His lecture pokes fun at those social attitudes by mashing up, more than a century before the Internet’s satirical mashups, famous words by cultural luminaries with thoughts on the subject of masturbation. Twain, who reserved some of his sharpest critique for religion, thus unleashed his satire on both the cultural judgment of a practice so common yet so condemned, and on the sheepish religiosity that underpinned those judgments. It makes many boys lose their minds others, when grown, commit suicide. This loathsome habit lays the foundation for consumption, paralysis, and heart disease.

For, although these are wicked and will ruin the soul, self-abuse will ruin both soul and body. This is why it is called “self-abuse.” The sin is terrible, and is, in fact, worse than lying or stealing.

Teach your boy that when he handles or excites the sexual organs, all parts of the body suffer. Victorian newspapers would regularly feature ads for male chastity belts, “scientific” pills to dampen desire, and even metal clamps designed to contain any unwanted “excitement.” Those, ironically, were marketed at treatments for rather than mechanisms of “self-abuse.” ‘What Will the Boy Become?’ Illustration from an early 20th-century manual of ‘social hygiene.’Ī medical text from 1903 exemplifies the spirit of the era: Admonishing that the perilous practice would even effect early death, they used medical warnings as a vehicle for the same old moral judgments stemming from religion. By Twain’s day, as medicine was beginning to split off from religious doctrine, doctors no longer claimed that God would slay those guilty of onanism, but did vehemently portend the harmful effects of self-pleasuring - or “self-abuse,” as it was referred to at the time. In the Middle Ages, at the height of its rabid crusade to punish desire, the Catholic Church deemed masturbation a mortal sin deserving of eternal damnation. The lecture was eventually adapted into On Masturbation ( public library) and illustrated with charming Victorian-style engravings, but to fully understand just how scandalous Twain’s message was at the time, we ought to return to those Biblical admonitions. In 1879, 44-year-old Mark Twain - irreverent adviser of little girls, pointed critic of the press, recipient of some outrageous requests from his fans - took the podium at a men’s club in Paris and delivered a lecture titled “Some Thoughts on the Science of Onanism,” onanism being masturbation, after the Bible’s Onan, who spilled his semen on the ground and was slain by God for this sinful transgression.

The art of female masturbation pdf