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

Miller, Geoffrey P., Law, Pollution, and the Management of Social Anxiety (1999). NYU Law School, Public Law & Legal Theory Working Paper No. 9, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=206793 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.206793

Geoffrey P. Miller (Contact Author)

New York University School of Law ( email )

Center for the Study of Central Banks
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New York, NY 10012-1099
United States
212-998-6329 (Phone)
212-995-4590 (Fax)

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