The enlightenment as genesis of 18th-century masturbation degeneracy hysteria.(Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation)(Book Review)

Solitary Sex." A Cultural History of Masturbation. By Thomas W. Laqueur. New York: Zone Books, 2003, 496 pages. Cloth, $34.00.

Why did social hysteria about masturbation appear so dramatically in Europe at the beginning of the 18th-century? Thomas W. Laqueur examines the history of masturbation in search of the answer to this question in Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. Scholars researching the history of masturbation in the West usually point to the early 18th-century anonymous publication of Onania: or the Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its…