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

Lookup NU author(s): Elizabeth SchlappaORCiD

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).

Abstract

As the founding work of the eighteenth-century anti-masturbation campaign, Onania (c. 1716) owed its tremendous popularity to the lurid readers’ letters which enlivened its ever-expanding editions. Despite their notoriety, Onania’s letters have escaped sustained analysis. This article reexamines Onania's place in the history of gender, using the readers' letters as the basis for a qualitative analysis of its portrayal of female masturbators. Thematic comparison between male and female letters illuminates the differing significance of men’s and women’s self-pleasure in the gendered social world of Georgian England. Moreover, Onania’s letters positioned women’s masturbation as threatening by playing on long-standing mistrust about female sexuality: self-pollution confirmed men's worst suspicions about how women behaved in secret. The widely noted voyeurism of some of Onania's female letters was thus more than simple prurience: it enabled men to witness, consume, and reclaim a private form of female sexuality from which they were otherwise excluded. By drawing out the themes in Onania's letters, this study illustrates how the inception of the anti-masturbation campaign was saturated by gendered calls to alarm about female sexuality.

Publication metadata

Author(s): Schlappa E

Publication type: Article

Publication status: Published

Journal: Journal of the History of Sexuality

Year: 2023

Volume: 32

Issue: 2

Pages: 313-336

Print publication date: 01/09/2023

Acceptance date: 20/12/2022

Date deposited: 15/10/2024

ISSN (print): 1535-3605

Publisher: University of Texas Press

URL: https://doi.org/10.7560/JHS32304

DOI: 10.7560/JHS32304

ePrints DOI: 10.57711/gb2x-xa61

Notes: A post-print version of this article (accepted version pre-copyedits) is now available open access.

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