Friction of the Genitals and Secularization of Morality

IN THE VOLUMINOUS and ever-growing scholarship on the history of sexuality, a fair portion deals in one way or another, explicitly or implicitly, with the complex issue of the secularization of morality. Whether one is interested in the relation of sodomy to homosexuality or of theological perversion to psychiatric perversion, for instance, the question of the transfer of a sexual practice from a theological sphere to a scientific discourse is raised—or at least should be raised. In this essay I will tackle this question by focusing on one important example from the history of sexuality: masturbation.