it is true that large discussions in anti masterbation texts among in americans in the 19th century dealt with phyiscal weakness, personal obessions, lonlieness, secretiveness, and an almost opedial neuroticism about going against parenting, and the inability to produce off spring. the discusssion deals less with moral turpitude and more with corperal lassitude.

there is something in the 20th century moving away from the coperal to the moral--i just cannot figure out what it is.

(another semirelaed qoutes from Thomas W LAquers The Social Evil, The Solitary Vice and Tea, in the book i quated earlier)

it is striking, for example, how litle the Greek Church Father Gregory of Nyssa is explcity concenrned with sexual intercourse or desire in his tract On Virginity. Instead he returns again and again to the pain of human existence (155)

"As Peter Brown has recently argued:"the debate about virginity {in the early church} was in large part a debate about the natures of human solidatary"It was a debate about what the indivduals did and did not need to share with fellow creatures" (156)---my note if we argue that the church in america between the second and fourth great awakenings resembled the early church--can this be extrapolated

In the 19th Century, virgiinity is of course no longer the issue. But the bodys sexuality, in the specters of prostituiton, and masterbation this time, still haunt society. (ibid)

...The supposed physical sequealae of masterbation seem almost secondary reaction to its understanding social pathology....
The debate over masterbaton that raged from the 18thcentury onward might therefore be understoof as part of the more general debae about the the unleashing of desire upon which a commerical economy dependend and about the possibilty of human community under these circumstances... (156-157))