Solitary Pleasures

<p><strong><em>Solitary Pleasures</em></strong> is the first anthology to address masturbation exploring both the history and artistic representation of autoeroticism. Masturbation today enjoys a highly equivocal and contradictory status among cultural discourses relating to sexuality. On the one hand it is the subject of much popular treatment especially in sexual self-help books advice columns and in pop culture--for example Madonna's Like a Virgin performance a recent <strong><em>Roseanne</em></strong> episode and David Russell's movie <strong><em>Spanking the Monkey</em></strong>. On the other hand masturbation is still a taboo subject for most people in everyday conversation. Perhaps more surprising it has been largely dismissed by academics as a trivial humorous topic and the history of a delusion.<br><br>It was not until the eighteenth century that onanism was portrayed as a morbid act of epidemic proportions that produced pox hair loss blindness insanity impotence and a horrible. Its prevention and treatment warranted diverse and often cruel measures: surveillance diets drugs corsets electrical alarms urethral cauterization clitoridectomy and labial sewing. This literature's apocalyptic warnings about the personal and social morbidity of pollution-by-the-hand are largely unknown to most people today but the ghostly echoes of these admonitions still inform and preserve the present taboo of the subject.<br><br>Why did this apparently innocuous activity become so overpoweringly stigmatized? Why was the eradication of masturbation one of the most important goals of 19th century public hygiene? Why even after the sexual revolution is masturbation still shrouded in shame?</p>