If Walls Could Talk: An Intimate History of the Home by Lucy Worsley
Authors: Lucy Worsley
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both sexes, and they only caused problems when they emerged from behind the bedroom door.
The most interesting period in the history of masturbation was the nineteenth century, when the anti-masturbatory propaganda and scare-mongering information issued to young people had much in common with the anti-drug campaigning material of today. Why did this great wave of fear grip society and cause so much guilt in the bedroom?
Excessive lust seems to have been a problem as old as humanity. Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century recommended wild lettuce as a medicine which ‘extinguishes lust in a human. A man who has an overabundance in his loins should cook wild lettuce in water and pour that water over himself in a sauna bath. He should also place the warm, cooked lettuce round his loins.’ But the first book devoted to the dangers of masturbation – Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution, and all its frightful consequences in both sexes considered – appeared in Georgian London in 1715, where urban life was booming. One explanation for the anti-masturbation movement may lie in thefact that cities distanced people from nature. They created a growing concern with appearances and correct behaviour, and people moved from being producers to consumers. Then there was the influence of the new ‘rational’ trend in thought and habits. If you prided yourself upon your enlightened rationality, you might well have considered that sexual pleasure without reproduction was pointless and therefore wasteful and wrong. The writer of The Ladies Dispensatory (1739) thought female masturbation simply dreadful: women who’d learned to become ‘capable of pleasuring themselves’, he said, were foolishly and wrongly turning down good offers of marriage.
By the nineteenth century, young men were routinely warned of the ‘dangers’ of masturbating, and there were even devices available to make sure it didn’t happen. While it’s quite upsetting to imagine generations of youngsters genuinely believing that they might go blind through pleasuring themselves, the nineteenth-century solutions for preventing them from doing so were often amusingly and crazily Heath Robinson-like in character. The ‘Leather Jacket Corset’ (invented in 1831) included a metal penis tube and ‘prevented access to the testicles’, while ‘The Timely Warning’ was a penis-cooling device that employed cold water to cool ‘the organ of generation, so that the erection subsides and no discharge occurs’.
Now, most people think that as long as the bedroom door is closed, anything goes, and masturbation is a topic for humour not shame.
‘Dr Fleck’s leather corset’, one of many inventive Victorian anti-masturbation devices
10 – Venereal Disease
Oh! Now I have a pressing need to make water … Oh! It scalds me to Pieces … ’tis like Fire … – I have heard and read of pissing Pins and Needles, But never felt what it was till now.
So wrote a sufferer from venereal disease in a striking blow-by-blow account of his symptoms on 9 September 1710. He was experiencing its classic symptoms: pain in urinating and purulent matter dripping from the urethra. ‘These damned twinges, that scalding heat, and that deep-tinged loathsome matter are the strongest proofs of an infection,’ ranted fellow victim James Boswell in 1763. He believed himself to be afflicted by ‘Signor Gonorrhoea’, but at this point people still couldn’t distinguish between gonorrhoea and syphilis. The latter was the more serious: years after the first infection, the symptoms could reappear and culminate in flesh decay, paralysis, madness and a horrible death. Whichever of the two he had, Boswell was understandably gloomy at being confined to his bedroom for several weeks of treatment.
In common with their predecessors and successors in practically all other periods, commentators writing during the First World War thought that the morals of young people were in rapid and
The most interesting period in the history of masturbation was the nineteenth century, when the anti-masturbatory propaganda and scare-mongering information issued to young people had much in common with the anti-drug campaigning material of today. Why did this great wave of fear grip society and cause so much guilt in the bedroom?
Excessive lust seems to have been a problem as old as humanity. Hildegard of Bingen in the twelfth century recommended wild lettuce as a medicine which ‘extinguishes lust in a human. A man who has an overabundance in his loins should cook wild lettuce in water and pour that water over himself in a sauna bath. He should also place the warm, cooked lettuce round his loins.’ But the first book devoted to the dangers of masturbation – Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution, and all its frightful consequences in both sexes considered – appeared in Georgian London in 1715, where urban life was booming. One explanation for the anti-masturbation movement may lie in thefact that cities distanced people from nature. They created a growing concern with appearances and correct behaviour, and people moved from being producers to consumers. Then there was the influence of the new ‘rational’ trend in thought and habits. If you prided yourself upon your enlightened rationality, you might well have considered that sexual pleasure without reproduction was pointless and therefore wasteful and wrong. The writer of The Ladies Dispensatory (1739) thought female masturbation simply dreadful: women who’d learned to become ‘capable of pleasuring themselves’, he said, were foolishly and wrongly turning down good offers of marriage.
By the nineteenth century, young men were routinely warned of the ‘dangers’ of masturbating, and there were even devices available to make sure it didn’t happen. While it’s quite upsetting to imagine generations of youngsters genuinely believing that they might go blind through pleasuring themselves, the nineteenth-century solutions for preventing them from doing so were often amusingly and crazily Heath Robinson-like in character. The ‘Leather Jacket Corset’ (invented in 1831) included a metal penis tube and ‘prevented access to the testicles’, while ‘The Timely Warning’ was a penis-cooling device that employed cold water to cool ‘the organ of generation, so that the erection subsides and no discharge occurs’.
Now, most people think that as long as the bedroom door is closed, anything goes, and masturbation is a topic for humour not shame.
‘Dr Fleck’s leather corset’, one of many inventive Victorian anti-masturbation devices
10 – Venereal Disease
Oh! Now I have a pressing need to make water … Oh! It scalds me to Pieces … ’tis like Fire … – I have heard and read of pissing Pins and Needles, But never felt what it was till now.
So wrote a sufferer from venereal disease in a striking blow-by-blow account of his symptoms on 9 September 1710. He was experiencing its classic symptoms: pain in urinating and purulent matter dripping from the urethra. ‘These damned twinges, that scalding heat, and that deep-tinged loathsome matter are the strongest proofs of an infection,’ ranted fellow victim James Boswell in 1763. He believed himself to be afflicted by ‘Signor Gonorrhoea’, but at this point people still couldn’t distinguish between gonorrhoea and syphilis. The latter was the more serious: years after the first infection, the symptoms could reappear and culminate in flesh decay, paralysis, madness and a horrible death. Whichever of the two he had, Boswell was understandably gloomy at being confined to his bedroom for several weeks of treatment.
In common with their predecessors and successors in practically all other periods, commentators writing during the First World War thought that the morals of young people were in rapid and
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