Onanist manifesto

Don't knock masturbation — it's sex with someone I love.

Annie Hall

Masturbation has a pretty prestressed history. Particularly starting from the late 18th, early 19th century onwards, Europe witnessed a crusade against onanism; medicine and pedagogy blamed it to be the cause of almost every mental or physical illness you could think of. Interestingly enough (I've read quite a bit about the topic, as you might have guessed), there was a particular link between reading/books an masturbation. Of course because in pre-movie times porn was mostly in written form (Rousseau once referred to them as the books you read with one hand). But even more so because reading - like masturbating - was something to be done alone; both were solitary vices.

Masturbation was a site where boundaries between individual and societal body, public and private, and the particular fears of bourgeois society became apparent. Foucault (who else?) described the fear about infantile masturbation as the key trigger for the instauration of the heterosexual, bourgeois nuclear family; the infantile body becoming the area of a particular parental care and thus - hello psychoanalysis - the vanishing point of incestual desires. Masturbation was also a key figure of class anxieties, because the servants were seen as the modern Evas who seduced innocent and healthy children into depravation. They were the enemy in one's own house; potentially dangerous because they would teach the precious offspring an alluring hobby which in the end would lead to the degeneration of bourgeois class and thus of all society. (The most interesting story to me is the one where nurses would masturbate crying and annoying babys and toddlers to calm them down.)

Masturbation was more or less absolved in the 20th century, particularly by dear Siggi who was one of the first ones to openly accord sexual drives to children. Nevertheless, masturbation beyond childhood and puberty still carried (and carries) the stain of deviantness and something vaguely associated with infantilism (also dear Siggi's idea, because the ultimate goal of sexual development was of course genital, heterosexual intercourse). To masturbate is embarrassing, pubertal, deficient - you're only doing it because you can't get the real thang.

I, for one, am really into masturbation. I got a late start, but enjoy it all the more. I don't consider it as a supplement (to speak with Derrida) in any way or as something inferiour or less good than sex with another person (in fact, I've had sexual partners where masturbation clearly would have been the better choice). I just think it's a different way of having sex. I would like to see it as a technology of self in the Foucauldian sense; a bodily exercise where you work on yourself, for yourself. I see it as a way of being nice to myself, of taking care of my body; also a way of getting to know my body and explore my fantasy and my mind.

When I masturbate, I feel like the boundaries of my body are becoming strangely blurred. You know, it's like when you go to sleep and there is this moment where you can't exactly tell where your arm ends and the part of your body on which your arm rests starts. I get a sense of total disorientation or rather: I feel like my whole sensations are solely focused on my lower back and pubic region.

I kinda feel like a Monchichi, you know those stuffed animals you had in childhood that had those plastic fingers you could stick in their mouths?