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More traditional male masturbation, however, continued to be the perennial bone of contention in the eighteenth century. ‘Self-pollution', as it was now known, blossomed into the subject
du jour
. A prominent English surgeon, John Hunter, came close to approving masturbation, saying it was better for the constitution than sexual intercourse as the emotions were not roused. He was soundly criticised by professional colleagues for this view.

Yet the pendulum was swinging in the direction of approval of masturbation (and the related ‘problem' of spontaneous ejaculation), which only a century before had been considered a serious sin. Previously, sounding off against the practice was a Church obsession. Now, in keeping with the medicalisation of the age, it was starting to be viewed on its merits. Edward Shorter, author of
The Making of the Modern Family
, explained that condemnation of masturbation, far from being a taboo of any importance, was effectively unknown before the Industrial Revolution, and was barely mentioned at all in serious medical texts before the eighteenth century; even pornographic literature seldom bothered with it. During the extended period of the Revolution, furthermore, rather than being suppressed, Shorter argued that masturbation came into its own as part of a ‘premarital sexual revolution' that did much to ‘modernise' relationships.

A wide range of experiential material on masturbation was published across the Western world. In Switzerland, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his 1792
Confessions
, ‘frankly and sincerely' told all. He admitted being addicted to masturbation, which he explained he did while thinking about beatings he received as a child from his foster mother. He also said his first sexual encounter left him feeling he had committed incest, leaving him unwilling to have sex with women.

But Rousseau was not the first celebrity masturbator. Samuel Pepys, at the height of the Restoration, recorded a supposedly
involuntary orgasm (but more likely obtained by subtle frottage) whilst watching the King's mistress, Lady Castlemaine, in church. The scholar John Aubrey at the same time recorded how he finally worked out why his tutee, the Duke of Buckingham, lacked concentration in lessons – the young milord was masturbating. And in the colonies, Joseph Moody, the Harvard-educated schoolmaster of York, Maine, noted in a diary of 1720-4 fifty-five instances of his own masturbation, according to research by Brian Carroll of the University of Connecticut for an article in the
William And Mary Quarterly
.

Thurs. [July] 19 [1722]. This morning I got up pretty late. I defiled myself, though wide awake. Where will my unbridled lust lead me? I have promised myself now for a year and a half that I would seek after God, but now I am perhaps farther away from him than ever before.

Mon. [April] 13 [1724]. Pretty cold; wind from N. W. to S. fine weather … I dined with the doctor and schoolmaster Abbott. Then with the doctor I called on Captain and Ensign Allen. I stayed up with my love not without pleasure, but I indulged my desire too freely, and at night the semen flowed from me abundantly.

Thomas W. Laqueur's landmark 2003 book
Solitary Sex: A History of Masturbation
pinpoints a specific moment when, he contends, masturbation became a serious moral issue as opposed to something for country parsons to bang on about. Laqueur identifies the fulcrum point as the release in Boston in 1724 of an anonymous tract called
Onania: Or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in both Sexes, Considered
. It set out that masturbation caused many illnesses, including ‘palsies, distempers, consumptions, gleets, fluxes, ulcers, fits, madness, childlessness' and even death. Laqueur argues that masturbation began now to worry not conservatives, but progressives. What could bother a progressive thinker
of the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, about a private, non-exploitative pleasure like masturbation? One might as well ask a twenty-first-century liberal what could possibly bother him about a private, non-exploitative pleasure like smoking; for sketchy, unscientific reasons, masturbation had become a matter of public morality and, very nearly, public policy.

The Enlightenment was all about learning to think of the self as regulated by one's own moral compass – not the dictates of religion. And that is why masturbation came to be perceived as a threat; it endangered self-discipline and self-care. Laqueur identifies three aspects of masturbation that troubled Enlightenment thinkers: ‘It was secret in a world in which transparency was of a premium; it was prone to excess as no other kind of venery was, the crack cocaine of sexuality; and it had no bounds in reality, because it was the creature of the imagination.'

