Forbidden Words: Taboo and the Censoring of Language

148 Forbidden Words
whack off, get off, come off, beat off, bring off, toss off (which Grose glosses
as ‘Manual pollution’). Note the common occurrence of the particle off in
phrasal verbs of masturbating: this particle captures the release from pent-up
desire which motivates masturbation. In Australia (and Britain too), a nice
extension of the figurative meaning of wank has developed, such that a wank
is ‘a self-indulgence’ and a wanker is ‘a charlatan, a humbug, a prick’. Both
nouns are readily quoted in newspapers from the utterings of public figures –
which indicates that they are not strongly tabooed; they are, however,
dysphemistic.
By tradition, masturbation will lead to the physical and mental degradation
of the masturbator:
‘And will it not take time to work out our Church dogma that masturbation will render
the Catholic lad blind, hairy-palmed, insane, doomed, and with the leg bones bent like
an orphan with the rickets?’ ([Boston-Irish policeman] Shem 1978: 395)
Male masturbation is mostly self-administered and not normally under
medical instruction. There is a different story for female masturbation.
According to the seventeenth-century physician Thomas Sydenham, the most
common of all diseases except fevers was ‘hysteria’. 11 The symptoms of
praefocatio matricis ‘suffocation of the mother’ or suffocatio ex semine
retento ‘suffocation because of retained seed [not semen but the vaginal
secretion that results from sexual arousal]’ were anxiety, sleeplessness, irritability,
nervousness, erotic fantasy, sensations of heaviness in the abdomen,
lower pelvic oedema and vaginal lubrication. The standard treatment from the
time of Hippocrates (470–377 BCE) until the 1920s was:
When these symptoms indicate, we think it necessary to ask a midwife to assist, so
that she can massage the genitalia with one finger inside, using oil of lilies, musk
root, crocus, or similar. And in this way the afflicted woman can be aroused to the
paroxysm. This kind of stimulation with the finger is recommended by Galen and
Avicenna, among others, most especially for widows, those who live chaste lives,
and female religious, as Gradus proposes; it is less often recommended for very
young women, public women, or married women, for whom it is a better remedy to
engage in intercourse with their spouses. (Forestus 1653 III, 28; quoted in Maines
1999: 1)
When the patient was single, a widow, unhappily married, or a nun, the cure was
effected by vigorous horseback exercise, by movement of the pelvis in a swing,
rocking chair, or carriage, or by massage of the vulva by a physician or midwife . . .
Single women of marriageable age who experienced hysterical symptoms were
usually urged to marry and, as Ambroise Paré [1517–90] expressed it in the sixteenth
century, ‘bee strongly encountered by their husbands’. (Maines 1999: 8f)
Over the centuries it was practised, vaginal or vulval massage to orgasm became just
another skill that male physicians and midwives must perfect for the benefit of their
patients. (Blackledge 2003: 258)