Let's see, what shall I blog about today? I didn't really do much with this lovely day (the first real spring-like day of the year - the temps were in the 80s and the trees are all in blossom), so no "what I did today" blog. And I'm fresh out of dharma talks for right now. I think I've kicked religion around enought this week, anyway.

I know - I don't think I've blogged about masturbation yet.

Masturbation was apparently invented in 1712. That is the surprising assertion documented in "Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation" (Zone Books) by Thomas W. Laqueur. Of course, that's an exaggeration, because since our primate cousins masturbate, we probably did so from our earliest beginnings. But in 1712, there was a shift in thinking about masturbation which brought it to the forefront of reform by moralists, physicians, and other do-gooders.

The ancients were nearly silent on the subject, and thought that masturbation was simply a method of ridding the body of excess sperm. In Jewish law, spilling seminal fluid was much debated by the rabbis.

The only reference in the Bible that could relate specifically to masturbation does not. Onan's crime is sometimes used as an injunction against masturbation, although the wiser commentators note that masturbation was not Onan's violation (coitus interruptus, and thereby refraining from being fruitful and multiplying, was). Early Christian teaching was that masturbation was nonreproductive, and was thus to be avoided, but it was not a big source of worry.

Then in 1712, John Marten produced his masterwork. Marten was a quack who had written on venereal disease and had been previously jailed for obscenity. But in 1712, he published "Onania; or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution and all its Frightful Consequences," and masturbation was never to be the same. Marten's book was basically a big advertisement for his potions, which would cure the horrid vice. Marten's new anxiety filled a need, which Laqueur claims was due to the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Masturbation was of great interest to major writers and philosophers: Voltaire, Mary Wollstonecraft, Swift, Rousseau, Kant and Whitman all thought and wrote about the "solitary vice."

It was not until well into the twentieth century that physicians stopped blaming masturbation for all sorts of illness, and now it is advocated as part of self-discovery. The famous sex shop Good Vibrations declares every May to be National Masturbation Month, and the poster last year had the slogan, "Think Globally, Masturbate Locally."

Those who want warnings on the evils of the practice can still find many religious leaders who will oblige them. Laqueur closes his study with the incident of Joycelyn Elders, who was surgeon general until 1995, when she answered a reporter's question saying that sex education should include teaching about masturbation. In the minds of some moral persons, this seemed equivalent to teaching techniques of masturbation. She had not previously pleased them with her outspoken views on AIDS or pre-marital sex, but she used the M word, causing a rift with that moral beacon, President Clinton, who said that her view of the benefits of masturbation reflected "differences with administration policy." While it amused many that there was an administration policy on masturbation, Elders was out, and the two century legacy of John Marten continued.