Law, Pollution, and the Management of Social Anxiety
107 Pages Posted: 1 Mar 2000
Date Written: 1999
Abstract
This paper considers the cultural meaning of masturbation and spermatorrhoea (wet dreams). It explores the more than 200-year-long campaign against "self-pollution" by examining the meanings assigned to the practice along a number of dimensions that collectively contribute to society's construction of the Good and the Bad: : purity and pollution, health and harm, self and other, natural and unnatural, beauty and deformity, gender-appropriate and gender-inappropriate, order and chaos, good and bad, and true and false. The article identifies several overlapping frameworks that norm entrepreneurs used to stigmatize masturbation: the religious, medical, and sociological models. Each of these models offered a theory for the origin, development, and treatment of the conditions. The paper concludes with some conjectures about the value the campaign against masturbation may have offered in terms of displacing social anxieties, especially for physicians, moral conservatives, and early feminists.
Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation