History of Minimum Wage

Getting by on the Minimum Wage

Minimum wage is a hot topic in the United States and around the world. Today, most of the world’s countries have some type of minimum wage.

Why was minimum wage introduced in the first place? Which country had the world’s first minimum wage? Where is minimum wage going in the future? Today, we’re going to explain the history of minimum wage in the United States and around the world.

The World’s First Minimum Wage

New Zealand passed the world’s first national minimum wage laws way back in 1894.This minimum wage law covered all businesses and all industries across the entire country.

Australia (specifically, Victoria), was the second jurisdiction in the world to pass minimum wage laws. At first, Victoria’s minimum wage laws only covered certain industries: they only covered six industries that were notorious for paying low wages. By 1904, these minimum wage laws had grown to cover 150 industries. New South Wales and Western Australia had also passed their own minimum wage laws two years earlier in 1902.

Following the “minimum wage experiment” in Australia and New Zealand, other countries began considering enacting minimum wage in their own borders.

As a result, the UK passed its own set of minimum wage laws in 1909.

Minimum Wage in the United States

Minimum wage in America isn’t as old as you might think: the first federal minimum wage was first introduced by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1938. Minimum wage was set at 25 cents an hour, which works out to about $4 per hour in today’s money.

That minimum wage was introduced as part of the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA). The FLSA also covers things like youth employment standards, overtime pay, recordkeeping, and standards for government employees at the local, state, and federal levels.

The first federal minimum wage laws were passed in America in 1938. But prior to that, at least one state had passed its own minimum wage laws. Massachusetts passed minimum wage laws in 1912 (although they only covered women and children).

Since FDR’s first federal minimum wage in 1938, the minimum wage has been raised 22 times by 12 different presidents.

US minimum wage is purposely set up not to rise with inflation. Minimum wage can only rise with congressional action. In other words, if the 12 presidents never raised minimum wage over the years, then we would still be getting paid a minimum of 25 cents per hour for our work.

Minimum Wage Increases Over the Years

October 1938 (FDR): $0.25/hr ($4.15/hr in 2014 dollars)

October 1939 (FDR): $0.30/hr ($5.05/hr)

October 1945 (Truman): $0.40/hr ($5.20/hr)

January 1950 (Truman): $0.75/hr ($7.29/hr)

March 1956 (Eisenhower): $1/hr ($8.61/hr)

September 1961 (Kennedy): $1.16/hr ($8.97/hr)

September 1963 (Kennedy): $1.25/hr ($9.56/hr)

February 1967 (Johnson): $1.40/hr ($9.80/hr)

February 1968 (Johnson): $1.60/hr ($10.75/hr)

May 1974 (Nixon): $2/hr ($9.49/hr)

January 1975 (Ford): $2.10/hr ($9.13/hr)

January 1976 (Ford): $2.30/hr ($9.47/hr)

January 1978 (Carter): $2.65 ($9.51/hr)

January 1979 (Carter): $2.90/hr ($9.34/hr)

January 1980 (Carter): $3.10/hr ($8.80/hr)

January 1981 (Carter): $3.35/hr ($8.62/hr)

April 1990 (Bush): $3.80/hr ($6.82/hr)

April 1991 (Bush): $4.25/hr ($7.30/hr)

October 1996 (Clinton): $4.75/hr ($7.08/hr)

September 1997 (Clinton): $5.15/hr ($7.51/hr)

July 2007 (GW Bush): $5.85/hr ($6.61/hr)

July 2008 (GW Bush): $6.55/hr ($7.12/hr)

July 2009 (Obama): $7.25/hr ($7.80/hr)

Above statistics come courtesy of Time.com.

As you can see, the minimum wage has increased in a linear fashion in terms of dollars, but in terms of real dollars, minimum wage has declined sharply from its highest point in February 1968.

Of course, the above rates only cover the federal minimum wage. Most states – and even some cities – have minimum wages significantly higher than the federal level.

San Francisco’s minimum wage, for example, rose to $12.25 on May 1, 2015. On July 1, 2018, minimum wage will rise once more to $15 per hour.

Washington has the nation’s highest minimum wage, clocking in at $9.47, while Oregon has a minimum wage of $9.25 in second place. California plans to raise its minimum wage to $10 per hour in 2016.

