In Diderot's Le Rêve de D’Alembert (1769), a character based on the vitalist physician and theorist Théophile de Bordeu (1722-1776) proposes masturbation as a life-saving cure for a pubescent girl. Her excessive virtue, he explains, has resulted in a dangerous overabundance of seminal fluid; but he adds that any man suspected of recommending this medical intervention should be shunned by society. The contradictions surrounding Diderot's masturbating girl make her an emblem for a discourse, born in the eighteenth century, by which women naturally resist sexual knowledge, and thus require an enlightenment available only through the agency of men.
...MoreArticle Darren N. Wagner; Joanna Wharton (2019) The Sexes and the Sciences. Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (pp. 399-413).
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