In eighteenth-century France, too, according to Michel Foucault in another milestone, if abstruse, sexual studies text,
The History of Sexuality
, masturbation and sexual thought in general came to be seen as a huge social problem. Not just the discipline, but the very architecture – the classrooms, the shape of the tables, the dormitories – ‘all this referred, in the most prolix manner, to the sexuality of children. What one might call the internal discourse of the institution – the one it employed to address itself, and which circulated among those who made it function – was largely based on the assumption that this sexuality existed, that it was precocious, active, and ever present… Around the schoolboy and his sex there proliferated a whole literature of precepts, opinions, observations, medical advice, clinical cases, outlines for reform, and plans for ideal institutions.'

Another student of sexual history, Brett Kahr, regards André Tissot, the Swiss author of a 1760 anti-masturbation tract, as responsible for ‘the greatest advance of the eighteenth century'. This physician, explains Kahr, urged generations of children to refrain from touching themselves. ‘It may seem extremely
strange to regard Tissot as a progressive thinker,' writes Kahr, ‘because we all know about the psychological suffering that millions have endured in subscribing to the misguided belief that masturbation causes blindness and insanity. But Tissot not only instructed youngsters to refrain from fondling themselves, he also advised the boys and girls to forbid the adults from molesting them as well … his widely disseminated tract also laid the foundations for the crusade against child abuse, a cruel institution which damages one's ability to enjoy sexual relationships in adulthood.'

Masturbation was less problematic in parts of eighteenth-century Scotland, or so it seems. Here, ritualised ‘self-pollution' was, a little bizarrely, the founding and practically sole purpose of the Beggar's Benison, a gentlemen's club of the time. That and another startling institution devoted to the worship of female pubic hair were the subject of a Scots-published 2001 book,
The Beggar's Benison: Sex Clubs of Enlightenment Scotland and Their Rituals
, by David Stevenson, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Scottish History at St Andrews University.

The Beggar's Benison and the Wig Club were ostensibly organised around ‘the joys of libertine sex' and frolicking in the ‘Colony of Merryland' (in 1652, a London journal had referred to a brothel-ship on the Thames as being ‘bound for Merryland'). But the bourgeois and upper-class members were mostly interested in masturbation, many being past the age of being immediately attractive even to hired women. A prominent ‘Beggar' was a gentleman called David Low. The club's activities must have provided an interesting diversion from his work; he was the Minister of an Episcopalian congregation and, says Stevenson, ‘the nominal Bishop of Ross, Moray, Argyll and the Isles as well as'.

The Beggar's Benison was founded, unlikely though it seems, in 1732 in the herring fishing village of Anstruther in Fife, on the Firth of Forth. An extreme reaction to the dour
Calvinist moralism of these parts, it took its name from a (probably apocryphal) incident in Scottish history when the famously libidinous King James V, travelling incognito, was carried across a river at Dreel Burn by an old peasant woman of the kind that stationed themselves at river crossings to assist gentlefolk keen to avoid getting their feet wet. He paid the woman, possibly (Stevenson imagines) had sex with her, whereupon she thanked him with the blessing, or benison, ‘May your purse ne'er be toom [empty] and your horn aye [always] in bloom.' Roughly translated as, ‘May you always have plenty money and a fine erection.' This was adopted as the Beggar's Benison motto. The Beggars' emblem, reflecting their seaside origins, was a crossed anchor and penis.

Quoting from the Beggar's Benison's records, Stevenson described the club's initiation ceremonies: ‘The novice was “prepared” in a closet by the recorder and two remembrancers “causing him to propel his Penis until full erection”. He then came out of the closet, a fanfare being provided by “four puffs of the Breath Horn”, and placed “his Genitals on the Testing-Platter”, which was covered with a folded white napkin. “The Members and Knights two and two came round in a state of erection and touched the novice Penis to Penis.” A special glass with the order's insignia on it was then filled with port and a toast drunk to the new member, and, in a brief parody of a church service, he had to read aloud an “amorous” passage from the Song of Solomon and comment on it. Investment with sash and medal followed, as the sovereign and other members intoned the benison or blessing: “May Prick and Purse never fail you!”'

The club record is oddly coy about spelling it out, but it was considered good form for the novice, if possible, to masturbate himself to ejaculation at the ceremony. ‘The Beggars dined and drank in an atmosphere of happy obscenity,' Stevenson says, ‘delighting themselves with how shocking they were being. The air was full of sexual innuendoes
ranging from basic crudity to some quite ingenious and witty efforts.' Two of their toasts were, ‘to girls lecherous, kind and willing' and ‘to the mouth that never had a toothache'.

