by Cracked. com
The Hilarious Health Panic That Shaped the Modern World
A BETTER, TRUE STORY: Late nineteenth-century America freaks out about how much everyone else is masturbating, and we’re still reaping the rewards.
Unfounded public health scares are a staple of nearly every human civilization. It’s natural to fear that which you don’t understand, that which wasn’t shaped that way last week, that which really seriously may be infected. Most of them, however, don’t go on to define an entire century of culture. Not so with the great masturbation panic.
FIGURE 6.31 “I’m supposed to draw what? ‘Cornucopia of modern advances brought about by vigorous masturbation?’ What kind of book did you say this was?”
During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, everyone and their quack doctor was looking for effective solutions to the “masturbation epidemic.” According to the pithily titled book A Guide to Homeopathic Practice; Designed for the Use of Families and Private Individuals, masturbation could “impair the intellect, weaken the memory, debase the mind, ruin the nervous system, exhaust the vital power and destroy the body, mind and soul . . . [and] result in insanity, impotence, spontaneous combustion, shit-sweats, epilepsy and puny offspring.” And believe it or not, we only made up two of those!
Showering Daily
Bathing regularly seems to be a cyclical fad, like the ancient Sumerian game of POGs. Romans loved bathing, but early Christians associated it with the naked form and all its unholiness, which means that for most of American history, your ancestors smelled like ass.
One of the most popular forms of keeping chickens unchoked and dolphins unflogged was to bathe regularly, the idea being that little kids learned that masturbating feels good accidentally by itching their filthy junk. And when we say “bathe,” we mean upping the traditional once-a-week schedule to daily “sponge baths, sun baths, electric baths, spray and plunge baths.”
While many of those elaborate bathing techniques went out of style, the more frequent bathing never did. Yes, the fact that most of us shower daily today can be traced back to it being recommended as a cure for masturbatory urges.
Corn Flakes, Graham Crackers, and Grape-Nuts
For reasons that will never be clear to anyone ever again, our ancestors thought that a diet too high in “excitants” like cloves, vinegar, candy, or pickles could “heat the blood” and send little boys and girls into a flurry of carnal self-abuse.
Corn Flakes, Grape-Nuts, and graham crackers were all originally marketed as bland foodlike alternatives to losing your child to Satan. John Kellogg boasted that his new pressed corn disk was “predigested” and would help curb unruly sexual impulses. Luckily, we now know that diet and the body’s inner workings are almost entirely disconnected.
The Boy Scouts and YMCA
Another popular method of cock-blocking the nation’s hand was to attempt to draw blood away from the sexual organs by exercising the upper body. Right around the same time we were hosing everyone down and feeding them predigested graham product, the YMCA was billing itself as a miracle cure for the vice of masturbation, and Lord Baden-Powell founded the Boy Scouts of America in an attempt to do the same, under the belief that “exercising the upper part of the body by arm exercises, boxing, etc.” would curb masturbatory urges.
Baden-Powell, by most accounts, was a wank-obsessed weirdo, and reading his Scouts-founding book Rovering to Success makes it embarrassingly clear that the main function of the Scouts was to deflate the inflamed and dampen the aroused. Powell got married at fifty-five, refused to sleep in the same bed as his wife, and described masturbation so vividly in his book Scouting for Boys that his editor forced him to cut the related passages. And speaking of cutting and wieners . . .
Circumcision
We all know that circumcision began as a deal the Jewish people made with God so that everything would be Easy Street for them from then on for all of history, but why is it that most American males, Jewish or otherwise, are circumcised today?
While there’s some debate about possible health benefits, the “health benefit” that started it all was the misguided belief among doctors of the late nineteenth century that cutting off your baby’s foreskin might keep him from masturbating just a little longer. Many claimed that removal of the foreskin made masturbating more difficult, a fact that they could have tested only by waiting twelve years for a circumcised kid to reach puberty or asking a Jewish person. They opted for the former.
And, hey, remember John Kellogg, the cereal guy? He recommended circumcision be administered “without an anesthetic,” and that the child then be “so carefully surrounded by vigilance that he cannot possibly transgress.” That’s right—if cutting a little bit of your baby’s dick off doesn’t teach him not to touch it, at least watch him when he does.
Masturbation (but with a Robot)
You’d think newborn circumcision would be as crazy an idea as you could come up with as far as methods of preventing masturbation go. But you’d be wrong. While little boys with “self-abuse problems” could look forward to everything from leeching to chastity belts (i.e., penis lockers) to “discouraging” penis piercings, the cure for females caught masturbating was even dumber . . . masturbation.
Specifically, a doctor using a vibrator (which at the time was newly invented “medical equipment”) would bring them to “a state of calmness” and combat the female-only (and completely fictional) nineteenth-century diagnosis of hysteria—defined as “convulsions, weeping, laughing, random talk, indecent words or acts, a tendency toward masturbation,” or basically any other expression of humanity or feeling that annoyed men. Eventually, vibrators became available over the counter at drugstores, though they were still considered medical devices for many years. If your wife was getting hysterical, you just sent her to her room with her vibrator to “do her exercises,” and lo and behold, she lost all desire to masturbate! It’s a frickin’ miracle.
MYTH OF “THE GOOD OLD DAYS”: Things are getting worse with each passing year.
As you enter the prime of your life, the people on their way out are going to do their best to convince you that the place is going to shit. They are, of course, the ones who have been in charge of it for the past few decades, and therefore the prime suspects for any permanent damage sustained during that period, but, incredibly, that point will seem irrelevant to them. Fortunately, things aren’t really on the brink of some unprecedented apocalyptic meltdown. The world just seems worse to them because their brains have stopped making enough of the chemicals that keep human beings from turning into farty old curmudgeons. But if you’re not careful, you might end up with some of their favorite complaints implanted in your brain years before it’s your turn to actually believe them.
You’ve heard this from some old-timer: “In 1950, a decent family car was about five hundred dollars, and the gas for it was about twenty-five cents a gallon! A large loaf of bread cost under fifteen cents, and for a buck a high-end prostitute would do what in those days was known as a ‘Roosevelt Sausage Roll.’ Now you have to work two jobs just to survive!”
THE TRUTH: Let’s start with the obvious: In 1950, a low-end job in the service industry paid a dollar an hour. A fancy job in insurance or real estate? A buck-fifty an hour. Steaks were fifty cents because everyone was making Tooth Fairy money.
Adjust for inflation, and you find that the prices of most things have stayed pretty constant over the years. High-end manufactured goods have actually gotten much, much cheaper. For instance, say what you want about the golden age of the five-hundred-dollar car, but in 1960, you were half as likely to own one as you are now.
And that’s not even getting into the shocking advances in affordable technology—in 1954, the cost of a high-end Westinghouse color TV, with a massive fifteen-inch screen, was $1,295. No, not adjusted for inflation. That was the actual price at the time—half of the yearly income for many families. Compare that to today, when a workingman can afford a handheld device that ca
n access all of the porn ever created.
Oh, and did we mention that in the United States, taxes are the lowest they’ve been since 1950?
THE MYTH: “People are getting stupider.”
“Two words,” they’ll say, “Jersey Shore. All anybody cares about today is celebrity gossip, Twitter, and video games. People are getting stupider by the minute, and the stupid people are breeding faster than the smart people.”
THE TRUTH: Yes, Jackass 3D made a ton of money at the box office, but hop in your time machine and go back eighty years, and you’ll find audiences howling with laughter at the Three Stooges bonking one another on the heads with shovels.
Instead of trying to compare the relative intelligence of another era’s pop culture, let’s break down the numbers: Average IQ scores have risen 24 points since 1914. In fact, test makers constantly have to readjust IQ tests to account for the fact that each generation of children is smarter than any that came before. It’s called the Flynn effect, and it basically says that today’s kids are doing way better on way harder tests. Theories range from our improving diet to the elimination of lead in paint to the increasing complexity of our mental lives, but the data are hard and irrefutable. Across every age group, and in every country they’ve tested, the standard for average intelligence keeps going up. In fact, someone who tested as having perfectly average intelligence in the early twentieth century (a score of 100) would be closer to a designation of legal retardation (a score of 70) by the standards of a modern test.
Meanwhile, the quality of education has been going up for the past forty years, with children scoring higher in reading and mathematics. That’s not just in the United States—it’s worldwide. Graduation rates, too, are on an upward trend. So by the sheer numbers, we are actively creating useful members of society at an increasing rate. Go back in time and grab an eighteenth-century blacksmith and make him do your data-entry job. He’ll try to drown your computer long before he gets the hang of a job you could do with your eyes closed.
THE MYTH: “Modern music is all derivative trash.”
“Two more words: Justin Bieber. Turn on a classic rock station and you can listen for hours without hearing one bad song. Now turn on a Top 40 station and try to resist the urge to run a power drill through your ears. Today’s music is just a bland product mass-produced by corporations.”
THE TRUTH: First of all, the past looks better because classic rock stations get to pick from the best of the era—they’ve filtered out all of the now-forgotten garbage that you’d actually find on the radio if you hopped into a time machine to the year 1972.
Second, we wrongly assume that what gets remembered over time was popular in its day.
For instance, what survives from the Vietnam era (thanks mostly to Vietnam movies) are tracks like the badass protest song “Fortunate Son” by Creedence Clearwater Revival and “Gimme Shelter” by the Rolling Stones. Both were released in 1969 and will wind up on the soundtrack of any movie about that year. But in reality, Billboard’s top song in 1969 was “Sugar, Sugar” by cartoon characters the Archies. Let us quote its profound wisdom:
Honey, ah, sugar sugar
You are my candy girrrrrrl.
Truly, this is art. The lyrics are mirroring the instant-gratification nature of our modern, consumerist society by likening and emphasizing the confectionary comparison to romantic love. Or else it’s a bunch of nonsensical bullshit. Either way.
“Fortunate Son” got no higher than number 14 on the charts. “Gimme Shelter” was never released as a single at all.
