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Virgins on the cutting-room floor
Bonus Chapter: Male Virginity
Every Sperm is Sacred
For many reasons, not least of which are the lack of obvious physical signs and the inability of males to become pregnant, male loss of virginity has never been as firmly established as a rite of passage into social adulthood in the same way as it has for women. A man’s transition from boyhood to manhood has taken place earlier, yoked to an entirely different component of active male sexuality, one with obvious observable signs of its own: ejaculation.
Where women often go from being girls to women—parthenos to gyne, virgo to uxor, maid to mistress—at marriage and its corresponding onset of intercourse, men go from boy to man when they show proof of being physiologically capable of performing the act they must perform to sire children. Numerous adulthood rituals, many of them specifically religious, have been timed to take place around the time of a young man’s first ejaculation. In ancient Rome, the springtime fertility festival held on March 17 festival and called Liberalia was the occasion on which households would celebrate the first ejaculations , the ejacularche, of their young male members.
Even today, various cultures and religions have male rite-of-passage rituals whose timing, in the thirteenth or fourteenth year of life, roughly coincides with the part of puberty during which a boy is likely to be experiencing ejacularche. Examples include the Jewish bar mitzvah (the female equivalent, the bat mitzvah, is a twentieth-century innovation), in which the thirteen-year-old boy assumes the rights and responsibilities of religious adulthood, notably including the ability to be married under the terms of Jewish law. The confirmation ceremonies common to many Christian denominations, focusing on youths between the ages of 13 and 15, serve an essentially similar function.
None of the other various things we associate with adulthood—completing one’s education, proving the ability to fend for one’s self physically or economically, acquiring life experience, or even marriage or the loss of a man’s virginity—have proven sufficiently universal or of sufficiently universal importance to have triggered the rites of passage that bring with them the mantle of social manhood. Reproductive maturity, on the other hand, has always triggered those adulthood rites. And as far as male reproductive maturity goes, ejaculation is the sine qua non.
But if ejaculation is a proud symbol of fertility, potency, virility, and adulthood, it has also at various times been seen as a dire threat to male well-being. For people of some times and places, illicit, excessive, or merely ill-timed ejaculation was believed to be very nearly as deleterious to a man as illicit intercourse could be for a woman. Not quite in the same way, since ejaculation can be completely involuntary and thus was not seen as being a matter of the will in the same way that losing one’s virginity outside of wedlock was assumed to be for a woman. Still, from the Greeks to the present day, a lack of control over one’s seminal emissions has been perceived as evidence of sin and lax morals, a harbinger of failure, and a sign of impurity.
Historically speaking, errant ejaculations have been seen as troublesome in two different ways. Physically, the loss of semen has been assumed to drain or weaken the body. Psychically, it has been believed to be a killing blow both to a man’s temperance as well as to his spiritual purity. The history of spermatorrhea—literally the excessive discharge of sperm—could occupy entire books on its own. In the context of virginity, however, ejaculations, particularly involuntary ones like nocturnal emissions or “wet dreams” and ones brought about through masturbation, are the only aspects of male sexuality to have ever been regarded or written about with as much anxiety and urgency as virginity and the hymen have been for women. During both the first centuries of Christianity and during a nearly century-long span of the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, panic over ejaculation made the sex lives of some unmarried men every bit as fraught as those of their virginal sisters.
Christianity, with its emphasis on chastity and avoidance of earthly ties, preferred sexual activity to take place within the bounds of a sanctified marriage , if it had to happen at all. This preference, inherited from the Judaic tradition (pagan men of the era typically had a far greater latitude in their sexual activity than monotheists, an issue discussed at length in Chapter Nine, although the precise limits of what was acceptable depended greatly on one’s social class), bundled into itself likewise the Jewish distaste for ejaculation or other emissions that took place outside of intercourse. Jewish men of the priestly lineage of Aaron, the kohanim, were forbidden (see Leviticus 21-22) from approaching the Holy of Holies in the temple if they were in a state known as tameh, a condition of impurity that could be caused by ejaculation, sores or boils, or other “unclean” discharges.
A well-ordered, clean, physically sound body from which nothing dripped or oozed had long been a part of general criteria for holiness. One aspect of this well-ordered, clean body was that it should bear no evidence (physical or psychical) of having ejaculated. With the rise of Christianity, the monotheist practice of linking the act of ejaculation with the state of being unfit to stand before God combined synergistically with the newfound Christian preoccupation of avoiding lust and all forms of sexual sin.
Marriage, while certainly an option for the early Christian plagued by the demands of an averagely libidinous body, was considered only second-best to lifelong celibacy. The ideal was not to manage the libido or even to master it, but to eradicate it, a point on which Clement and the other Church Fathers were prepared to cede little ground.
For the Christian celibates born of this philosophy, the act of ejaculation acquired unprecedented significance and took on an extraordinary atmosphere of peril. Each incidence of ejaculation, even those unremarkably common “look, Ma, no hands!” emissions we currently call “wet dreams,” was considered to be evidence of the inherent lust of a flawed and sinful human nature. Never mind the fact that research indicates that nocturnal ejaculations are as likely to result from anxious or fearful dreams as they are from erotically pleasurable ones. To the early Christians, just as to most of us today, they symbolized pent-up lust seeking its natural expression in sexual activity. To the Christians, involuntary ejaculation also signaled individual failure to be truly ready to commune with God, evidence that the sin of lust still dwelt deep in the most hidden heart of hearts.
When Desert Fathers like St. Anthony, who secluded himself in a desert tomb for the better part of twenty years, described the fires of lust that tormented them in spite of their repeated attempts to purge them, it was often exactly this unanticipated wet spot in the wee hours of the morning that furnished the “proof” of the tenacity of their concupiscience and the apparent ineradicability of their sin. Called “illusions of the night” by fourth century ascetic John Cassian, nocturnal emissions were considered the material manifestation of having been deluded during sleep by one’s sinful inner self. No longer suffering from such “illusions” was the sixth, highest, and most difficult to attain of Cassian’s six degrees of monastic chastity. It surpassed no longer being aroused by women, never having an erection while awake, and the ability to remain unaffected by any mention of a sexual act. Those who managed this pure passionlessness—a state the Greeks called hagneia—were sufficiently rare that they could achieve a certain celebrity simply for having transcended their bodies this way. When the fifty-four-year-old theologian Evagrius died in 399 CE, it was widely and admiringly reported that it had been three whole years since he had felt any such stirrings of lust.
The monks did not believe, however, that a man’s inherent sinfulness was the only cause of unwanted ejaculations. The material circumstances of the body also had a powerful role to play in whether these eruptions took place. The dominant medical model of the age, the humoral model, rested on the principle of the balance and counterbalance of dryness, heat, wetness, and cold within the body. Too much of one thing, not enough of another, and the body and its systems might very well go haywire. The expulsion of an excess of a particular type of bodily substance might require a physician’s assistance in the form of bleeding or emetics. Or it might happen spontaneously through naturally occurring effusions like vomiting, diarrhea, nosebleeds, menstruation, or ejaculation. When it came to spontaneous ejaculation, a superabundance of moisture and warmth in the body set the stage and provided the means. Sinful, carnal human nature, plus the self-correcting balances of the machine of the body, would do the rest. [Note]
This humoral understanding of the body’s workings provided the medical basis for the often astonishingly minimal diets of the highly devout. Abstaining from taking too much food or drink was in part a way of abstaining from the pleasures of the flesh generally, and from the sin of gluttony particularly. But abstaining from excess food, and specifically from particular foods like wine and meat which had a reputation for inspiring lustful thoughts, was also believed to be a dietetic one-two punch. First, humoral theory held that without excessive quantities of food, the body would not have extra material floating around within it that might be concocted into excess sperm that the body would need to expel. Second, controlling the types of food one ate, since different foods had different humoral natures, could help one avoid imbalances that might likewise skew the balance of the body and mind toward lustful thoughts or actions.
