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Most condemned as a perversion
Considering the number of "perversions" that are possible in human sexual behaviour it is
amazing that
masturbation should have been most condemned in history. One reason for this is undoubtedly
that masturbation
is common in any society whereas many other types of deviant sexuality are rare. It is hard to
think of a disease
or debilitating condition that has not been represented, at one time or another, as an effect of
masturbation. The
following are picked at random from quotes in Alex Comfort as supposed consequences of
"self-abuse"-
impotence, tabes dorsalis, pulmonary consumption, dyspepsia, dimness of sight, vertigo,
epilepsy,
hypochondriasis, loss of memory, fatuity, hysteria, asthma, melancholia, mania, dementia,
paralysis and death!
What is surprising is that medical men believed that such conditions could be caused by
masturbation, a practice
which as we are told ad nauseum in these enlightened times- is entirely harmless.
Alex Comfort points out that masturbation concerned few medical writers prior to 1720 -
and at least one writer
saw it as a desirable practice. An anonymous author of "Hippolytus Redivivus"
(1644) represented masturbation
as a remedy against the dangerous allurements of Woman. Perhaps such an argument would
not be popular
today: at least it was preferable to the hysteria that was to follow in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries!