Solitary Sex Quotes

“Onania had legs, as they say in publishing. Even after two of its publishers died, it kept going. But its monopoly on masturbation was short-lived; others moved in to make the private vice ever more public and profitable. Next in the field, in the mid-1720s, was the most successful of London's quack-medicine establishments, led by the famous Mrs. Garroway, scion of the well-known coffeehouse family. From a secure base in "Dr. Chamberlayne's Anodyne Necklace for Children's Teeth" and a subsidiary line that included gout cures, purging sugarplums, ague plasters, saffron drops, and ophthalmic tobacco that the firm made, sold, and advertised lavishly, she branched out into the self-pollution business. The whole array -her new cure for the newly discovered masturbatory disease and the old standbys could be had in London or the provinces, retail and wholesale, in person and by mail. Hundreds of pamphlets, each slightly different from the others, as well as weekly notices in newspapers, spread the fame of this wide-ranging pharmacopoeia and of onanism. In short, others rushed into the niche that Onania had pioneered.”
― Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation

“Remarkably, this shameless effort to invent a new disease and at the same time offer its cure at a steep price became the founding text for a medical tradition that would draw in the pillars of high-Enlightenment medicine and help create modern sexuality. Scores of dissertations, hundreds of articles, encyclopedia entries, didactic tracts, and many learned tomes would find their origins in 1712. Almost two hundred years later, when many had come to doubt that masturbation caused serious physical harm, a noted French doctor could still find almost a hundred conditions that were either signs or consequences of self-abuse.”
― Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation