The Clitical Guide to Female Self-Pleasure: How to Please Yourself So Your Partner Can Too

CHAPTER 2

Masturbation: A Brief History

Where Did It All Begin?

It's quite likely that men and women have been masturbating since the beginning of time. In order to understand just why and how masturbation became partnered sex's ugly sister, we need to travel back in time. So I climbed into my own version of the Tardis a few years ago and travelled back into history. What follows are my findings as to why we have both the myths and stigma that may have, to some degree, dissipated, but that still hold many women back from enjoying all the pleasures their bodies are capable of achieving.

Beginning of Time: The Bible Edition

Before you get mad at me, I swear I'm not trying to be provocative here with that particular title, but it's hard to deny that religion and the belief that masturbation is wrong go hand in hand and the only way to discover why is to go back in time and find out. It would be remiss of me not to take a look at how these two things are linked.

It is often commonly assumed that The Bible specifically forbids masturbation. This belief has grown, in no small part, thanks to the story of Onan. Onan's story can be found in the book of Genesis, and to be more specific, chapter thirty-eight. In this chapter, Onan was required to marry his brother's widow and, more importantly, to provide her with a child who would then inherit his brother's estate. This was the Jewish practice at the time The Bible was penned.

Now if we look at the annotated Bible passage it, in fact, reads that since Onan knew that the offspring would not be his, he spilled his semen on the ground whenever he went to his brother's wife, so that he could give no offspring to his brother.

Onan was not put to death because he was masturbating but because he was practicing the withdrawal method of birth control. He did this in order to avoid fathering a child who would never legally be his.

It would not be until the 18th century that Onan's story would be interpreted by theologians of the time, as it is often now understood to mean that masturbation was not something that should ever be practiced. We will get to the 18th century in a little while, though. We have a few other centuries and continents that we need to travel to and through before we can truly understand the history of masturbation and the myths that have resulted.

Ancient China

Philosophers and doctors in Ancient China both held the belief that ejaculation from masturbation was a waste of what was, and still is, referred to as ‘chi’. Chi was believed to be a form of energy that was vital to life, and that wasting it was never in the best interests of the patient or the person as a whole. In some of the first-ever sex manuals, which were written by Taoist masters, masturbation in men was condemned because of this belief. These same masters were also aware that women were also capable of ejaculating, or as we commonly refer to it today, ‘squirting’.

Whilst women were not specifically forbidden to masturbate, it was not a practice that was encouraged for basically the same reason as in men. Of course, we need to put this in the context of a time when women were not seen as equals in society, so their energy, or chi, was not considered to be as vital as for that of their male counterparts.

The Ancient World

Masturbation, or ‘autoerotism’, as it was often referred to in countries such as Ancient Greece and Egypt, was considered a very form of crude sexual expression. While masturbation was not specifically forbidden, it was frowned upon and thought to belong in the domain of prostitutes and lower-class citizens.

It was as early as 2000 BC that we began to see incidences of a disease that would plague the female species until the middle of the 20th century. ‘Hysteria’ in Ancient Egypt was used to describe a specific set of symptoms that included fainting, nervousness, weight loss, and depression, to name but a few. The worst symptom by far was when a woman was thought to have blood and fluid trapped in her genitals. This was also known as ‘edema’. What they were talking about was basically the female equivalent of ‘blue balls’ in guys.

Once a diagnosis of hysteria was made, there was only one option for the poor physician. He would simply massage the patient’s genitals until she orgasmed and, surprise, surprise, would receive some relief from the symptoms, all be it a temporary solution. Whilst there is no written evidence that suggests women themselves actually masturbated to help relieve the symptoms of hysteria, I think it's a pretty safe assumption that many did.

The Middle Ages

By the Middle Ages the Catholic Church was firmly established and its doctrine on masturbation was set in stone, as were most things related to sexual relations between married couples. Basically this boiled down to one thing, the only sex that was permitted was the type where the union would result in a child, or at least provided the possibility of this happening.

This was also the age where doctors became more concerned with the pollution of a person’s soul if they should decide to practice masturbation. This was especially true if you happened to be a monk or a virgin or you were considered to be a high-risk patient. The treatments they offered in order to prevent this pollution ranged from simply fasting, cold baths and sitting on stones, to actually causing the affected person to punish themselves via flagellation. It's hard to determine how successful these masturbation interventions were as there is very little written evidence either way.

Eighteenth Century

As the practice of medicine and the study of anatomy became a more established practice within and during this and subsequent eras, the hype surrounding masturbation began to grow. In 1710, for example, we saw the first real book on the subject and if the title was anything to go by it was considered a very important work! 'On the heinous sin of self-pollution, and all its frightful consequences, in both sexes, considered with spiritual and physical advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice. And to seasonable admonition to the youth of the nation (of both sexes) and those whose tuition they are under, whether parents, guardians, masters or mistresses.' I told you it was an impressive title, didn't I? This book heralded in the beginning of the modern-day campaign against masturbation that would persist well into the middle of the 20th century.

