From the early eighteenth century to the urban myths of today, masturbation has been credited with causing all manner of bodily miseries. Serious moral and medical alarm about self-pleasure was first popularised by an anonymous pamphlet entitled Onania, or, The Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences (c. 1716). Masturbation, it claimed, was physically ruinous to either sex, causing infertility, genital discharge, consumptions, genital disfigurement, and even death. Through a potent medley of thunderous moralising, hair-raising medical anecdotes, and lurid readers’ letters, Onania launched a cultural obsession lasting over two centuries, and inspired countless medical warnings about the perils of masturbation.

While Onania’s authorship remains a mystery, it has been attributed to the surgeon and venereal specialist, John Marten.[1] A commercially-minded entrepreneur and a relentless self-publicist, Marten’s enemies described him – rather less charitably – as a quack. His much-republished Treatise of the Venereal Disease and its supplement, Gonosologium Novum, were certainly the uncredited source of most of Onania’s medical content. Although Onania is usually credited with inventing concern about female self-pleasure, most of these claims were adapted from Marten’s Treatise, whose successive editions reveal an increasing antipathy towards masturbation.

Marten’s views about female sexual physiology were conventional for his day; he regarded the clitoris as the source of female sexual pleasure and desire, and rejected the claim that women produced a “true seed” as men did. Like his peers, Marten was well aware that women pleasured themselves. His work referenced both penetrative and clitoral stimulation, and generally portrayed masturbation as a satisfying alternative to coitus. Although he considered virgins and widows the most likely to masturbate, access to marital sex would not necessarily supplant self-pleasure. Women’s pleasure was “almost endless,” far exceeding the sexual stamina of one man – which, he said, explained why married women still masturbated.[2]

Between 1706 and 1711, Marten’s commentary became increasingly negative about female self-pleasure. In 1708, he added an anecdote about a sixteen-year-old girl, whose lustful constitution and social contact with men caused her to masturbate:

[She] would frequently, tho’ a modest Lady, yet from a natural Instinct, use Titillation with her Finger; insomuch that she not only divested herself of the Hymen … but by the use of —— harder than her Finger, so fretted the Parts, that she was scarce able to walk or sit.[3]

Marten’s main concern, however, was that she had lost her virginity by penetrating herself. “Many young hot giddy Girls,” he warned, deflowered themselves in this way, with potentially serious consequences on marriage. This concern was relatively novel; when other writers commented on self-defloration, it was used to explain how a woman could break her hymen but retain her virginity. For Marten however – and subsequently for Onania – masturbation was a meaningful threat to men’s sexual property.

In medical terms, Marten initially warned of local inflammation, genital ulcers, and barrenness. By 1711, the list included rickets, consumptions, poor complexion, and sickly children. Marten attributed these effects to all forms of unthinking sexual excess; when Onania borrowed this material, judicious editing was necessary to portray masturbation as uniquely harmful. For some women, however, sexual release could be a medical necessity. Regardless of whether women produced a “true seed” like men, some pubescent girls could still become seriously ill through sexual frustration: “if Enjoyment is deny’d, or they use not those means so customary among many Women, to pleasure themselves, it brings them into Cachexia’s, ill habits of Body, Hysterick Fits, Green-sickness, or other inconveniencies.”[4]

Marten also proposed masturbation to treat furor uterinus – a form of hypersexual madness later known as nymphomania. For Marten, masturbation was a consequence of this condition, not – as Onania would later claim – its precipitating cause.[5] Alongside other remedies, he therefore recommended genital stimulation as a cure:

When the Case is inveterate … the quickest, certainest, and most pleasant Remedy … is by tickling the Neck of the Womb with the Fingers, after fomenting the parts to warm them, anointing the Fingers at the same time with Ambergriese, Civet, and Musk, whence the Womans Matter and sharp Vapours will flow out, by the force the Woman makes upon that pleasure of Tickling, which is also almost as delightful as her Copulating with a Man.[6]

Unsurprisingly, Onania did its best to quash such special pleading. Women, the author insisted, did not produce true seed, and therefore could not require masturbation to release it.[7] When lifting Marten’s passage on frustrated adolescents, the anonymous author was again obliged to rework Marten’s prose. In Marten’s original, both sex and masturbation prevented the physical consequences of pent-up sexual desire. With a few tweaks, Onania had changed the conclusion entirely: masturbation became merely an alternative evil to such diseases.[8]

Despite heavy reliance on Marten’s work, Onania’s amendments to these plundered passages reveal disagreement with many of his claims about women. Twenty years later however, things had changed. The anti-masturbation campaign was well underway; Onania and its imitators had spent two decades portraying female masturbation as intrinsically harmful. By the time Marten published his abridged Treatise in 1735, two years before his death, it was clear that his priorities had altered. Though only a fifth as long as the original, the commentary on masturbation had expanded vastly.

In tone and content, the abridgment had far more in common with Onania than his previous works. All mention of therapeutic masturbation had vanished. Having once considered masturbation at best a “pleasant remedy”, and at worst mildly harmful in excess, he now called it “a Practice so filthy and odious … detestable and abominable … so ruinous in its Consequences, and so terrible to the Mind and Spirits, that one would think it enough to frighten all that were not hardned in it, from daring to commit it.” He could have continued in his tirade against masturbation, he said, but chose not to, as the subject had already been amply covered by Onania.[9] From having pioneered most of its warnings to women, Marten ended his career marching in step with Onania – the very book which had twisted his earlier words.

Image of John Marten is from the Wellcome Collection: https://wellcomecollection.org/works/rpueh537/items

Image of Onania is from wikicommons.

Biography

Elizabeth Schlappa received her PhD in 2022 from Newcastle University. Her doctoral research on eighteenth-century female masturbation was supported by an AHRC Northern Bridge studentship and Funds for Women Graduates. Her wider research interests are in early modern gender, medicine, and sexuality. She has published in Gender & History on femininity in anti-masturbation literature, with an article on Onania’s readers’ letters forthcoming in Journal of the History of Sexuality. With the support of a WHN ECR Fellowship, she is currently completing a book exploring the gender history of female masturbation and women’s pleasure in eighteenth-century medicine.

[1] Thomas Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003), 32; Michael Stolberg, “Self-Pollution, Moral Reform, and the Venereal Trade: Notes on the Sources and Historical Context of Onania (1716),” Journal of the History of Sexuality 9, no. 1/2 (2000): 53–55.

[2] John Marten, Gonosologium Novum […] (London, 1709), 86–87.

[3] John Marten, A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease […], 6th ed. (London, 1708), 425.

[4] Marten, Gonosologium Novum, 90.

[5] John Marten, A Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Disease […], 5th ed. (London, 1707), 485–86.

[6] Marten, Gonosologium Novum, 105.

[7] Onania; or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes […], 8th ed. (London, 1723), 114.

[8] Ibid., 79.

[9] John Marten, A Compendious Treatise of All the Degrees and Symptoms of the Venereal Distemper, in Both Sexes (London, 1735), 174–76.