As befits a Rotary-style club dedicated to masturbation, the members (so to speak) also revelled in an early form of lap-dancing. ‘Posture girls' were hired to pose and show their genitals. At the Candlemas meeting of 1734, we learn from Stevenson: ‘One Feminine Gender, 17, was hired for One Sovereign, fat and well-developed. She was stripped in the Closet, nude; and was allowed to come in with her face half-covered. None was permitted to speak to or touch her. She spread wide upon a Seat, first before and then behind; every Knight passed in turn and surveyed the Secrets of Nature.' At another life class of 1737: ‘Two girls, 16 and 17, posed, exhibited, and danced nude.' Appearing at the club was not always an advisable career move, however. One girl who displayed her body was shamed on her wedding day when a well-wisher shouted in the church, ‘That's the bitch that showed her hairy cunt and arse to the gentlemen of the Beggar's Benison for five shillings.'

Just as
Playboy
magazine carries serious articles, the Beggar's Benison hosted occasional lectures on worthy-ish topics. One such, given in 1753 by James Lumsdaine, was on ‘The Act of Generation'. Lumsdaine considered the Biblical ‘Be fruitful and multiply'. This cannot have been Nature's only intention in equipping man with sexuality, Lumsdaine argued, for the sexual urge continued even after one had done his multiplication. Indeed, if men tried to stop being sexually active, they would be left with ‘living plagues' – strong, unfulfilled sexual urges, causing anguish and wasting a capacity for great enjoyment. Nature, he argued, has given us ‘this exquisite endowment', and it becomes us to enjoy the great gift. He did, however, urge the use of contraception. Ensuring that unwanted conception does not take place was, for Lumsdaine, central to love-making; men should not be thoughtless brutes or beasts in satisfying their desires. The ‘sexual embrace should
be independent of the dread of a conception which blasts the prospects of the female'.

The Beggar's Benison never quite became a national institution, but it prospered modestly in the surprisingly fertile soil of Nonconformist Scotland. It expanded to Edinburgh and Glasgow, then across Scotland. The Benison even reached as far as Russia. A Benison medal was identified in the 1980s in the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. Russia also developed its own sex clubs in imitation; Peter the Great established one called the ‘Most Drunken Synod'. Lodges created over fifty job titles for members, from ‘orator' to ‘prick farrier' and ‘cunt-peeper'. The punishment specified for wrong-doing members was to have their penis smeared with egg yolk and oats and then presented to a pair of hungry ducks who would gobble it clean. The club had a British branch especially for the Moscow expat community. It was called ‘the British Monastery'.)

The Wig Club was founded in 1775 in Edinburgh, and named after its most venerated item of regalia – ‘one renowned Wig worn by the Sovereign composed of the Privy-hairs of Royal courtezans' – a hairpiece, that is, made of the pubic hair of Charles II's mistresses. The Wig Club's members ranged from the ages of 21 to 68 with the average admission age being in the late-3os. ‘Each member of the Wig Club had to provide locks of public hair suitably harvested to be added to the wig, as proof of having triumphed sexually,' recounts Stevenson. ‘Whether this proof of ability on matters sexual is more or less distasteful than the Benison's masturbation may be debated.'

The Wig Club was more ribald than even the Beggars, who inclined a little towards solemnity. Stevenson tells of one Wig Club meeting where ‘… it was ordered that all members were to drink “to the Wig out of the Prick Glass”, which, just in case things weren't achingly jocular enough, may have been a trick glass “designed so that part of the contents would be
released suddenly when the glass was raised to a certain angle, so drenching the drinker”.'

Almost wholesome by comparison with the Scottish sex clubs was another marker buoy of eighteenth-century sexuality, John Cleland's erotic 1748 novel
Fanny Hill, or the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
. This tale of young Fanny's arrival in London as an innocent orphan from Liverpool, her swift descent into prostitution and subsequent experiences in a brothel run by Mrs Brown, takes the form of confessional letters bursting with all the gynaecological detail the most demanding male reader could want.