This book was by no means the only work that set out to detail the perils of masturbation or, as it was known by this time, ‘onanism’. Of all these works, probably one of the most famous was written by Swiss doctor, Simmons A.A.D. Tissot and was also given a grand title: 'Onanism: – A treatise on the diseases produced by masturbation, or the dangerous effects of secret and excessive venery.'

Tissot was the first physician to declare that the loss of the body’s vital fluids via masturbation could, and would, undoubtedly cause mental illness, as well as a litany of other symptoms and was something to be avoided at all costs.

It was during the 18th century that masturbation prohibition was practiced and encouraged by physicians, parents, and the authorities with a vigor that bordered on an obsession at times, but the prohibition would not reach its peak until the 19th century, which is where we will visit next.

Nineteenth Century

During the 19th century, and especially with the reign of Queen Victoria, the feelings against the practice of masturbation reached a fever pitch. While the Victorians are well known for their puritanical views of sex, not many people realize that masturbation was now more popularly referred to as self-abuse and this was indeed how it was viewed by many of this era. Even well-known feminists of the time would warn against the nasty habits of schoolgirls, as many women believed that if you masturbated when you were younger, you would never have the ability to grow into a proper Victorian lady.

During the 19th century the medical profession began to make great strides as regards to our understanding of the way that the body actually worked. That said, it was also very much the time of what is now referred to as ‘quackery’. Anyone could concoct a potion and claim it would cure just about any ill or affliction that took one’s fancy. As the anti-masturbation hysteria grew many quacks and the odd doctor designed a range of devices that were intended to aid parents in their quest to stop their children from the evil and dangerous practice of ‘self-pollution’.

Most of these devices were aimed at the male market, but there were a few produced with the female in mind. These, typically, would involve a chastity belt-type device or perhaps the most famous would take the form of gloves constructed of steel wool. Can you imagine sleeping with those on, let alone trying to masturbate? The anti- masturbation craze soon surfaced in the USA and particularly within the food market. It was a commonly held belief that eating spicy, rich food would fuel one’s sexual appetite, which in turn would be hard to control. As I began to look more at the history of an entire industry that was founded in no small part on these beliefs I became more and more obsessed with the humble breakfast cereal. What follows is a quick tour around how the breakfast-cereal industry came to be in America, and the impact that anti-masturbation thoughts of the time prevailed on that industry and the entire population.

Snap, Crackle, and Porn!

Whilst most people are familiar with the humble Graham Cracker, few of us know what lead to its creation, so let me enlighten you. Sylvester Graham was a Presbyterian preacher and a free-thinker. During the 1830s the typical American diet consisted of little more than red meat and blood. From his pulpit each Sunday Graham would spend many hours highlighting the perils of poor eating and masturbation. These beliefs were based on the work of Samuel Tissot and his then-famous book: Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism.

As influential as Tissot was on Graham's thinking, an equally strong influence came in the shape of the English clergyman, William Metcalfe, who was the first advocate of vegetarianism in America. Again Graham interpreted Metcalfe's writings and thoughts into his own, while Metcalfe argued in favor of vegetarianism on moral grounds. Graham was more concerned with the carnal passions that eating meat produced in people. At that time the stomach was considered to be the major organ in the body, so anything that inflamed it was compared to lust. Graham actively promoted a vegetarian diet and claimed it was a cure for almost every form of human sickness. The cure consisted of sexual moderation (no more than 12 times a year for a married couple), exercise (this would help with nocturnal emissions, he told us) and a proper diet.

In the 1830s Graham took his show on the road, lecturing an inquiring public about the perils of ‘self-pollution’. As the first of its kind it had an amazing impact on the general populace and the man behind it was just as dynamic. He sought to revolutionize the diet and sexual behavior of an entire country and in many ways was successful. Graham knew his audience well and if he were alive today no doubt would make a wonderful spin doctor, given his grasp of rhetorical devices. He was a master at making claims that no one could disprove. Considering that he preached that masturbation caused its victims to become shy, suspicious, languid, unconcerned with hygiene and, in acute cases, to suffer from hysteria, you'll see how hard it would be for your average masturbator to disprove his theories.

Around 1834, Graham stopped lecturing about sexuality and turned his thoughts toward sound nutrition. The truth was, his lectures had become too unpopular for him to continue, but our friend Graham was determined to find a way to spread his thoughts. Graham believed that there were two kinds of hunger – sexual and nutritional – and that both kinds threatened good health.

