The decloseting of masturbation?

Journal of Sex Research, August, 2004 by Martha Cornog

The Joy of Self-Pleasuring: Why Feel Guilty About Feeling Good? By Edward L. Rowan. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 2000, 226 pages. Paper, $19.00.

Masturbation as Means of Achieving Sexual Health. Edited by Walter O. Bockting and Eli Coleman. New York: Haworth, 2002, 147 pages. Paper, $17.95.

Masturbation: The History of a Great Terror. By Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck (Translated from the French by Kathryn A. Hoffmann). New York: Palgrave, 2001, 239 pages. Hardcover, $24.95.

Freud wrote much about masturbation, perhaps most quotably in his wrap-up of the 1912 symposium on "Onanie" for the Vienna Psycho-Analytical Society. After summarizing at length the group's agreements and disagreements, he concluded (almost throwing up his hands, we might imagine), "But I think the time has come to break off. For we are all agreed on one thing--that the subject of masturbation is quite inexhaustible" (Freud, 1912/1958, p. 254).

Masturbation may be inexhaustible as a topic, but there has not been any inexhaustible outpouring of books about it. Since the 1960s, only around 30 have appeared (this total includes 7 works of either fiction, jokes, or photos; Cornog, 2003, pp. 321-323). This is a paltry showing, considering the publishing torrent about sex during those decades--both scholarly and popular--and considering that masturbation is surely the second most common human sex act.

Of those 30 books about masturbation, 13 appeared in the 1990s and 5 since 2000. This bodes well. As we all know, the Kinsey reports and feminism opened up the topic toward the beginning of this period. Later, the Joycelyn Elders and Pee-Wee Herman scandals of the 1990s pushed the "M word" into the media, joining with the Bobbitt and Clinton-Lewinsky scandals that put penis and oral sex (perhaps even fellatio!) into public discourse. How many people thought that instead of firing Elders, Clinton should have taken her hint, playing with himself instead of with Monica Lewinsky?

Now that elderly actress Gloria Stuart has written openly in her autobiography ("A Touching Memoir," 1999), "I am devoted to masturbation," perhaps the time is right for more books on the subject. Certainly, people have concerns. When I polled the American Association of Sex Educators, Counselors, and Therapists (AASECT) list-serve recently as to what clients and students want to know about masturbation, at least 10 AASECTers showered me with questions they hear all the time. Many were variations of "Is the way I masturbate normal?"; "Can you do it too much?"; "Is it abnormal or wrong to masturbate if you're in a relationship?"; and "Will it have a bad effect on me/decrease my sperm/make it harder for me to have an orgasm any other way?"

FOR FRESHMAN LEVEL

Rowan's book The Joy of Self-Pleasuring--the first of three reviewed here--is designed for such questioners. He writes as a psychiatrist and sex therapist: "This book presents the material that I know to be helpful in the process of changing our attitudes towards masturbation." He encourages readers to enjoy masturbation by grounding permission in scholarly sources made accessible---essentially, blending the popular and the scientific. "We have to understand how psychology, sociology, anthropology, statistics, anatomy, physiology, medicine, religion, and education have viewed sex and masturbation over time" (p. 15). Several good masturbation "how-to" books have been on the market (e.g., Allison, 2002; Dodson, 1996; Litten, 1993, 1996), but Rowan's was the first nonscholarly book to take a broader perspective and anchor it with notes and references. He covers the following topics: why we feel bad about masturbation, early masturbation experiences and effects, the sexual response cycle, masturbation techniques (including warnings about dangerous ones), frequency statistics and who does it, animal masturbation, masturbation in other cultures, religious viewpoints (Judeo-Christian only), medical viewpoints and fears of disease starting with Onania, Boy Scout Handbook texts about masturbation over the decades, masturbation fantasies, masturbation in male-female relationships, masturbation as part of sex therapy, and supplanting the negative myths of masturbation with more positive affirmations.

Is this a tall order? Yes. Much information about masturbation has been fragmented, chaotic, disorganized, spread over hundreds of sources, and badly substantiated if at all. Choosing what to present from among this mess and figuring out how to synthesize it understandably for nonscholarly readers must have posed challenges for this author.

Rowan has a dry wit and uses it well to make the scholarly material digestible, but occasionally jocularity jars against the scholarship rather than leavening it (e.g., an appendix titled "Websites for Wankers"). Not quite journalism, not quite therapy, and not quite scientific writing, the text does not always flow smoothly. Subheadings would have helped with navigating subtopics and arguments. Sometimes main points drown in details, and sometimes transitions seem forced. At times many topics jostle together within one chapter, not always comfortably. Moreover, the title misleads: "joy of" suggests a sex manual, but the thrust is really about the masturbation taboo, how it came about, and why to discard it. Still, these are relatively minor problems in a work so concisely useful for patients and anyone approaching the topic seriously for the first time.