Too Much

Barbara Taylor

• Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation by Thomas Laqueur
  Zone, 501 pp, £21.95, March 2003, ISBN 1 890951 32 3

Lounging in a boat anchored near his home, daydreaming about a ‘pretty wench’ he’d spotted in Westminster earlier that day, Samuel Pepys became so aroused that he ejaculated spontaneously, having ‘it complete avec la fille . . . without my hand’, as he recorded complacently in his diary, the ‘first time I did make trial of my strength of fancy of that kind’. The pride was that of a world-class wanker, an inveterate fantasist delighting in imaginary ‘sport’ with bevies of accommodating lovelies, including Mrs Steward, Charles II’s inamorata, and the queen (even in fantasy, Pepys was a staunch royalist). ‘The best that was ever dreamed,’ he chortled over a night-time’s romp with the delectable Lady Castlemaine, another of Charles’s mistresses. Only masturbating in church occasioned any qualms. ‘God forgive,’ he scribbled into his diary after a sermon spent mentally fornicating with a friend’s teenage daughter.