As strange as this may seem to many of us today, the Graham movement was a powerful one back in the 1800s. By 1840, his public career was over but his ideology remained deeply ingrained in society and had influenced a number of bran-loving entrepreneurs. One of those was James Caleb Jackson (1814–1895), a diet expert who combined Graham’s health-reform plan with his own ideas, which mainly consisted of hydropathy. Hydropathic therapy, also known as the ‘water cure’, involved applying extremely cold water – showers, tubs, soaks, and wet-packs – to different parts of the body. Jackson's real brainstorm, however, was creating a stone-like wafer out of Graham flour and water. He called his treat ‘Granula’ and would later go down in history as having made the first cold breakfast cereal.

Graham’s legacy to the world was what we today know as the humble Graham Cracker, all be it a sweetened and processed version of the one that was served during his lifetime at the many Graham hotels and boarding houses that sprang up and catered to his devoted followers. Although Graham's career had ended, his effects on sex and nutrition teachings still remained popular and the invention by Jackson of Granula was considered a major breakthrough in medical nutrition.

Of course, back then Granula was not considered a tasty treat and was not popular at first, but Jackson, like many eminent people of the day, had an ace up his sleeve. He had a ready-made market in the form of his patients at his sanitarium in Dansville, NY, where it was served on a daily basis to the residents.

It was this sanitarium that Sister Ellen White of the Seventh Day Adventists visited and asked Jackson to duplicate his Dansville establishment in Battle Creek, Michigan, the home and world headquarters of the Seventh Day Adventist movement. This facility would later become known as the Kellogg Sanitarium, or just ‘the Sans’, but the fact is the institute was to play a key role in not only revolutionizing the American breakfast but also the ideas behind health, nutrition, and sex.

When Sister White first opened the Sans she, too, was considered a health reformer. Inspired by Jackson and Graham, she too published a book on masturbation in 1864 called, An Appeal to Mothers: The Great Cause of the Physical, Mental and Moral Ruin of Many of the Children of Our Time. As we can see from the passage below, even though this text was written by a woman, women were still regarded as the weaker sex.

‘Females possess less vital force than the other sex, and are deprived very much of the bracing, invigorating air, by their indoors life. The results of self-abuse in them is seen in various diseases, such as catarrh, dropsy, headache, loss of memory and sight, great weakness in the back and loins, afflictions of the spine, the head often decays inwardly. Cancerous humor, which would lay dormant in the system their lifetime, is inflamed, and commences its eating, destructive work. The mind is often utterly ruined, and insanity takes place.’

Sister White, although intelligent, proved to be no leader and the Sans floundered for about ten years until a quirky young doctor named John Harvey Kellogg took over daily operations. Kellogg was another Graham disciple and advocate. He was also highly regarded within the Adventists for his hard-hitting medical journalism. Unlike Graham, he openly embraced medical science and was constantly experimenting with wholegrain foods. Two years into the job, he invented the first Battle Creek health treat, which consisted of a mixture of oatmeal and corn meal baked into biscuits and then ground into bits.

For some reason he decided to call his treat ‘Granula’, a strange decision when you consider that the only other cereal on the market was also called Granula. Once they finished suing him, Kellogg took the decision to rename his new product ‘Granola’. Granola wasn't the only delicacy that was served to the inmates of the Sans. Other specialties included caramel cereal coffee, Bulgarian yogurt and meat substitutes.

At one point in his career Kellogg concentrated his research solely on nuts. He wrote a paper entitled ‘Nuts May Save the Race’. During this period of his studies he is believed to have invented peanut butter as well as malted nuts. As strange as it may seem now, this bland diet helped turn around the fortunes of the once-failing Sans. Kellogg believed that most of the patients admitted to the Sans simply suffered from Americanitis and the remedy was simply a change in diet. The cure rate at the Sans was remarkably high simply because no one who was seriously ill was ever admitted. Kellogg never admitted any chronic masturbators to the Sans, either. This suited his purpose and like Graham he continued to preach the doom and gloom of such abhorrent practices.

For example, on the night of his honeymoon, Kellogg spent his time writing his most famous book, Plain Facts for Old and Young, a Warning on the Evils of Sex. This book featured an amazing collection of symptoms and cures for the curse known as ‘self-pollution’ as well as covering all important sexual ills of the time, but self- pollution was by far the biggest. In this book, he included the 39 signs that would indicate to an outsider that someone in fact masturbated. The fact that this list covers just about anyone who even vaguely looks human was no accident. For example:

Sleeplessness, love of solitude, bashfulness, unnatural boldness, confusion of ideas, capricious appetite, use of tobacco, and acne.

