The Bush Whacker's Book Club

Okay, let's face it: I'n no Oprah Winfrey. But I read a lot of books, even if I don't have a corporate machine behind me. And, in the interests of blogging more, I'm inaugurating a new category of blog entries. Here goes with the first of the lot, certainly appropriate for a Bush Whacker who's studying sexuality.

Solitary Sex by Thomas Laqueur

The subtitle of this book says it all: "A Cultural History of Masturbation." Thomas Laqueur is coming to speak to the Sexuality Studies Working Group (of which I'm a member) this coming Friday. So my day today will be largely spent trying to finish reading this tome of a book (almost 500 pages) before he gets here. Laqueur's a Berkeley prof, whose reputation was built largely on his previously published book, Making Sex. It's a medical/social/cultural history of the very idea of sexual difference. (Rumour has it that Laqueur took himself off to medical school to really study medicine in order to be a more legitimate commentator on its history. I was told this once, though who knows: could be an academic urban myth)...

In Solitary Sex Laqueur argues that masurbation is THE modern form of sexuality, rooted, as it is, in ideas about and anxieties attached to individualism. There's a good deal of literary discussion here too about books that Samuel Pepys, in his diary, called "books you read with one hand." But Laqueur really takes a serious look at the historical evolution of masturbation, tracing its modern-day configuration back to a particular tract called "Onania," published in 1712. (Rare precision for a history of ideas and practices). One of the more surprising observations he makes is that masturbation was a form of "self-pollution" (both morally and medically) not only for conservatives, but also for progressives. This is not to say that mastubation was only invented in 1712, but only that masturbation in its current form can be traced back to this time. It's quite fascinating how masturbation (and prohibitions against it) so define the ways we think about sexuality even in the current form.

That's one story about the role of masturbation in my life these days. I could tell you others. But doesn't the fact that I'm not say as much about the unspoken rules of decorum, about conventions of privacy and publicity, and about what contexts make sexually explicit content more acceptable than others? Isn't Laqueur therefore right that masturbation tells us quite an interesting story about the individual's relationship to sexual practices and ideas AND about the role of sexuality in civil society?