An Unmanly Vice: Self-Pollution, Anxiety, and the Body in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

The campaign against masturbation offers one of the outstanding success stories in the history of medical popularization. This paper seeks to identify the reasons for this success, focusing on the campaign's early stages, from the late seventeenth century onwards. It first identifies a series of often quite explicit political, ideological, and economic motives such as religious notions of 'uncleaniness', bourgeois concerns about self-control, marriage, and population growth, and the financial interests of the London veneral trade. Drawing, in particular, on the 'confessions of self-declared victims of masturbation in eighteenth-century patient letters, it then shows that the physical and mental symptoms attributed to masturbation very successfully addressed some of the deepest anxieties in contemporary society, anxieties about virility, gender identity, and physical selfhood. Finally, applying Bourdieu's notion of 'habitus', the central role of a new, implicitly male, more solid, closed and self-contained dominant body image is underlined. Framing the interpretation and the very experience of the body among the proponents and the recipients of anti-onanist discourse alike, it helped to make the dangers of masturbation an almost irrefutable, objective truth.

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