ABSTRACT
The traditional tale now sounds far too biologistic; most scholars would today stress the cultural conditioning and determination of sexual orientation, attitudes, and activities. Foucault taught that sexuality was discursive, that savoir and pouvoir were inseparable, and that power was not primarily negative. The intersection of all these themes lies in writing. Writing about sex has taken many forms, from bawdy jests to judicial records, from libertine verse to anatomical treatises. Hence an essential ingredient, even pleasure, of early sex manuals is controversy about the legitimacy of sex literature. Self-pollution, commonly begun at boarding school, was subsequently, Beddoes argued, encouraged by the sedentary habits of high-society teenagers, who were allowed to loll on sofas reading lubricious romances: “novels render the sensibility still more diseased,” he accused, “they increase indolence, the imaginary world indisposing those, who inhabit it in thought, to go abroad into the real”.
