Manifesto of a 17 year old American girl

Erin is a 17 year old American girl, who, having just finished High School, is looking forward to an English writing course at university. For her end of term high school paper she wrote a revolutionary manifesto about female masturbation, probably not fully aware of its social and historical significance. Briefly, it extols what she believes to be the virtues and naturalness of masturbation and it calls on women to stop being ashamed of it.

In parts of the world, such as the Pacific, and in many other native cultures, masturbation was socially accepted and free of the shame surrounding it in Western society, but few realize how recent such shame came to embrace masturbation, or how the semantic environment changed it from a natural and acceptable activity to one that was almost poisonous and certainly at least sinful.

In the early 18th-century an anonymous author published Onania: or the Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in Both Sexes Considered . This caused major social affects as did a few other spurious books published later, such as the Elders of the Protocols of Zion, used by the Nazis to persecutes Jews and books about the white slave trade and recovered memory that were used to whip up the moral panic about sex abuse. While Onania did not contribute to an extreme such as genocide, its effects, or one should say, the effects of the spurious doctrine it preached, have lasted longer and have even reached out to natural havens in the Pacific and elsewhere as Western Puritans spread their doctrine of purity. Long before the book, of course, the Christian Church had already incorporated masturbation into its catalogue of sins: the book simply helped demonize it. In her essay, Erin places some of the blame on Aquinas.

Thomas W. Laqueur, in his Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation, while examining the history of masturbation and acknowledging the contribution of Onania to the puritanical reaction, also sees a clear shift in the semantic environment of the early 18th century when masturbation was no longer seen simply as a sin, but became a new social threat that Western societies needed to control, as governments continue to try to control general sexuality today. "Beginning in the eighteenth century, solitary sex came to represent the relationship between the individual and the social world" (p. 22). The individual might "choose the wrong kind of solitude, the wrong kind of pleasure, the wrong kind of imagination, the wrong kind of engagement with their inner selves. A false step led not so much to sin as to disease and decay; it was a secular waywardness" (p. 22).

In her outburst, Erin says, “In case you haven’t figured it out yet, I’m an extreme advocate for exploration, experimentation and, yes, masturbating! In my 17 glorious years in this life, I’ve explored and learned the intricacies of my body, as I believe everyone should. I’ve sat naked in front of a mirror, more than once, and just looked—learned. Developing as a sexual being doesn’t happen over night (and, despite popular belief that includes Prom night)—it takes time, and it takes self-awareness.”

Read Erin's manifesto: Masturbation-how-society-has-got-us-all-fooled.

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