Masturbation in the 19th Century

Thank God I live in a world where pornography is so easily accessible. I have movies, magazines, web sites, conventions—an entire industry working in behalf of my penis.

I wouldn’t have survived as a masturbator in the 1800s. There just weren’t enough visual stimuli in those days.

Sure, maybe I’d get lucky. Maybe a photograph makes its way up the eastern seaboard, and I find it soaking in the gutter outside the pool hall. It’s of a woman lying naked on a Shay’s lounge. It’s been ripped in half and then taped back together unevenly so the woman appears to have two enormous muffs, one slightly higher than the other.

I keep this photograph in my night table and masturbate to it for the next twelve or thirteen years.

But maybe I don’t get that lucky. Maybe somebody else finds that photo. And maybe I’m better off, because back then auto-eroticism was regarded as an ailment, a symptom of spiritual immaturity. The punishment for being caught was severe. The forms of treatment used to rehabilitate the masturbator included lead bed sheets, strait jackets, erection alarms, wooden eggs inserted into the rectum, and castration.

What with the scarcity of pornography and the looming threat of rehab, I doubt I’d be doing much masturbating in the time of Queen Victoria. I guess I’d be trying to have sex with women.

As strange as that sounds.