“It would be impossible to rake into so much Filthiness”: Representing the female masturbator in the letters of Onania.

Abstract

As the foundational text of the eighteenth-century antimasturbation movement, Onania has
attracted considerable scholarly attention. Internationally renowned and widely imitated,
Onania set the agenda for over two centuries of moral and medical anxiety about the dangers
of masturbation, with its female masturbation narratives still being retold almost a century
after their first appearance. However, while the readers’ letters it reproduced are much
remarked upon in the historiography of masturbation, no sustained analysis of their content
has yet been undertaken. Similarly, the relationship between masturbation and early modern
femininities has received little attention. This study considers Onania’s place in the history of
gender, using a combination of close reading and a systematic comparison of the language
and content of the letters to examine how this influential text portrayed male and female
subjects.

This analysis shows that Onania bequeathed to its many imitators a far more strongly
gendered account of masturbation than has previously been acknowledged. Onania’s letters
shed light on how the construction of the female onanist was intrinsically bound up with
shifting constructions of early modern femininity, and the sexual politics and anxieties of the
age. While some themes applied equally to both sexes, portrayals of women were
simultaneously more threatening and more voyeuristic: they were profoundly disruptive to a
heteronormative status quo without necessarily invalidating the female onanist as a sex
object. Onania’s letters reveal both contemporary expectations of women, and how writers
and their readerships imagined women might secretly subvert those expectations. These
traditional anxieties were essential to the establishment of masturbation as an alarming
female vice. By putting familiar male anxieties into women’s mouths, Onania provided
multiple generations of readers with an alarming new model of how women behaved when
unobserved, and how they should be regarded.