UNFORTUNATELY, sexual and other revolutions are a lot of work with rather prosaic returns. The most that our generation can accomplish is a gradual disengagement from the misconceptions of our time. Our past remains to permeate the present. One less-than-liberated woman asks her physician if it is true that homosexual children result from the rear-entry coital position. Another inquires if it's wrong for her sixty-five-year-old husband still to want sex. An adolescent boy asks his coach if there is any way to prevent the wet dreams that impair his athletic prowess.
Each generation advances intellectually, but lags emotionally.
A medical student and his young wife are able to speak
about sex with his mother, a just-liberated matron. The
young couple tests the depth of the mother's newfound philosophy
by discussing many intimate details. The mother
doesn't even blush. She replies with a shady joke and a sex
manual quotation of her own. Finally, the young wife
describes the intricate manipulations necessary for her
vagina to lubricate. She suddenly turns and asks her
mother-in-law, "What does it take for you to get juiced up,
Mom?" The mother blushes, stammers, and is unable to
answer.
Attitudes toward childhood masturbation have aptly illustrated
changes in our attitudes toward sex. Prior to the eighteenth
century, masturbation was condemned solely on
moral grounds. Thereafter, the habit became inexorably
wedded to physical disease. Masturbation was said to cause
insanity, tuberculosis, syphilis, eventual impotence, or sterility,
and deformed children. Those unable to control their
urges sometimes committed suicide in despair. Any indulgence
was the forerunner of fatal addiction.
Treatment was so drastic as to seem macabre. One physician
recommended that the clitoris be "freely excised either
by scissors or knife-I always prefer the scissors." The nerves
leading to the penis were cut, an operation which produced
permanent impotence. This was a small price to pay for freedom
from debilitating disease. (Baker, 1866) In fact, one disease
was created in order to explain nocturnal emissions or
"wet dreams." This disease, "spermatorrhea," connoted
intrinsic evil and was a penalty for early, heavy masturbation.
(Schwartz, 1973)
In 1854, Charles Drysdale presented the following ominous
account of this condition:
The victim wakes suddenly from a stupor, just as the discharge
is pouring out, which he will try in vain to check; or perhaps
he does not wake till it is over, and then, as a lethargic
consciousness, which of itself tells him what has taken place,
slowly awakens, he puts down his hand and sickens with
despair, as he perceives the fatal drain, and thinks on the
gloomy morrow which will follow. ... The patient may, after years
of suffering, sink into the lowest stage of weakness, and
die...the disease has in many cases progressed to insanity, and
idiocy...
Gerhart Schwartz describes the profusion of mechanical
devices to correct spermatorrhea which flooded an eager
market. Most were spike-lined rings, to be placed about the
penis at bedtime. Uncomfortable, but not unbearable without
an erection, they produced excruciating pain when the
penis distended. This immediately awakened the unfortunate
wretch, who was then told to take a cold bath in order to
relieve his excitation. Electric shocks and tight bandages
were also employed. In 1908, Miss Perkins, a nurse who
worked in a sanitarium, wrote about the most secure and
complete device to prevent masturbation.
She called it "Sexual Armour":
It is a deplorable but well-known fact that one of the most
common causes of insanity, imbecility and feeble-mindedness,
especially in youth, is due to masturbation or self-abuse. This is
about equally true of both sexes. Physicians, nurses and attendants
associated with insane asylums have long found this
habit the most difficult of all bad practices to eradicate, because
of the incessant attention required of them in respect to the subjects
in their care. ... Therefore, with persons who have carried
on such disastrous practices until serious ailments of the mind
have resulted, there has been but little hope of cure.