was becoming a potent cultural and political
force. People believed that fertility was declining, and were frightened that France
would lose her vaunted position. If young men could turn to themselves for sexual
satisfaction, would they not, as Rousseau had warned, prefer a life of leisure without the
labors and duties of marriage and family? And without the family, would France not
collapse?
Whether these factors entirely account for the
worries about Onanism is unclear, but the idea that masturbation causes serious disease
became a medical dogma. In the last half of the 19th Century, Richard von
Krafft-Ebing, among many others, elaborated on Tissot's work, and theorized that
masturbation in combination with a degnerate genetic heritage was the cause of the
antipathic sexual instinct, his word for homosexuality. As
late as 1904, Tissot is cited in Walling's anti-sexual screed Sexology to prove
that yes, masturbation can kill you.
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| Notes and References |
Sources disagree about the exact date of publication of Tissot's book.
Rosario,
1995, probably the most authoritative source, dates the first Latin version at 1758 and
the first French version at 1760. Tissot quotations come from citations in Rosario,
1995.
Bullough, Vern, 1994. Science in the Bedroom.
NY: Basic Books.
Brecher, E. M., 1969. The Sex Researchers. New
York: Little, Brown and Co.
Foucault, Michel, Robert Hurley, trans., 1978.
The History of Sexuality Volume I: An Introduction. New York:
Pantheon.
Laqueur, Thomas, 1990. Making Sex.
Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.
Porter, Roy, 1995. "Forbidden
Pleasures: Enlightenment Literature of Sexual Advice" in Bennet, Paula and
Vernon Rosario, eds., Solitary Pleasures. New York: Routledge.
Ragan, Bryant, 1996. "The Enlightenment
Confronts Homosexuality" in Jeffrey Merrick and Bryant Ragan, 1996, Homosexuality
in Modern France. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rosario, Vernon, 1995. "Phantastical
Pollutions: The Public Threat of Private Vice in France." in Bennett, Paula and
Vernon Rosaria, eds., Solitary Pleasures. New York: Routledge.
Tissot, Simon Auguste Andre David, 1764. l'Onanisme:
Dissertation sur les maladies produites par la masturbation. Reprinted,
1980. Paris: Le Sycomore.
Walling, William H., 1904. Sexology.
Philadelphia: Puritan Publishing.
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© 1998
Andrew Wikholm
All Rights Reserved |
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