Minimum wage increases have been fairly steady since 1938. There have been two major breaks in minimum wage increases. The first large break took place between January 1981 and April 1990. Then, the second major break took place between September 1997 and July 2007, which was the longest period during which the minimum wage was not adjusted.

Minimum Wage Averages At 60% of the Poverty Level

Another important thing to recognize about minimum wage is its relation to the poverty level. Using a work year of 50, 40-hour work weeks, we can get the annual earnings expected from a minimum wage worker.

In 1968, minimum wage as a percentage of the poverty level was at 99%. In other words, someone working a minimum wage job full-time for one year would be just 1% under the poverty line.

Since 1989, minimum wage as a percentage of the poverty level has averaged around 60%.

Minimum Wage Laws from State to State

All US states but 5 have their own minimum wage laws:

Five southern states have no minimum wage laws, including Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Tennessee, and South Carolina.

Four states have a state minimum wage lower than the federal minimum wage, so the federal minimum wage automatically applies (Wyoming, Minnesota, Arkansas, and Georgia)

20 states have laws that lock the state’s minimum wage with the federal minimum wage

21 states and the District of Columbia set their rates higher than the federal minimum wage.

Characteristics of Minimum Wage Workers

To understand how minimum wage laws work in the United States (and also around the world), it helps to understand who, exactly, mime wage workers actually are. In 2013, the Bureau of Labor Statistics compiled data about the millions of minimum wage employees across the country:

In 2013, approximately 1.5 million US workers aged 16 and over earned exactly the federal minimum wage of $7.25 per hour.

Another 1.8 million US workers received wages below the federal minimum wage.

Together, the above two groups make up 4% of all hourly paid workers in America

In 1979, 13% of US wage workers received minimum wage. In 2012, that number had dropped to 5%. The 2013 figure of 4% is an all-time low.

Half of all minimum wage workers are age 25 or younger. Approximately 20% of all hourly paid workers are age 25 or younger.

20% of employed teenagers earned minimum wage or less, compared to about 3% of workers over age 25.

62% of minimum wage workers are women and 38% were men. 5% of women in America earned minimum wage or less, compared to 3% of men.

64% of minimum wage workers are part-time workers while 36% are full-time workers.

47% of minimum wage workers were in the South while 24% were in the Mid-west, 18% were in the Northeast, and 12% were in the West.

64% of minimum wage workers are in service occupations, with 47% in food preparation and related serving professions.

The two states with the highest percentage of hourly paid workers earning federal minimum wage or lower are Tennessee and Idaho (both at around 7%).

The states with the lowest percentages of hourly paid workers earning minimum wage or lower are Oregon, California, and Washington, all of which are under 2%.

Annual Earnings for Full-time Minimum Wage Workers

Full-time earnings for minimum wage earners are estimated based on a 40-hour work week and 50 working weeks per year.

The current federal minimum wage is $7.25 per hour, which leads to a full-time minimum wage of $15,080 per year.

In 2012, the poverty threshold for a single person was $11,945 and $22,283 for a family of four with two children.

An individual who works minimum wage for a full year will make enough to live above the poverty line. However, if that individual is the sole provider for a family of four, then that individual is only earning 65% of the federal poverty guideline according to research collected by the UC Davis Center for Poverty Research.

Minimum Wage Laws Around the World

New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom were the first countries in the world to pass minimum wage laws.

Since then, most countries around the world have passed minimum wage laws of some form or another. Here’s a brief overview of minimum wage history in other nations around the world:

Australia

Australia was the second country in the world to pass minimum wage laws. After Victoria, New South Wales, and Western Australia passed laws in 1902 and 1904, the country of Australia passed a “basic wage” act with the Harvester Judgment of 1907.

The Harvester Judgment provided a fair living wage for workers across the country and was considered a case with “national ramifications” and “international significance”.

Today, Australians earn the highest minimum wage in the developed world, earning $17.29 per hour as of 2015.

Brazil

Brazil’s national minimum wage is adjusted every year by federal law. In 2012, minimum wage was R$ 622 ($173.57 USD) per month, which works out to R$ 20.7 ($5.78 USD) per day and R$ 2.59 ($0.72 USD) per hour.

Canada

Canada’s minimum wage laws vary between provinces and territories and there is no federal minimum wage law.

