“Victorian period, was that they were inseparable from that most troublesome of activities, sex. Within marriage, sex was of course sometimes necessary. Mary Wood-Allen, in the popular and influential What a Young Woman Ought to Know, assured her young readers that it was permissible to take part in physical intimacies within marriage, so long as it was done “without a particle of sexual desire.†necessary. Mary Wood-Allen, in the popular and influential What a Young Woman Ought to Know, assured her young readers that it was permissible to take part in physical intimacies within marriage, so long as it was done “without a particle of sexual desire.†practically useful to their spouses, but no further. Even the American educator Catharine Beecher, who was by the standards of the age a radical feminist, argued passionately that women should be accorded full and equal educational rights, so long as it was recognized that they would need extra time to do their hair. For men, the principal and preoccupying challenge was not to spill a drop of seminal fluid outside the sacred bounds of marriage—and not much there either, if they could decently manage it. As one authority explained, seminal fluid, when nobly retained within the body, enriched the blood and invigorated the brain. The consequence of discharging this natural elixir illicitly was to leave a man literally enfeebled in mind and body. So even within marriage one should be spermatozoically frugal, as more frequent sex produced “languid†sperm, which resulted in listless offspring. Monthly intercourse was recommended as a safe maximum. Self-abuse was of course out of the question at all times. The well-known consequences of masturbation covered virtually every undesirable condition known to medical science, not excluding insanity and premature death. Self-polluters—“poor creeping tremulous, pale, spindle-shanked wretched creatures who crawl upon the earth,†as one chronicler described them—were to be pitied. “Every act of self-pollution is an earthquake—a blast—a deadly paralytic stroke,†declared one expert. Case studies vividly drove home the risks. A medical man named Samuel Tissot described how one of his patients drooled continuously, dripped watery blood from his nose, and “defecated in his bed without noticing it.†It was those last three words that were particularly crushing. Worst of all, an addiction to self-abuse would automatically be passed on to offspring, so that every incident of wicked pleasure not only softened one’s own brain but sapped the vitality of generations yet unborn. The most thorough analysis of sexual hazards, not to mention most comprehensive title, was provided by Sir William Acton in The Functions and Disorders of the Reproductive Organs, in Childhood, Youth, Adult Age, and Advanced Life, Considered in Their Physiological, Social and Moral Relations, first published in 1857. He it was who decided that masturbation would lead to blindness. He was also responsible for the oft-quoted assertion: “I should say that the majority of women are not very much troubled with sexual feeling of any kind.†As early as 1836, a French medical authority named Claude François Lallemand published a three-volume study equating frequent sex with robust health. This so impressed a Scottish medical expert named George Drysdale that he formulated a philosophy of free love and uninhibited sex called Physical, Sexual and Natural Religion. Published in 1855, it sold ninety thousand copies and was translated into eleven languages, “including Hungarian,†as the Dictionary of National Biography notes with its usual charming emphasis on pointless detail. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 463). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 462). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (pp. 461-462). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 461). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 461). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 460). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 460). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. Bryson, Bill. At Home (p. 460). Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. ”
