The pained history of self-pleasure

Don't knock masturbation," Woody Allen famously quipped. "It's sex with someone I love." But masturbation has of course been knocked around some, historically. According to Thomas W. Laqueur, a professor of history at the University of California at Berkeley (and the author of "Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation") masturbation was not a topic of great interest to the powers that be until 1712, when a con man named John Marten anonymously published a book spectacularly entitled: "Onania; or, 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 seasonable Admonition to the Youth of the nation of Both SEXES."

In this book, he first introduced the idea that the biblical Onan's sin was masturbation, even though most close readers of the biblical text know Onan's actual sin was a failure to impregnate his dead brother's wife (as mandated by Jewish law)--specifically, coitus interruptus.

The book became a hit, and Marten, now fancying himself a "surgeon," quickly capitalized on his luck by selling remedies for the ills of masturbation. Con men are, above all, great capitalists, as we have all re-learned recently in the U.S....