220
STEVEN MARCUS
set of descriptive terms is forced into the service of representing a
variety of states, in
this
case extreme states of mental alienation.
One further fact that
is
noted but left unexplained is that these cases
"chiefly occur in members of families of strict religious education ...
those who from this cause have become insane have generally ... been
of strictly moral life, and recognized as persons who paid much
attention to the forms of religion." In addition, "in the acute attack
resulting from this cause ... religion forms a noted subject of con–
versation or delusion." Masturbation causes insanity; religion seems
somehow connected with this process, but the connection goes un–
explored-which can only lead us to conclude that the process by
which causality is ascribed is often highly selective and tendentious.
If
masturbation-and sex in general-causes all these horrors,
how does the cause operate? With this we come to the informing
idea of sexuality in the era before Freud. In the masturbating boy,
"the large expenditure of semen, has exhausted the vital force." The
continent boy, however, has "not expended that vital fluid, semen,
or exhausted his nervous energy, and
his
youthful vigor has been
employed for its legitimate purpose, namely, in building up
his
growing frame." Although Acton does not endorse the old formula
by which it was calculated that an ounce of semen was equivalent
to forty ounces of blood, he continually warns
his
readers that the
semen
"is
a highly organized fluid, requiring the expenditure of much
vital force in its elaboration and in its expulsion." The fantasies that
are at work here have to do with economics; the body is regarded
as a productive system with only a limited amount of material at
its disposal. And the model on which the notion of semen is formed is
clearly that of money. Science, in the shape of Acton, is thus still
expressing what had for long been a popular fantasy: up until the
end of the 19th century the chief English colloquial expression for the
orgasm was "to spend."s It had not yet been displaced by the modem
"to come"- a complex shift in metaphoric emphasis whose meaning
is not at all clear. Furthermore, the economy envisaged in this idea
is based on scarcity and has as its aim the accumulation of its own
product. And the fantasy of pornography is
this
idea's complement,
for the world of pornography is a world of plenty. In it all men are
3. See
''Tb'
expense of spirit in a waste of shame."