Thus the near-starvation regimes of many early ascetic Christians. John Cassian describes a celebratory meal in which the repast, per person, consisted of two small loaves of bread (together weighing approximately eleven ounces, or about the same as two large bagels), five roasted chickpeas, three olives, two prunes, and a dried fig, clocking in at approximately a thousand calories. As a day’s rations for a grown man, this is less than is prescribed by all but the most radically ambitious of weight-loss diets, and less than the official rations given to prisoners in the concentration camps of the Third Reich. And this was party food. The daily diets of these men were sparer still.
Cassian and other writers, like the early fourth century physician and bishop Basil of Ancyra, wrote at considerable length about the dietary and physical culture regimes they felt would best enable celibates to turn the flame of the bodily appetites down to the barest possible glimmer and ensure that the reservoirs of semen had no opportunity to become too full. They drew on the wisdom of contemporary and historical medical authorities to prescribe diets which would help their readers avoid building up too much warmth and moisture in the body, counseling celibates that when they did eat, they should eat sparingly of drying, “cool” foods like salted olives, figs, prunes, salted fish, brine, vinegar, and leeks. Too much sleep was also considered problematic when control over ejaculation was the goal, as sleep was held to “moisten” the body.
It must be said that such measures were indeed rather effective libido-suppressants. Exhaustion and starvation frequently are. Modern empirical studies on the effects of undernutrition and famine have made it clear that there is a correlation between libido and adequate food supply, as well as between sufficient nutrition and fertility. Humans are not the only animals that have a tendency not to breed much or at all during times of famine. It makes sense, biologically: when resources are already stretched to their limit, it is unlikely that producing more offspring will help matters, and pregnancy is hazardous enough even at the best of times. Over the millennia, many creatures, notably including humans, have developed self-regulating mechanisms in which undernutrition or starvation literally shut down the reproductive system, sometimes permanently.
So far, so good: for many monks, such punishing regimes did indeed shut off the flow of the dreaded seminal fountain. But it didn’t work for all of them, and, more importantly, it didn’t necessarily keep on working. The body is astonishingly adaptable, and for monks who had grown up poor and lived most of their lives with chronic undernutrition, as well as for those who had lived on very little for a very long time as adult monks, metabolic adjustment was not out of the question. A restricted diet might successfully stifle the flesh for some time, in other words, but still not necessarily be a permanent solution to either the appetites of the body or to the spontaneous eruptions which were such a source of consternation and shame. Alas, there is only so much one can restrict one’s diet before complications far more fatal than the occasional errant squirt of semen begin to take their toll.
There were other reasons that monastic celibates limited themselves to abstemious eating. It was a mortification of the flesh, a refusal of sensual indulgence, a display of willing impoverishment, and a way to imitate Biblical fasts including Jesus’ own. Over time, penitential eating habits became a calling-card of religious vocation and a way for individual believers to intensify their testimony by allowing their ravaged, starved bodies to bear witness to their defiance of the demands of the material, secular world. A spare diet was enshrined in the monastic rules that governed the lives of cloistered monks and nuns, and has persisted ever since, within Christianity, as a sign of especial devotion to God.
It comes as no surprise, then, that food was also central to the tactics of many spermatorrhea-fearing Victorian-era purity crusaders, the most famous of whom was Sylvester Graham, inventor of the eponymous cracker. Graham, a Connecticut native who was trained as a Presbyterian minister, did as many other self-anointed authorities on the subjects of health and public morality have done before and since, and strode bravely into the fray of a culture that he perceived as coming apart at the seams, brandishing his distinctive combination of diet and salvation like a fiery sword.
Graham and his contemporaries, who included sanitarium physician-cum-breakfast cereal magnate John Kellogg, preached Protestant ethics in combination with a familiar-sounding regime of whole grains, pure water, vegetarianism, hard beds, vigorous exercise, hard work, teetotaling, and a religious devotion to keeping one’s hands away from one’s genitals and one’s mind out of the gutter. Graham and his compatriots had the health and soundness of the entire human organism in mind much of the time when dispensing their fundamentally ascetic, conservatively Christian wisdom. But the most important of the ills they strove to eradicate was none other than masturbation, “the solitary vice,” commonly euphemized and dubiously medicalized as “onanism” or “spermatorrhea.”
Commonly attributed to the supposed prudery of the Victorian era, the masturbation panics of the nineteenth century actually had a far longer history. Graham, along with similarly-minded reformers on both sides of the Atlantic, was merely in the right place at the right time, equipped with the moralizing initiative and the rhetorical skill to popularize a school of thought that had been gaining steam for more than 120 years by the time Graham gave his famous 1832 A Lecture to Young Men.
To put all this in context, and to fully appreciate the nature of what we might term the “ejaculophobia” of the middle and later nineteenth century, we must look to the writings that produced it. Something, after all, had to be behind the development of an ideological climate in which someone like Graham could stand up and proclaim that “onanism is by far the worst form of venereal indulgence” and be taken perfectly seriously even by reasonably skeptical men like physician Luther Bell, superintendent of McLean Asylum in Boston, who later admitted that prior to encountering Graham, he had never given any medical reason to suspect that masturbation was capable of causing the kinds of ills Graham and others claimed.
The story begins not during Victoria’s reign, but during that of Queen Anne, the last of the Stuarts, who reigned from 1702 until 1714. 1710 is the year generally given for the first appearance of an anonymously authored text entitled Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, And all its frightful Consequences, in both Sexes, Considered. It was very possibly, according to historian Peter Gay, written by a quack “doctor” who wanted to peddle cures for the newly-minted ailment “onanism,” an euphemism for masturbation derived from the name of the Biblical son of Judah who so notoriously sinned in spilling his seed upon the ground (an act which is, incidentally, transparently described as having been coitus interruptus, not masturbation, making the euphemism a misnomer).
Onanism was both a practice, therefore making the patient ultimately responsible for his own condition, and a disease with an array of horrifying symptoms. In its list of such symptoms, Onania cites insanity, body pains, pus-filled boils, gonorrhea, bowel ailments, general deterioration of the body and nervous system, and, remarkably, both impotence and premature ejaculation. Clearly, an “illness” of such severity cried out for a physician’s care.
And care they did. Prior to the early eighteenth century, masturbation had not been of much interest to medical men. Pre-18th-century medical treatises on sexual problems make little extended mention of it. This changed in 1758, with the publication of De l’onanisme, an exceedingly influential medical text on the topic written by the eminent Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste-André-David Tissot (1728-1797). Repeating much of what he found within the pages of Onania, Tissot alerted the world to the newfound perils of the ageless practice of self-gratification, and from there things began to snowball in earnest. Seven printings of De l’onanisme were published within a few short months of the publication of the French-language edition of the work (it was originally published in sanitary academic Latin). Translations into all the major European languages rapidly followed.
Onania and De l’onanisme, and the ideology of pathological sexuality they conveyed, succeeded beyond their authors’ wildest dreams. Not because they were accurate, nor because their information was verifiable (the era of applying the scientific method to medical research would not begin in earnest for another century or so). They succeeded because they spoke to deep anxieties about the state of the world, the state of culture, and the status of the individual. It is on this level—the level at which masturbation and the loss of semen function as a metaphor for things like sin, failure, decadence, and lost honor—that the panic over masturbation in the eighteenth and nineteenth century so strongly parallels anxieties about female virginity.
The 18th and 19th century literatures on the subject are often characterized as “medico-moral” rather than “medical,” and for good reason. Physiology and morality, illness and wickedness, are indissolubly mixed throughout the body of what was written about masturbation.
The physical side of things was bleak: according to Tissot, sperm was essentially a distilled product of the blood, with forty ounces of blood required to manufacture a single ounce of sperm. A man who drained his body of semen, particularly in ways that did not afford the naturally rejuvenating balm of a woman’s presence, was virtually slitting open a vein. Having accepted this as true, it seemed not at all unreasonable that Benjamin Rush could, in 1812, list insanity, pulmonary consumption, dimness of sight, loss of memory, epilepsy, and even tabes dorsalis (lesions of the spinal cord caused by syphilis) as potential outcomes of such injurious depletion of the body’s precious essence.
The social side of things was even bleaker. Philadelphia surgeon George Calhoun wrote, in his Report of the Consulting Surgeon on Spermatorrhoea, or Seminal Weakness, Impotence, the Vice of Onanism, Masturbation, or Self-Abuse, that such practices led to “total extinction of the emotions natural to the sexual instinct” and to intellectual sluggishness, a lack of resistance, and a chronically irritable temper. Graham credited masturbation with causing, among other things, effeminacy, imbecility, feebleness, and an inability to have “normal” sexual relations with one’s wife. Samuel Bayard Woodward (1787-1850), superintendent of the State Hospital for Lunatics in Worcester, Massachusetts, turned his observations of openly masturbating inmates into a vividly-imagined theory in which masturbation became the second most important cause of insanity.
Case histories, in the medico-moralist texts composed by these men and others, were plentiful and predictable. The most typical narrative involves a particular type of protagonist, the young man of good bourgeois stock and upbringing who falls prey to the sinful practice, typically while away at school. In a contagion-model explanation of this “disease,” the young man is taught how to masturbate by other, already-corrupted boys. Soon he becomes short-tempered, has difficulty with his studies and his friendships, becomes psychologically erratic, and perhaps even develops a tendency toward violence. Then comes the crucial confrontation: a father figure confronts the onanist with his decay and identifies for him the nature of his problem. These stories have two stock endings. In the tragic version, the young man fails to reform himself, refuses the good advice of his mentors, and ends up a degenerate, diseased and wasted, deprived of the joys of family, friends, and professional success. The happy-ending version, of course, details the course of the young man’s repentance, his adoption of beneficial practices like vegetarianism, hymn-sings, and frequent cold-water baths to counter the effects of past seminal depletion, and finishes with a vignette of his happily-ever-after with loving wife and rosy-cheeked children.
Masturbation thus became a symbol of perilous downward mobility, of everything the burgeoning middle-class culture of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had to lose. Not merely an issue of spiritual sin, the loss of sperm through unauthorized ejaculation now also threatened intelligence, reason, physical health, marriage and family, and, perhaps most importantly, the supply of suitably prudent, self-governing, and responsible men whose social mandate it was to see to the smooth function and continued upward development of society at large.
These were the real grounds on which onanism was transformed from a furtive pastime into something which smacked of sex crime: it threatened the most powerful and influential sectors of society. Just as the premarital loss of virginity had, since ancient times, been understood to have the potential to undermine both the family and the state, now the loss of male sexual innocence through a “corrupt” acquaintanceship with self-stimulation might be understood to do precisely the same thing.
An ounce of prevention was seen as being worth more than a pound of cure. Sylvester Graham wrote:
“The young man who lives in the world, soberly, regularly, usefully, and perfectly continently, without ever once having known what any seminal emission is till he arrives at his twenty-first – or even to his twenty-fifth year; and is married – that young man is a hero indeed – an Hercules – an Angel – a God! I had almost said, in point of health, strength, beauty, and brilliancy, of body and mind."
Graham continued on to proclaim that if he himself had known as a younger man what he now knew, he “would be, I believe, thirty or forty years of age, before I would know any at all, from personal experience, about these matters.” The very idea that it might even be possible to intentionally postpone “any seminal emission” until a man reached his twenty-first or twenty-fifth birthday seems almost laughable to most of us today, yet for Graham and his fellow crusaders, just as for Basil of Ancyra and John Cassian, such radical abstinence was declared and striven for in dead earnest.
Such a fevered crusade spawned its share of severe, even barbarous techniques. A child might be subjected to household or school rules which required his hands to be above the bedclothes at all times. If he did not obey, he might find them tied nightly to the bedposts, and perhaps his legs likewise restrained, in the name of preventing him being able to stimulate his own genitals. Graham and his followers placed their hopes upon vegetarianism, cold-water baths, fresh air and exercise, wholesome pastimes, and plenty of that old time religion.
Those for whom this was inadequate might try various “chastity" devices, including sheaths and rings intended to be worn on the penis that were studded on the inside with sharp spikes that would cause the wearer pain should he so much as have an erection. (Devices of similar intent, adapted to the female anatomy, also existed, and are often confused with “chastity belts” although their intent was not necessarily to preclude intercourse but something altogether different). Even straitjacketing was not out of the question as a means of keeping idle hands from becoming the devil’s playground.
