Solitary Pleasures: The Historical, Literary and Artistic Discourses of Autoeroticism

Synopsis

Solitary Pleasures 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 Roseanne episode, and David Russell's movie Spanking the Monkey. 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."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.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?

Copyright:

1996

Book Details

Book Quality:

Publisher Quality

ISBN-13:

9781134715336

Related ISBNs:

9780203760390, 9780415911733, 9780415911733, 9780415911740, 9780415911740

Publisher:

Taylor and Francis

Date of Addition:

07/04/20

Copyrighted By:

Routledge

Adult content:

No

Language:

English

Has Image Descriptions:

No

Categories:

Nonfiction, Art and Architecture, Social Studies

Grade Levels:

College Freshman

Reading Age:

18–18

Submitted By:

Bookshare Staff

Usage Restrictions:

This is a copyrighted book.

Edited by:

Paula Bennett

Edited by:

Vernon Rosario