April 15, 2003
Interview with Thomas W. Laqueur: Discussing Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (2003)
by Nader Vossoughian
Over the last couple weeks, I’ve had the pleasure of reading Thomas W. Laqueur’s beautifully written Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. Although Professor Laqueur reads the history of masturbation back to Roman antiquity, the era most pivotal to his study are the years “in or around 1712.” During this time, masturbation came under fire with growing frequency in the popular and scientific presses. As Laqueur points out, the period marked the dawn of the Enlightenment, a century from which we have inherited our modern ideas about liberty and autonomy. At the same time, it had also given us our contemporary concept of the human body, and our understanding of illness more specifically. As the French historian of science Georges Canguilhem (1966) has noted, while the ancient Greeks conceived of illness holistically, as a byproduct of the body’s desire to restore itself to health, since the eighteenth century modern medicine has (predominantly) conceived of illness as something entirely foreign (and extraneous) to the body’s natural biological processes. Laqueur figures the history of masturbation within this larger project of “remapping” illness (and our attitudes toward the body politic more generally), and elegantly explores the ethical, philosophical, and political stakes involved in this process. Q. Professor Laqueur, I’m interested in hearing your thoughts about the relationship between masturbation and the imagination. You discuss, for example, how the late-eighteenth century German philosopher Immanuel Kant quite forcefully condemned masturbation. By the same token, in his Critique of Judgment, Kant celebrated the imagination as a faculty of the mind that allowed humans to appreciate aesthetic beauty. Disinterested pleasure, Kant reasoned, resulted from "free play" between the intellect and the imagination -- that beauty, in other words, was a solitary experience detached from the world at large. Could Kant, after all is said and done, in any ways be seen as a repressed apologist of masturbation? Isn't self-pleasure the only form of sexual pleasure that Kant's subjectivist philosophy allows for?
A. The problem is not that the imagination is denied its rightful place by Kant. Quite on the contrary, as you point out. The point is that the evil use of the imagination places one in an untenable relationship not to something abstract like beauty but to oneself. In the case of sexual pleasure between people-- not shared but dependent on another-- he makes an elaborate argument that this is justified by the contract of marriage that gives each partner his/her due. In the case of masturbation, no such contract is possible; one is simply using oneself as an object and is leading oneself into this situation willfully.
Q. In your book, I really appreciated the way you explored how masturbation has entered into late 20th century conversations about feminism, women’s sexuality, gay pride, and lesbian studies. One issue I continue to ponder, however, is the degree to which masturbation advocates of recent years have been able to advance their agenda independent of other minority sexual rights movements. Is there, for example, a pro-masturbation lobby in Washington, D.C. (one that does not operate under the banner of a gay rights movement)? What efforts have been made to organize such a lobby, if at all (both in Washington, D.C. and elsewhere)? Has there been an upswing in masturbation rights activity since President Clinton’s dismissal of Jocelyn Elders, the former Surgeon General who was criticized for speaking about the public health benefits of masturbation?
A. The answer to this question is in one sense easy in that the State makes no claim on what a person does alone, which is still how masturbation is understood. There are no laws against it; there are no laws, as far as I know, against group masturbation; and there are no laws against mutual masturbation, because even in older Roman Catholic thinking on the subject it is not a form of sodomy. The only place where the State directly confronts masturbation is in its attacks on what it takes to be violations of public morality: mutual masturbation in rest rooms, public indecency, pedophilia, etc. In that sense, the defense of masturbation is intimately tied in with gay rights issues or the advocacy of child love, a position that finds little public voice these days. So there is no masturbation rights movement because the practice does not [run under the rubric of being] "civil" in the sense of "civil rights."
That said, there is a growing community of men and women who promote masturbatory sexuality as part of a more general liberatory program that is independent of the gay or the feminist movements. Clearly, the advocates of Tantric masturbation or of masturbation as a form of knowing oneself -- see Joanni Blank's Collection First Person Sexual example-- would fall into this category. National Masturbation Month -- the promotion of masturbation as pleasurable without any real programmatic interest -- would be another example of public advocacy of solitary sex.
Q. What can you say about the state of masturbation research in the academy? Do you foresee masturbation studies becoming as ubiquitous as gay or feminist studies? Why or why not?
A. I do not see masturbation studies becoming anything like gay and feminist studies for two reasons: it is too general a practice to create an identity, and it is outside the public domain in which areas of academic study are grounded. That said, there is a huge literature in medicine, psychology, sociology, and other disciplines that deals with one aspect or another of masturbation.
Thomas W. Laqueur is Professor of History at the University of California, Berkeley.
Posted by agglutinations at April 15, 2003 06:15 AM