From church to Gandhi: The war against sex for pleasure

By Sangeeth Sebastian

Many years ago, one summer afternoon, while we were in school, we received an unexpected sermon, from our school principal, a clean shaven Catholic priest, known for his authoritarian and punitive style of functioning, on the consequences of immoral behaviour.

In a sombre voice reserved for punishments, he announced through the intercom box in our class that Tony Jose of IXC has been expelled from school for ‘grave moral turpitude.’   His announcement was followed by a barely concealed threat.  “Anyone who failed to uphold the tenets of the school will be dismissed without further warning,” the voice warned.

The announcement threw the class into a flurry of speculation over Tony’s possible crime.  Our doubts were eventually settled during interval when Brijesh alias BBC of IXC revealed what the principal was trying to hide behind his verbal exuberance. Tony was caught jerking off in class.

While frank talk on sex is still unusual in many Indian schools, parents and educators are constantly on guard throughout a child’s early years and adolescence to detect any signs of masturbation.  (Schools in 19 the century Europe had anti-masturbatory benches to prevent boys from crossing or closing their legs.) Teenagers caught in the act are still made to feel ashamed and fearful of their behaviour. Many still envisage calamities, from going blind and mental illness to furry palms and tuberculosis to even death, for engaging in solo sex, according to surveys. Why such fear and panic for the world’s most common and “safest sexual activity”?  

It all began with a quack

While the church condemned all forms of non-procreative sex, including masturbation, which it regarded as an “intrinsically disordered sin” right from the beginning of the Middle Ages, the man who was primarily responsible for starting this fear and panic around the act was an eighteenth century theologian turned quack called Bekker.  

Sometime in 1715 he came up with a pamphlet in England called Onania; or, The Henious Sin of self-pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in both sexes Considered with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice.

To ensure the success of his work and to bring religious prohibition to the practice, he linked the practice to the Biblical story of Onan (how clever?) which had nothing to do with masturbation. Inspired by the pamphlet’s huge success in England, Samuel Tissot, one of the most revered physicians in Europe at the time, came up with his own version of the pamphlet called L’Onanisme, a few decades later.  Tissot’s version, without any substantiating proof or evidence, went on to list a slew of “masturbatory horrors” including blindness, hairy palms, crooked back, spinal tuberculosis, low self-esteem, pimples, epilepsy, venereal disease, madness and death as the possible fallout of masturbation. Thus an invidious idea hatched in the mind of a quack was granted the much needed credibility by a famous physician. L’Onanisme was eventually translated into several languages.

Gandhi and sex

While it’s unclear if L’Onanisme was translated into any of the Indian languages, one of the earliest books on brahmacharya published in Hindi lists problems similar to the ones listed by Tissot as the possible danger of semen loss. Nobody gave greater credence to this theory in independent India than Gandhi, who himself had an idiosyncratic and medieval understanding of sex. 

A curious mix of Pope and ancient Indian law giver Manu, Gandhi was obsessed with conserving semen, which he believed should be retained for physical strength and health. In his antipathy towards lust and sexual pleasure he behaved more like a medieval Christian monk than a Hindu. He described intercourse between a man and a woman “an ugly thing” and insisted like Pope that couples should limit sex to the “safe period” of a woman’s menstrual cycle to avoid the use of contraceptives.  Sexuality, in Gandhi’s world view, was to be banished to the nether regions of eternity, writes Girija Kumar, author of Gandhi & His Women Associates.  A view also shared by historian Ramchandra Guha. “For Gandhi, all sex was lust. Far better that women resist men and men control and tame their animal passions,” writes Guha in his book Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1914-1948.  

Little wonder then that in 2009, when India banned sex education, after right wing religious groups raised objection to the introduction of masturbation and safe sex in the programme, the rallying figure in their fight was none other than Gandhi.

Sangeeth Sebastian is a senior journalist based in New Delhi with a keen interest in transforming cultural attitudes around sex, religion and masculinity. He is currently working on a book about masturbation, porn and relationship