This was a clever ploy from his point of view. Just as Graham had done before him, it was extremely difficult for anyone to prove the theories wrong. Dr Kellogg was never wrong, his way was the only way and to prove a point, although he married he never consummated his marriage to Ells Eaton and they lived in separate apartments. This was supposed to prove that sexual relationships were not necessary to obtain good health.

It's quite likely, though, that the doctor was in some way dysfunctional (one book suggests he had mumps). After breakfast every morning, he had an orderly give him an enema. This may mean he had klismaphilia, an anomaly of sexual functioning traceable to childhood in which an enema substitutes for regular sexual intercourse. For the klismaphile, putting the penis in the vagina is experienced as hard, dangerous, and repulsive work.

Whatever the reasons for his beliefs, they had long-lasting effects on society and many of the myths that still surround masturbation can be directly attributed to his way of thinking. The Sans became more and more famous and Dr Kellogg himself became something of a demagogue. He began to concentrate less on his fundamental beliefs and more on scientific facts and theories.

A major step in this direction came when a patient showed him a little wheat mattress a friend had sent her to aid her digestive problems. Invented by Henry Perky from Denver, they were what we now know as Shredded Wheat. At this time Shredded Wheat was not thought of as a breakfast food. Originally it was a main course, a natural food that followed the true Grahamite tradition. As well as the original Shredded Wheat there was a whole host of recipes associated with this biscuit. These ranged from banana croquettes with Shredded Wheat to cheese and Shredded Wheat toast – the list was endless. Perky even founded a scientific institute devoted to training demonstrators on how to educate the ordinary housewife on its uses.

In the humble Shredded Wheat the good Dr Kellogg saw the potential for the first ready-to-eat breakfast cereal and went about creating his own. After much experimentation he came up with Granose, the first flaked wheat cereal. Once again the Sans featured heavily in the development of this little wonder flake. As Kellogg put his ideas into commercial production he met with some stiff opposition, not least from Perky himself, who wasn't about to let anyone rip off his invention and had taken no less than 47 patents out with regards to Shredded Wheat. The effect of the cereal wars was that Battle Creek exploded with cereal and health-food manufacturers and almost overnight the place became known as ‘cereal central’. Many more wars ensued in the battle for the cereal that would rid the world of all its ailments.

John Kellogg was finally forced to turn the ailing Kellogg’s company over to his brother, William, who although he had worked at the Sans with John, had little interest in curing the public of bad eating habits and masturbation but in making money. So was born the Kellogg’s brand as we now know it today, but its original founder left his legacy in the myths that still surround masturbation to this day.

Late 19th Century to early 20th Century

Remember, as far back as Ancient Egyptian times we saw the emergence of the medical but vague term ‘hysteria’. At the same time as Kellogg’s and Graham were busy producing cornflakes and crackers, the medical profession was busy curing women of what was thought to be the often life-threatening disease known as, you guessed it, ‘hysteria’. Just as in Ancient Egypt, this disease only afflicted the female sex and caused a myriad symptoms, running the gamut from anxiety, irritability, nervousness, feelings of heaviness in the lower abdomen, sleepiness, to name but a few. Of course nowadays we recognize ‘hysteria’ for what it actually is: horniness.

Back then, though, the cure for hysteria was a simple one. Doctors would manually masturbate their female patients to orgasm. Of course the end results were not called ‘orgasms’; instead they would be referred to as ‘paroxysms’. As you can imagine, this was, in many cases, a time-consuming cure, and often a temporary one. Can you imagine how tired these doctors’ hands must have been?

So, being as this was the start of the Industrial Revolution, nothing was, or at least seemed, impossible and in order to relieve their cramped hands, many doctors turned to mechanical methods to help their patients reach the desired state of paroxysm. Unfortunately these machines were often poorly constructed and caused injury to the patient, but, as is often the case, electricity came to the rescue. In 1880, more than a decade before the invention of the electric iron and vacuum cleaner, an enterprising English physician, Dr Joseph Mortimer Granville, patented the electromechanical vibrator.

The vibrator was an immediate hit with doctors and patients alike and at the turn of the century, as electricity became more widely available across American homes, the humble, if often scary by today's standards, electric vibrator became a staple in many homes. Of course, when you consider this was a time when women were still considered the ‘fairer sex’, the actual use for the vibrator had to be disguised. Many popular magazines of the time would sell them as ‘personal massagers’, although their actual use was not exactly a well-kept secret.

For a while electric vibrators were acceptable and commonplace in most American homes, but that would change with the advent of the silent movie. Silent movies were not just used to make Charlie Chaplin a superstar of his time, but also by some enterprising young men, who saw their potential to provide pornographic images. As the trade in pornography grew and images of what were considered loose, wanton women using the humble electric vibrator began to grow, the popularity of the Personal Massager became tarnished and over time vibrators all but disappeared from the American home. For now…