At my comics shop’s adult section this week, I picked up a book entitled “Dian Hanson’s: The History of Girly Magazines.” It’s a truly encyclopedic work, almost 700 pages long and filled with informative images from said girly magazines, from Alphonse Mucha kinda drawings from the late 1800s-early 1900s to 1960s photos of go-go girls in boots and ridiculously long falls and not much else.
The book also has text, printed in English, French and German. Handy indeed for the scholar. I haven’t read all the articles (hell I haven’t looked at all the pictures) but since the sad truth is that any history of girly magazines is going to have to deal extensively with attempts to prevent the publication of and otherwise suppress said girly magazines, there’s a lot of content about censorship. And in a very early article, I finally found the answer to something that’s been puzzling me: the origin of degeneracy theory. That is, the origin of degeneracy theory puzzled me, not the theory itself.
I’d read in other works about the bizarre efforts that various “learned” men of the 1800s and early 1900s went to, in order to suppress male sexual arousal. At the same time that some doctors were casually prescribing manual stimulation of the vagina and clitoris to relieve the female condition known as “hysteria” (vibrators were invented to relieve physicians of this tiresome and time-consuming chore) other doctors were designing painful spiky devices to be worn on the penis at night to prevent nocturnal emissions.
In fact, Kellogg’s cereials and Graham crackers were both invented by men who hoped their products’ wholesome blandness would reduce male arousal as well as be crunchy and tasty. (OK, the crunchy, tasty part wasn’t all that important to them, that came later.)
In fact, in the first penitentiary, where all the prisoners were given solitary confinement as much as possible to increase their ability to commune with God, the gaurds made a habit of suddenly openeing the windows to inmates’ cells at irregular intervals to prevent them from masturbating.
I figured this weird fixation on preventing male orgasms was the product of general sexual stupidity of the time. And I’m sure I was right, to some extent. But it turns out, it wasn’t JUST stupidity. There was science involved, too, specifically the science of a Dr. Tissot in Switzerland.
The prevailing consensus of the time was that you only had so much sperm in you and when it was gone, it was gone. Dr. Tissot, in studying the feminizing effects of castration on men, erroneously came to the conclusion that many of the effects he saw in the patients he studied came from lack of sperm. Dr. Tissot apparently didn’t know from testosterone.
I think you see the connection now. Men only have so much sperm. Masturbation and nocturnal emissions use it up. At some point … no one really knew when … masturbating might use it all up. You could render yourself the equivalent of a castrato by masturbating too often: low in energy, no ambition, overweight, depressed … what we now call a slacker.
I’d always thought it was peculiar, the curious energy and intensity with which guys like Kellogg and Graham and others tried to keep other men from having orgasms. Now I know, it wasn’t just sexual hysteria, there was a glimmering of science behind it, too. It was one of those compelling narratives people talk about. It was degeneracy theory.
Now, why Donald Wildmon and Pat Robertson do it nowadays, that’s sexual hysteria alrighty. And might be a bit of undocumented degeneracy theory lurking back there.
Damn, now I’m hungry for a bowl of cereal. Plain corn flakes, none of those distracting additions for me, thanks!