Excerpt from THE MALE SEXUAL MACHINE

Our first experience of life’s liquid can frighten, embarrass, or even shock. Nobody prepares you. Puberty is well on its way; a strange, pleasant feeling wakes you from a dream; you feel wet down there. No, you haven’t suddenly become incontinent, it’s your first wet dream an uncontrollable ejaculation nature’s way of relieving the pressure fueled by the male hormone testosterone sex glands bursting with sex fluids, ready to erupt with an erotic thought, a glimpse of panties, a flash of milky breast. A milestone in your life has just passed. But innocent, uncontrollable wet dreams are soon replaced by the carnal thrills of masturbation. Life’s liquid is suddenly not a precious bodily fluid to he preserved. It becomes irreverently disseminated with gusto—twice a day and three tunes on Sundays! No one contemplates the awesome possibility that it is in limited supply.

Small practical problems arise for our voting onanist—telltale stains on bed sheets that miraculously can now stand up for themselves: guilt damnable evidence of a shameful act, a feeling of doing something one shouldn’t. Rumors of celestial punishment abound—hairy palms, blindness, and withered sexual organs——but then you discover that there are millions of spotty-faced teenagers enthusiastically regularly emptying their glands without going blind, deaf, or insane. Why the guilt and where did all those dreadful stories Come from?

The know-aIls of ancient times actually believed that every time you had an ejaculation you lost a small amount of your brain. They called semen ct’n’bri sfillicidium, which, roughly translated, means distillate of brains. Cainus, a great thinker who presumably had never lost a drop of gray matter, announced that semen was microscopic “brains” that came directly from the “great brain.” Even Hippocrates thought of semen as a fermentation carried by the spinal cord to the sex organs. Aurelius Celsus must have precipitated an international depression when he told a horrified world that the loss of semen caused wasting of the spinal cord. Hippocrates must have agreed with him because he invented a name for it—biDes dorsalis—spinal consumption caused by too many ejaculations. These ancient beliefs must have stopped a lot of men from going around with their hands in their pockets and were almost certainly responsible for the terror campaigns of the nineteenth century during which learned men became preoccupied with the evils of ejaculation. The superstition that spilling salt causes had luck is believed to symbolize the awful consequences of spilling one’s seed. Presumably it’s easier to throw salt over your shoulder than a handful of semen.

In 1845, a leading European doctor wrote that too many wet dreams and too much masturbation caused by reading dirty hooks and having dirty thoughts “keeps up a constant irritation to the point that seminal secretions become chronic,” in other words the poor wretch started leaking semen. “Before too long . . . his body becomes debilitated, his sexual organs impotent and both the generative fluids and the vital forces of the body drain to such an alarming degree that the victim all too often succumbed to consumption, epilepsy, insanity, or an early grave.” One popular nineteenth-century sex manual wrote that Samson’s loss of strength was due not to his loss of hair but to the loss of semen caused by all his dirty thoughts about Delilah. Too much sex and loss of semen was also to blame when Calhoun in 1858 wrote, “The man generally suffers more than women, because women do not exhaust themselves as men do and preserve their health better.”

Bartholow writing in 1866 suspected that prolonged sitting in school caused an unhealthy accumulation of blood below the belt and an unnatural development of the genitals, which in turn encouraged seminal leakage. Some such as Bigelow began to shake a finger and warn that untreated chronic loss of sperm caused weakness of the mind, dullness, listlessness, shadowy dreams instead of intellectual labor, increasingly poor respiration, and an irregular heart beat. Practitioners later developed a pale complexion, dull pains in the loins, constipation, watery eyes, loss of memory, shrinkage of the sex organs, and pendulous testicles. Later stages were thought to bring catalepsy, epilepsy, mania, or some other disease of the nervous system, relieved only by a premature death.

Having scared the wits out of the adolescent male population with detailed accounts of how their brains would rot and how their sex organs would wither and fall off, the medical experts of the nineteenth century recommended ways by which parents could staunch the rivers of semen before it was too late. The simplest course was to tie the unfortunate child’s hands to the bedpost or make him wear a towel around his waist with a large knot in it to stop him from lying on his hack. A little more sophisticated was an arrangement with an electric bell that burst into life when the penis of our sleeping would-he wet dreamer became erect and completed an electric circuit. A sadistic turn was the development of a metal penis ring with spikes turned inwards, designed to make a sieve out of a twitching tumescent organ. Some recommended the use of a leather thong wrapped around the penis that tightened and caused excruciating pain. “Rather like stopping a man from throwing up by squeezing his throat,” was the comment of one of its opponents.

Armand Rousseau around the early l800s brought new meaning to the adage “go to work on an egg” when he recommended putting a wooden egg into the rectum, large enough to press on the prostate gland and send semen the wrong way into the bladder. Pretty soon these eggs became popular over much of Europe. Not only wooden but also metal and hand-painted porcelain ones—the ideal Christmas gift for anybody looking suspiciously off color. An interesting recommendation was the use of lead bed sheets, such that it was almost impossible to raise your elbows and get into a proper rhythm. Even drugs such as quinine, digitalis, cannabis, opium, and potassium bromide were forced down young gullets. Injections of tepid water into the rectum, electromagnetism, bloodletting, and, horror of horrors, even castration were also seriously discussed as ways of avoiding a premature death.

As late as 1876 a book was published that described semen as not only the best quality nerve juice but also as equivalent to forty times its weight in blood. The book recommended several ways of avoiding springing a seminal leak: avoid oysters; take plenty of cold baths; do not attend intimate dinners; drink no alcohol; do not talk to questionable women; and last hut not least don’t go to sleep with the rays of the moon falling on you!