Wanna know a crazy thing that a lot of British and American people were interested in during the late 19th and early 20th centuries?: masturbation. Moralists and medical writers freaked the heck out over “onanism,” a term that Victorians liked using for wanking, jerking off, sailing the taco, flicking the bean, etc, etc.
Anti-masturbation diatribes have a long history in Western Christianity, but the publication of _Onania: or, the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution_ around 1710 promoted the idea that masturbation could have harmful physical effects. _Onania_ was a huge success, reprinted repeatedly over the next centuries.
But by 1880, the anti-masturbation folks joined up with a social purity movement in England and the United States that took their crusade to the next level. Masturbation signified a loss of self-control, and could give practitioners pimples! Epilepsy! Mental instability! Historian Alan Hunt argues that most of the anti-masturbation messaging from this time was directed at an audience of middle-class adolescent males, because the social-purity fever of the day wanted male sexuality to be as contained as female sexuality. That is, both men and women should refrain from any sexual intercourse outside of marriage (and even then, they should focus on procreation as the purpose of sex).
John Harvey Kellogg — inventor of the corn flakes cereal — was not only a medical doctor, health activist, and eugenicist, but also a guy who seriously thought sex was unhealthy. He probably never had sex with his wife of forty-one years — all their children were adopted. He invented the corn flakes cereal for promoting health and to depress sexual urges — for him health and sexual abstinence went hand-in-hand. But not in a masturbatory way. Because he thought masturbation was very, very bad. So bad in fact that he thought it might be a good idea to thread silver wire through boys’ foreskins in order to stop them from getting erections. For girls, he argued in favor of putting *carbolic acid* (!!!l) on their clitorises to stop lustful masturbation feelings.
Of course, John Harvey Kellogg was wrong. Thankfully, we can eat our corn flakes with impunity.
Source(s): “The great masturbation panic and the discourses of moral regulation in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain,” _Journal of the History of Sexuality_, vol 8, no. 4 (April 1998), pp 575-615, published by Univ of Texas Press. “Corn flakes were part of an anti-masturbation crusade,” _Medium_, Matt Soniak, March 7, 2018.