Reprimand, restraints, and inhibiting devices were not the whole of it. A man also had recourse to physicians to help him with his masturbation problem, and they in turn often had recourse to the scalpel. The foreskin, particularly, was believed to have a central role in the sexual functioning of the penis, and so it was often the focus of intervention. Some doctors advocated the infibulation of the foreskin, a procedure in which the foreskin would be pierced near its rim, with one piercing to either side of the glans of the penis, then a wire or metal hoop inserted into the piercings in order to discourage erection and prevent the foreskin from being retracted.
Infibulation as a means of controlling male sexuality had its champions, some of them more realistic than others. German surgeon Carl August Weinhold (d. 1829), an ardent follower of English population control theorist Thomas Malthus, advocated a hugely controversial state-sponsored program of compulsory infibulation, at age 14, of any male citizen considered unfit to father children. Criminals, the insane, unmarried servants, and low-ranking workmen and soldiers were all to have their foreskins wired closed and the infibulating wire sealed with an offical metal government-issued tag to help prevent unsanctioned penis use, effectively keeping these men virgins as well as making masturbation next to impossible for as long as the state declared it desirable. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Weinhold’s proposal was never put into action, but infibulation was used by individual doctors and occasionally by asylums and other institutions in Europe and in the USA. John Harvey Kellogg was a fan of the practice, and in his 1888 Plain Facts for Old and Young he claimed that it had been used “with entire satisfaction” in the Iowa Asylum for Feeble-Minded Children.
The other possible method of dealing with the foreskin was circumcision, now a routine delivery-room procedure in most of North America. Dr. Abraham Jacobi (1830-1919), considered the father of American pediatrics, was a vocal advocate of circumcision, which he credited with deterring masturbation, bed-wetting, and epilepsy. In the latter half of the 19th century, circumcision was still associated primarily with Jews, who practice it as a ritual that honors and commemorates, in the flesh of its adherents, the covenant between the Jewish people and God. By no means the routine default hospital procedure performed on newborn male infants that it is today, non-ritual circumcisions of the nineteenth century were typically performed on older boys and on adult men, often without anaesthetic, as a direct anti-masturbation measure. Eventually, the procedure’s reputation for assisting clean-living ideals having been enhanced by rationales of personal hygiene (namely the argument that it is easier for a circumcised male to keep his genitals clean), it became a commonplace delivery-room procedure throughout the United States, where to this day it is performed on nearly every baby boy as a matter of principle.
Circumcision and infibulation were the most common physician-dispensed therapies in the war against the unsanctioned ejaculation, but were by no means the only ones in use. Severe or resistant masturbation cases might be addressed by cauterization of the genitals or even the interior of the urethra. One particularly horrifying “treatment” for chronic spermatorrhea sufferers was the searingly painful process of having the caustic and poisonous compound silver nitrate applied via catheter directly to the portion of the urethra nearest the prostate. Castration was also used in some cases, although it was not common.
Exposing the patient to emotionally scarring ideas or experiences was also considered cricket. Leopold Déslandes, a French physician, declared that when unable to frighten or cajole a patient into conscientiously treating his onanism, “there is still one resource, which is the sight of an onanist dying.” (One might well wonder how such a thing would be arranged to occur at the right time for it to be made a display of. Dr. Déslandes did not specify.)
Although men and boys of this era were not expected, as virgin and other ‘respectable’ women typically were, to confine themselves to the household in order not to be compromised by the carnal dangers of the streets, the physical and psychical soundness of their sexual purity was guarded and defended with a very similar level of paranoid severity.
Note: The “excess sperm causes wet dreams” theory of involuntary ejaculation, although it has had an extraordinarily long lifespan, is nonetheless incorrect. Sperm cells have a lifespan of between five and eight weeks if they are not ejaculated first. After an unejaculated spermatozoon has lived out its allotted lifespan it simply dies off, just as blood cells and many other types of bodily cells do, and is reabsorbed into the body. A man who does not ejaculate is thus at no risk of sudden explosion.
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I welcome anyone interested in translating any or all of these excerpts to do so, as long as you put them up on the Web and notify me of where they can be found. I plan to link all translated versions from this page.
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