Solitary Sex

A historical account of masturbation as a moral issue and cultural taboo.

Solitary Pleasures is the first anthology to address masturbation, exploring both the history and artistic representation of autoeroticism. Masturbation today enjoys a highly equivocal and contradictory status among cultural discourses relating to sexuality. On the one hand, it is the subject of much popular treatment, especially in sexual self-help books, advice columns, and in pop culture--for example, Madonna's "Like a Virgin" performance, a recent Roseanne episode, and David Russell's movie Spanking the Monkey. On the other hand, masturbation is still a taboo subject for most people in everyday conversation. Perhaps more surprising, it has been largely dismissed by academics as a trivial, humorous topic and the "history of a delusion." It was not until the eighteenth century that "onanism" was portrayed as a morbid act of epidemic proportions that produced pox, hair loss, blindness, insanity, impotence and a horrible. Its prevention and treatment warranted diverse and often cruel measures: surveillance, diets, drugs, corsets, electrical alarms, urethral cauterization, clitoridectomy, and labial sewing. This literature's apocalyptic warnings about the personal and social morbidity of "pollution-by-the-hand" are largely unknown to most people today, but the ghostly echoes of these admonitions still inform and preserve the present taboo of the subject. Why did this apparently innocuous activity become so overpoweringly stigmatized? Why was the eradication of masturbation one of the most important goals of 19th century public hygiene? Why, even after the "sexual revolution," is masturbation still shrouded in shame?

Part One: The Basics -- In Praise of Solo Sex; How Much is Too Much?; An Evening Alone with You; Creative Touching; Toys and Other Self-Love Objects. Part Two: Advanced Practices -- Sex Secrets and Solo Sex; Symbolic Exhibitionism. Part Three: Ultimate Orgasm and the Mind -- Fantasy is More Real; Ultimate Fantasies; How to Have Multiple Orgasms; Heightening Hunger Through Abstinence; Psychic Orgasm: The Ultimate High; Epilogue.

Sex is cheap. Coupled sexual activity has become more widely available than ever. Cheap sex has been made possible by two technologies that have little to do with each other - the Pill and high-quality pornography - and its distribution made more efficient by a third technological innovation, online dating. Together, they drive down the cost of real sex, and in turn slow the development of love, make fidelity more challenging, sexual malleability more common, and have even taken a toll on men's marriageability. Cheap Sex takes readers on an extended tour inside the American mating market, and highlights key patterns that characterize young adults' experience today, including the timing of first sex in relationships, overlapping partners, frustrating returns on their relational investments, and a failure to link future goals like marriage with how they navigate their current relationships. Drawing upon several large nationally-representative surveys, in-person interviews with 100 men and women, and the assertions of scholars ranging from evolutionary psychologists to gender theorists, what emerges is a story about social change, technological breakthroughs, and unintended consequences. Men and women have not fundamentally changed, but their unions have. No longer playing a supporting role in relationships, sex has emerged as a central priority in relationship development and continuation. But unravel the layers, and it is obvious that the emergence of "industrial sex" is far more a reflection of men's interests than women's.

The first written account by a contemporary Welsh initiate of the ancient tradition of sex magic as practiced by generations of Celtic druids. • Reveals authentic, accurate, and fully illustrated instructions. • Provides detailed instructions for crafting, purifying, and energizing all the necessary ritual tools. Sex magic is an important component of Celtic spiritual practice. Unlike other ritual practices that look to intermediaries or deities to execute the participants' wishes, druids believe that individuals can directly influence exterior reality by focusing their own internal sexual energy. Sex magic potentizes and projects this energy so that it reaches its full power, allowing the participants to liberate their consciousness from everyday awareness and influence reality at will. Written by a practicing druid with more than forty years in the tradition, Celtic Sex Magic explains the fundamental principles involved in channeling the vast amounts of energy generated during orgasm for the purpose of projecting spells and elevating consciousness. The secrets of this tradition have been passed down orally for generations and are revealed here in print for the first time. This workbook contains authentic, accurate, and fully illustrated instructions for a wide range of sex magic rituals that may be used by couples, groups, and solitary practitioners. The author also provides detailed instructions for crafting the necessary ritual tools and brewing the potions used in these rituals. Celtic Sex Magic offers the keys to unlocking and directing the enormous potential of sexual energy.

The claim that masturbation isn't good for you didn't just come out of nowhere. As April Haynes shows, a range of feminist reformers in nineteenth century America all agreed that the solitary vice caused untold suffering and death; that women and girls masturbated as frequently as did men and boys; that they did so because they lacked access to sexual information; and that therefore, female sex education would save lives. Haynes, in short shows that nascent feminists remade what might have been a puritanical crusade into a basis for envisioning their own sexual self-masterywith mixed results, for Haynes also tells the story of how, before the advent of sexology or even the professionalization of medicine, a great silent army” of evangelical female reformers first popularized, then institutionalized, the normative sexual discourse of the nineteenth century.