Az onanista alakja a 20. századi Magyarországon
The Figure of the Onanist in Twentieth-Century Hungary

Summary/Abstract: The study traces general tendencies in the changing discourse on masturbation in twentieth-century Hungary. It analyses texts by various “experts of sexuality”, such as educators, psychologists, and sexologists, and juxtaposes them with Thomas Laqueur’s and Michel Foucault’s theories about the history of modern masturbation. In Hungary in the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, just like in the rest of Europe, masturbation became (falsely) known as a potentially deadly illness, a source of all illnesses, in addition to being a vice. As a result, the figure of the “onanist” appeared and was constructed as the “sexual other” in various ways. In the early twentieth century, though many pathologies regarding solitary sex had been refuted by that time, it was still seen by Hungarian doctors as greatly harmful and a threat to society. The interwar years brought about the slow spread of Freud’s ideas on childhood and sexuality in Hungary, whereby masturbation was normalized, at least for children. However, the rejection of Freud, coupled with sexual anti-Semitism, proved to be a stronger force and sex education texts of the time often linked the exteriorized sexual danger of the Jew with masturbation. In postwar socialist Hungary pleasuring oneself became “neither a sin nor an illness”, but the discourse itself still warned of the danger of excess. The liberalization and pluralization of the discourse on sexuality in the Kádár regime brought about the new paradigm of acceptance and, in the work of some sexologists, even encouragement to masturbate for therapeutic reasons.

• Details
• Contents