“Modern masturbation is profane. It is not just something that putatively makes those who do it tired, crippled, mad, or blind but an act with serious ethical implications. It is that part of human sexual life where potentially unlimited pleasure meets social restraint; where habit and the promise of just-one-more-time struggle with the dictates of conscience and good sense; where fantasy silences, if only for a moment, the reality principle; and where the autonomous self escapes from the erotically barren here and now into a luxuriant world of its own creation. It hovers between abjection and fulfillment.”
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“Masturbation is the sexuality of modernity and of the bourgeoisie who created it. It is the first truly democratic sexuality.”
–Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation