Tax Policy and the Economy, Volume 11

This is the first cultural history of the world's most common sexual practice: masturbation. At a time when almost any victimless practice has its public advocates and almost every sexual act is front-page news, the easiest and least harmful one is embarrassing, discomforting, and genuinely radical when openly acknowledged. But this has not always been the case. The ancient world cared little about maturbation; it was of no great concern in Jewish and Christian teaching about sexuality. In fact, as Thomas Lacqeur dramatically shows, solitary sex as an important medical and moral issue can be dated with a precision rare in cultural history: the solitary vice, self-pollution, or self-abuse came into being around 1712. A creature of the Enlightenment, masturbation at first worried not conservatives - for whom it had long been but one among many sins of the flesh - but rather the progressives who welcomed sexual pleasure but struggled to create an ethics of self-government. The first truly democratic sexuality, masturbation was of ethical interest to both men and women, young and old.

Thomas W. Laqueur is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.