The sexual century began, in a sense, with Sigmund Freud's theories in Vienna. It ended, after a fashion, with U.S. President Bill Clinton overextending a form of sexual freedom in the oval office of the White House. In the intervening 98 years the automobile, co-ed schools, modern contraception, lifting of censorship, media orgies and the internet brought sex everywhere. A 1950s high school definition of slow dancing was "navel engagement without loss of semen." The President and the intern spawned a thousand jokes about more sordid things. May we profit from their bad example.
The technical term for what caused this mess is fellatio interruptus. Fellatio has been practiced through the ages (sometimes banned, even criminalized, as oral sodomy). But long before dry cleaners and DNA tests were even thought of, spilled seed has had terrible conseqences. Take Onan (Genesis 38:9). According to religious law he had to step into his dead brother's sandals, and inseminate the widow, Tamar. But Onan refused his brother's proxy and "spilled his seed upon the ground." Onan's punishment was capital: God was watching and there was real accountability.
What Tamar did after that makes Linda Tripp seem tame. The moral of the story still holds after thousands of years: it's about truthfulness and trust-keeping, a woman's anger at lying, lustful men. Our President may know the Good Book but probably forgot about Tamar. (No doubt he remembers "A Woman Waits for Me" by Walt Whitman. Monica got Leaves of Grass for a present, not a Bible.)
The word "onanism" survives still. Its meaning covers more than coitus interruptus: masturbation, in fact, is its chief meaning. This is a stretch, considering that ordinary everyday masturbation was not Onan's crime. But masturbation was seen as sinful by the church and harmful by medical authorities for centuries. Even Freud thought masturbation was unhealthy and until recently it was still called self-abuse or self-pollution. Authorities--medical and religious--blamed everything from sterility to insanity, acne to bad grades, on onanism. Because some mental patients masturbate openly, it was all too easy to attribute their status to that practice, instead of the reverse.
Onan's crime was not about sex. It was about primogeniture. As with Adam and Eve, whose original sin was willful disobedience in relation to knowledge, not sex, Onan's misadventure was abused by the guardians of public morality to taint what--at last--medical authorities accept as normal. Ironically Bill Clinton was embarrassed by his Surgeon General, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, who dared to say that masturbation might be discussed in sex education. He shooed her out. Bill Clinton began his reign with a strong stand for gay rights, but then no one would charge him with being in that minority group. Masturbation is for, by, and of the majority of people, but it's not to be talked about.
Since the 1960s and Masters and Johnson, self-pleasuring is accepted as natural and healthy for children and adults, and one physician aptly dubbed it "the thinking person's television." Now TV is the place, along with the grand jury and press, where sexual misdemeanors are tried by court jesters. As Jay Leno says, we don't need Bill to explain his relationship with Monica, we need him to explain his relationship with Hillary.
Masturbation often masquerades as regular sex, not to say love. Back in 1933, Havelock Ellis, British sexologist, observed that some male homosexuals who were treated for that condition with hypnosis could perform successfully with women, but that they felt it was really masturbation per vaginam. (The religious right wants to go down this road again.) Casual sex is still seen as more normal, and politically correct, than self-pleasuring, but fellatio is a form of self-pleasuring by proxy.
There's a parallel in the story of Anais Nin, diarist, novelist, and tell-all seducer of married men. Lying was second nature to both Anais and Monica. Nin mixed fact and fiction in her Diary and didn't need a Linda Tripp. In 1934, sailing from France (and her husband) to New York and psychologist Otto Rank, she had a naval/navel engagement and got a semen stain on her dress. That dress had been given to her by Rank, her paramour. Lest he see and question the damned spot, Nin cut it out with scissors, and told Rank the dress had been ruined by a spilled drink.
Otto Rank was a serious thinker before and after his fling with Anais. He was the guiding light for Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death, which won the Pulitzer prize. Bill Clinton took that tome on his honeymoon. We don't know whether he inhaled.
Otto Rank, Freud's favorite student and assistant for two decades, finally broke from his famous mentor, became Americanized, revelled in Mark Twain and admired the writing of Roosevelt aide Thurman Arnold. Given a real break, Otto Rank might have become the president's analyst. But he died in 1939, at age 55.
The FBI has a file on Otto Rank. I requested it in 1994 under the Freedom of Information Act and was told they have 200 agents working on such requests but it could take over two years. I got it after four years. Much of it is blacked out. There's a little about a relative (by marriage) who fought against Franco in the Spanish Civil war. We know the FBI has more important things to deal with than dead psychologists and even current stains on fabric. But even filing and retrieval of documents seems a challenge. Monica has had her say--but has she really? Anais Nin has had hers, too--posthumously: the unexpurgated diaries are out. Bill Clinton and Otto Rank have not been heard from on the details. And we know practically nothing about the sex life of Sigmund Freud. So goes--or went?--the sexual century.
E. James Lieberman, M.D., a Washington psychiatrist, is author of Acts of Will: The Life and Work of Otto Rank and co-author of Like It Is: A Teen Sex Guide.
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Last Updated March, 2001