Onania’s Letters and the Female Masturbator: Women, Gender, and the “Abominable Crime” of Self-Pollution

Abstract

F o r a w r i t e r c r e d i t e d w i t h i n v e n t i n g medical and moral anxiety about female masturbation, the author of Onania fought shy of offering too many details. “It would be impossible,” he protested, “to rake into so much Filthiness, as I should be obliged to do, without offending Chastity.”1 Such admirable delicacy was perhaps overstated. Addressed to readers of both sexes, an exposé of the secret vices of the fairer sex was integral to Onania’s appeal, and the author’s professed scruples proved little bar to waxing lyrical on the subject. Self-pollution, he claimed, was almost universal among women, subjecting them to disease, disfigurement, and even death. The most lurid and arresting depictions of women, however, he displaced onto his correspondents. The readers’ letters reproduced in Onania offered the most dramatic descriptions of women in the entire work: candid, allegedly firsthand accounts of the physical destruction that masturbation supposedly wrought on the body. This correspondence played a key role in its rhetorical and commercial strategy, with advertisements trumpeting the existence of letters from and about women as soon as they appeared.2 Although critics were quick to seize on their dubious provenance, the accounts in these letters took on a life of their own. Within a few years of their first appearance, these stories of female masturbation were appearing elsewhere. More critical writers like Samuel