id you know that one creepy little pamphlet called "Onania; or, the Heinous Sin of Self Pollution," published around 1712, has a lot to do with our collective Western anxiety about jerking off? This is just one of the surprising revelations in Thomas Laqueur's Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. Laqueur, a history professor at UC Berkeley, is no stranger to writing about sexuality: his '90s tome Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, is still in heavy rotation at college campuses across the country. A man unafraid to use the words "wanking" and "Harvard" in the same sentence, Laqueur chatted with me about the etymology of "choking the chicken," that scene in There's Something About Mary and the parallels between Rousseau and Pee Wee Herman.

— Sharon Lintz



So you wrote a big book about jacking off.
I actually wasn't planning to write a whole book on the subject. Someone asked me to write a paper about medicine and sexuality in the eighteenth century. And the big question there is, why do doctors suddenly worry about masturbation? And not just random doctors, but really important doctors, like the court physician of the King of Prussia. It was an interesting question, and I wanted to answer it.

Used to be that masturbation was no big deal. For example, Aristophanes made fun of wanking in much the same way American Pie did.
Right. The tradition of jack-off jokes spans the centuries. It doesn't mean they're nothing, though. They're always slightly humiliating.

Tell me about Onania.
Well, it first announced the evils of masturbation to the broad public. The original eighty-eight pages of the tract grew to several hundred with the addition of testimonials about how people had learned to masturbate and suffered its ill effects. The stories in it are sort of like Nancy Friday's Women's Sexual Fantasies — that explicit, only the authors claim they're real.

Onania diagnosed masturbation as a disease and peddled various "cures." That seems very modern.
Exactly, only worse. This isn't the doctor being paid by the drug company. In this case, the doctor was the drug company. Still, I don't want to say it's a conspiracy of doctors, because there were a lot of Enlightenment thinkers who were into it. For example, John Dewey, a really important education reformer, actually ran a contest about how schoolteachers could prevent masturbation.

Sick.
Yeah, it's pretty astounding. And these aren't Bible-belt types; these were the progressives of the day: Voltaire, Rousseau. That's what's interesting to me.

Rousseau's probably the most famous masturbator of all time. Besides Pee Wee Herman.
No, Rousseau's more famous. Poor Pee Wee.

What the hell were doctors actually diagnosing back then?
I think they saw people come in for one thing, who felt real guilt about masturbating. I also think they saw a lot of people who were actually sick — we know from medical studies that people had a lot of gastrointestinal problems back then from having too much fat in their diets. The third thing is, they would see people who were obsessive masturbators who actually suffered from obsessive-compulsive disorders. But rather than understanding that behavior as one manifestation of OCD, they took it as being the paradigmatic case.

But around 1900, people began to understand medical pathology.
Right. Also, Freud hit, with his different interpretations about masturbation.

Suddenly it was okay to wank, as long as you were under the age of, say, three.
Yeah, if you got it done just right. If you didn't do it just right, then your guilt about wanking could cause all sorts of other problems.

Seems like post-Freudian masturbatory guilt fueled a lot of landmark Boomer art. Phillip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint comes to mind. Or just about anything by Woody Allen.
And Our Bodies, Ourselves, too. Have you read Our Bodies, Ourselves?

I think so. I think my mother had it.
Right, it came out in the '70s. Anyway, in it, a girl writes about how her dad had an operation on his leg, and he got an infection, and she thought she was going to die. And she literally thought it was because she masturbated, and she swore she'd never masturbate again. Just incredible guilt. Then she realized that was really dumb and that masturbation was a form of self-discovery.

Thank God for the '70s.
Yeah. There really has been a change in the last thirty years. More public discussion about masturbation, more art on the subject. It's also when these upmarket sex shops like Good Vibrations opened.

You quote Norman Mailer — in the '70s, no less — as saying, "Masturbation is bad . . . anybody who spends his adolescence masturbating enters his young adulthood with no sense of being a man." I love this, because, really, who defines the term "wanker" better than Norman Mailer?
Norman Mailer hated feminists, who were bringing masturbation greater acceptance, and also the men who followed suit, thinking wanking was a good thing. But yeah, he was the ultimate wanker.

You call the come-as-hair-gel scene in Something about Mary grotesque. Why?
Well, because the guy's abject, such a loser. I mean it more in the Aristophanes vein. I mean, the character is a real . . . kind of a . . .

Doofus?
Yeah, a doofus.

You must give lectures about the history of masturbation. Ever get any flak?
Last year, I was invited to speak at the History and Literature program at Harvard. They ask you for something you're working on, and have the students read it and do various exercises. When I came up, one of the tutors objected to the fact that students would be forced to read and talk about masturbation.

Guess you can't talk about self-love at Harvard.
Right. They wound up giving the students an option: they could read [my work on masturbation], or they could read some of my other work. One Mormon girl wanted to read some of my work on religion, and that was fine. But everyone else, they liked the exercise.

Can you place the term "choking the chicken" in historical context?
That's really interesting. It's so hard to pinpoint when these phrases came in under what circumstances. And there's another interesting issue about how they become neutralized. Like in Greek, the word "malaka" means masturbator, or wanker — now, though, it's almost a standard term for buddy. But, I've never heard "choking the chicken."

Any predictions about the future of self-pollution?
Have you seen the movie Adaptation? Well, every time Nicolas Cage's character wants to get ahead on the adaptation, and think about the plot, he masturbates. It's kind of perfect that he connects masturbation with the imagination. It's a way out of his writer's block. It's kind of a way forward.  n°  

To buy Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, click here.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
		Sharon Lintz is a writer living in Brooklyn. She has written for the New York Post and comedycentral.com and has produced work for public radio, most recently a humor piece about vaginal cosmetic surgery for WBAI's now-defunct sex show eradio.