Written By: Jenne
I know what your thinking, strange title for an article on masturbation! Not as strange as you might think. Most of us sit down each morning and munch on our favorite breakfast cereal without a thought of how those little flakes of bran and corn came into being. Even less of us know that many masturbation myths can be directly linked to the humble breakfast cereal. The two are linked in more ways than you might imagine, read on and find out how…
Many of you will be familiar with Graham Crackers but not many with the thinking that lead to it’s creation. Sylvester Graham [1794-1851] was a free thinker and reformer in his time. In the 1830’s the American diet consisted mainly of red meat and blood. Graham specialized in highlighting the perils of poor eating and masturbation. Until Samual Tissots book: Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism the evils of masturbation had been simply a moral one, Graham took this a step further and made it a health issue.
In the 1830s Graham took his show on the road, lecturing an inquiring public about the perils of self pollution, as masturbation was then refereed to. As the first of it’s kind it had an amazing impact on the general populace and the man behind it was just as dynamic. He sought to revolutionized the diet and sexual behavior of a whole country and in many ways was successful. Graham knew his audience well and if he were alive today no doubt would make a wonderful spin doctor given his grasp of rhetorical devices. He was a master at making claims that no one could disprove or that maybe would disprove would be a more accurate interpretation. Considering that he preached that masturbation caused it’s victims to become shy, suspicious, languid, unconcerned with hygiene and in acute cases to suffer from hysteria you’ll see how hard it would be for your average masturbator to disprove his theories.
Around 1834, Graham stopped lecturing about sexuality and turned his thoughts towards sound nutrition. The truth was his lectures had become to unpopular for him to continue, but our friend Graham was determined to find a way to spread his thoughts. Graham believed that there were two kinds of hunger -sexual and nutritional- and that both kinds threatened good health.
As influential as Tissot was on his thinking an equally strong influence came in the shape of the English Clergyman, William Metcalfe. Metcalfe was the first advocate of vegetarianism in America. Again Graham interpreted Metcalfe’s writings and thoughts into his own, while Metcalfe argued vegetarianism on moral ground, Graham was more concerned with the carnal passions that eating meat produced in people. At that time the stomach was the considered the major organ in the body, so anything that inflamed it was compared to lust. Graham actively promoted a vegetarian diet and claiming it was a cure for almost every form of human sickness. The cure consisted of sexual moderation [no more than twelve times a year for married couple] exercise [this will help with nocturnal emissions, he told us] and proper diet.
As strange as this may seem to many of us today, the Graham movement was a powerful on back in the eighteen hundreds.