Look at the top-selling singles of the last sixty years. While you find some great music, you don’t find Queen or Led Zeppelin. Even Elvis and the Beatles are only on there twice, tying for the most number 1 year-end singles with none other than George Michael.
THE MYTH: “All of this processed food these days is killing us.”
“Just look at a label. High-fructose corn syrup? Phenylketonurics? What happened to old-time family meals, when a roast was just a roast, and a loaf of bread just had flour and yeast and other natural ingredients?”
THE TRUTH: First of all, prior to 1966, there was no ingredient labeling of prepared foods.
You bought a tin of meat-and-potato stew and it could be elk dicks and sawdust for all you knew. Ingredient and nutrition labeling laws changed all that, and today if manufacturers get caught letting fecal bacteria into the food, they’re forced into an expensive recall.
And all of those scary chemicals on the ingredients list? Many of them are preservatives. Meant to preserve the food. So it isn’t rotten when you eat it. Don’t forget that this is mankind’s oldest problem when it comes to food—the refrigerator and freezer are both recent inventions. Go back to the Great Depression or earlier and keeping food cold or preserved was a crapshoot, with listeria, botulism, and surprise spasms of diarrhea acting as the dessert to Granny’s wholesome down-home country meal (see chapter 7).
Again, we’re not saying there isn’t some gross stuff in your food or that a lot of what’s on the shelf isn’t horribly unhealthy. It’s just not the nadir of some long downward spiral.
THE MYTH: “Today’s crime is out of control!”
“You can’t turn on the news without hearing of a child being abducted. Every city in America has one section that you wouldn’t dare drive through at night. Now compare that to the 1950s, when nobody even locked their doors at night. What changed?”
THE TRUTH: The numbers say you would be just as safe keeping your doors unlocked at night now as your grandparents were back in “the good old days.”
There absolutely was a huge crime wave in the 1980s (thanks, crack cocaine!), but the numbers don’t lie: Crime, property crime, theft, and burglary have actually been dropping since about 1993. Dropping and dropping, below even where we were before drug violence skewed the stats upward. The murder rate is not only the lowest since the 1950s but also quite a lot lower than it was in the 1970s and even the 1930s.
What has not dropped is the number of high-profile crimes that get reported on the news, or the number of crime shows on TV. The rampant crime your grandma is terrified of isn’t based on what she saw out her window but what she saw on Fox News and heard in all the rap she listens to.
MYTH: Basically everything most Americans think about Islam.
“I’m no religious scholar or anything, but I know a few things about Islam: It’s a bunch of conservative, religious Arab zealots who force their women to wear veils and support violence and war against anybody who doesn’t share their beliefs.”
THE TRUTH: Very few Muslim women wear veils.
BET YOU DIDN’T KNOW: The three most populous Muslim-majority nations have all elected female heads of state!
Thinking that all Muslim women wear veils is like thinking that all Christian women dress like the Amish. If you had all of the Muslim women on the planet in one giant room and suddenly had to throw a football to someone wearing a burqa, it’d be next to impossible to complete that pass.
Yes, there are Middle Eastern countries where the veils are required by law (namely, Iran and Saudi Arabia), but combined, those countries have fewer than 5 percent of the world’s Muslims. There are actually more Muslim countries that outright ban the wearing of veils than there are countries that require them.
MORE TRUTH: America’s founding fathers were big fans.
Thomas Jefferson, for example, taught himself Arabic using his own copy of the Quran and hosted the first White House Iftar during Ramadan. John Adams hailed the Islamic prophet Muhammad as one of the great “inquirers after truth.” Benjamin Franklin declared, “If the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.” George Washington personally welcomed Muslims to come work for him at Mount Vernon. In the Treaty of Tripoli in 1797, the U.S. government stated, “The Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no charact
er of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity, of Mussulmen [Muslims].”
The founders had good reason to be friendly to the faith. It was Sultan Mohammed ben Abdallah of Morocco who was the first world figure to recognize the United States as an independent country after the Revolutionary War. If that was all part of a secret plan to undermine the Christian West, then holy crap do these people know how to work the long con.
SO MUCH TRUTH: Most Muslims are not Arabs.
Admit it: Every time you read “Muslim” in this chapter, you’ve pictured a Middle Eastern Arab. Actually, only about 20 percent of the entire world’s Muslim population is Arab or North African. For comparison, about 22 percent of the global Christian population is African, yet when somebody says “Christian,” you don’t immediately picture a dude from Africa.
A whopping 62 percent of all Muslims—aka a supermajority—don’t live in the Middle East at all. Most Muslims live in the Asia-Pacific region. Indonesia alone is home to more than 200 million Muslims, and the Indian subcontinent has roughly half a billion.
YOU OBJECTIVELY CANNOT HANDLE THIS AMOUNT OF TRUTH: Islamic countries have traditionally been more progressive than the West.
In the early days, Muslims were practically the ivory tower hippies of the world (prohibiting the killing of innocents and scorched-earth destruction of the countryside). Then a few centuries later came the Islamic golden age, which, as we covered in chapter 3, advanced mankind’s understanding of, like, everything. So, with that kind of head start, Muslim countries should all have flying cars by now. What happened?
