September 27–October 4, 2001

book quicks|nonfiction

Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror

By Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck
Translated by Kathryn A. Hoffmann
Palgrave, 239 pp., $24.95

True to its title, Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror presents the scientific, medical, moral and religious objections to what one 19th-century writer called the "shameful vice which decimates youth." In short, an English quack published a pamphlet denouncing "Onania" in 1715; Swiss physician Samuel-August Tissot followed suit in 1760 with L’Onanisme. Their preoccupation snowballed until the mid-1870s, when a handful of doctors questioned the prevailing view that masturbation was a sin akin to suicide and a drawn-out method of same. Subsequent generations of researchers have legitimized the practice.

Chronological gaps paint this evolution of views as sudden leaps from one extreme to the other and back again. A social context is seemingly missing. Author Jean Stengers acknowledges this shortcoming in his introduction. The book is, he writes defensively, "an illustration of the role the individual can play within phenomena reputed to be collected." Masturbation makes a case for such reactions on the part of institutions, but fails on a personal level. What argument could make a woman threaten to feed her toddler grandson’s penis to rabbits?

This is the least of the book’s lapses, which include minor miscalculations, sloppy spelling errors and untranslated phrases. Published in France in 1998, it already seems dated. (One factor could be researcher Anne Van Neck’s 1982 death.) More disappointing are the missed opportunities to explore connections between the days of bloodletting and witch hunts and our more enlightened era. On the last page, Stengers draws a parallel between the crusade against masturbation and the current war on drugs. Like earlier allusions to the Boy Scouts and genital mutilation, it’s a stillborn point, dropped as soon as it’s raised. The text is too cluttered with litanies of symptoms and repetitious quotations to advance the authors’ few original ideas. Masturbation is a solitary, unproductive exercise, and it leaves the reader dry.

—M.J. Fine