Minimum wage varies from $10.20 to $11 in provinces across the country (Alberta and Saskatchewan have the lowest minimum wage at $10.20 while Ontario has the highest at $11 per hour).

The territories, meanwhile, have the highest minimum wages in the country, including $10.86 per hour in the Yukon, $12.50 per hour in the Northwest Territories, and $11 in Nunavut.

According to 2012 statistics from Stats Canada, the average full-time retail wage across Canada was $19.03 and the average part-time retail wage was $11.94 per hour.

Certain Canadian provinces also have restrictions where certain professions – like liquor servers – earn a lower minimum wage, while other professionals – like homeworkers – earn a higher minimum wage.

China

China’s history of minimum wage legislation is very short. The country passed its first minimum wage law in 2004 as part of the Regulations on Enterprises Minimum Wage. The country now has two minimum wages: one monthly minimum wage for full-time workers and a separate hourly minimum wage for part-time workers.

Minimum wages also vary widely throughout China because different parts of China have very different standards of living. For a full list of minimum wages across China, click here.

European Union

18 of the 27 member states in the EU have national minimum wages.

Certain countries (Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Switzerland, Austria, Italy, and Cyprus) have no national minimum wage laws but rely on unions, trade groups, and employer groups to set minimum earnings through collective bargaining.

Other countries – like Germany – just recently passed minimum wage laws early in 2015.

France

France introduced its first minimum wage law in 1950 as part of the Inter professional Guaranteed Minimum Wage act. That act established two minimum wages: one wage was enacted for the Paris region and another wage applied to the rest of the country.

Today, France’s national minimum wage is €1,457.52 per month.

France also updates its minimum wage every January. However, the increase in minimum wage cannot be lower than the rate of inflation for the current year. In most recent years, the increase was about twice as much as inflation (5% per year compared to average inflation of around 2%).

Germany

Many people are surprised to learn that Germany did not have a minimum wage law until January 1, 2015. Germany just recently set its national minimum wage law as part of the MiLoG – Mindestlohngesetz.

That law requires Germany to update its minimum wage every other year according to the results of a Minimum Wage commission. Today, Germany’s minimum wage is set at €8.50 per hour.

Ireland

Ireland’s minimum wage was introduced in 2000. The country has some of the most unique minimum wage laws in the world, with certain reductions applying to different workers (particularly young workers).

For example, as of 2011, the minimum wage in Ireland was €8.65 per hour. However, certain groups receive minimum wage reductions:

30% reduction for all employees under 18

20% reduction for employees over 18 in their first year of employment in any job since they turned 18

10% reduction for employees over 18 in their second year of employment in any job since they turned 18

That minimum wage can be reduced even further by up to €7.73 per day if lodgings or food are provided as part of the job.

Trainees also receive a lower minimum wage during training, ranging from 25% for the first third of the course to 10% on the last third of the course.

Japan

Japan’s minimum wage varies according to the industry and region. Industries and regions both have their own unique minimum wages. In situations where one minimum wage is higher than the other, the higher minimum wage of the two will apply.

As of 2011, Japan’s minimum wage was ¥645 to ¥837 ($5.30 to $6.88 USD) per hour, depending on the region.

New Zealand

New Zealand was the world’s first country to pass a minimum wage law and has strong minimum wage laws to this day. New Zealand passed its minimum wage law across the country with the Industrial Conciliation and Arbitration Act of 1894.

Today, New Zealand has a countrywide minimum wage of $14.75 per hour. However, there is no minimum wage for employees under 16 years of age, and the minimum wage for employees between 16 and 17 is $11 per hour.

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom often claims to have had the world’s first local minimum wage laws. Starting in 1524, certain towns in the UK began regulating local wage levels.

More recently, the country created the National Minimum Wage (NMW) in 1999 at a rate of £3.60 per hour. That wage only applied to workers 22 years of age and older.

Today, minimum wage in the UK stands at £6.50 per hour for workers aged 21 and over, £5.12 for workers between ages 18 and 20, and £3.79 for workers under age 18.

Apprentices also have their own minimum wage of £2.73 between ages 16 and 18. That wage also applies to apprentices over 19 or over who are in their first year.

OECD Rankings of Minimum Wage in Countries Around the World

The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) recently released a chart showing minimum wage laws around the world in terms of US dollars per hour after taxes at purchasing power parities:

As mentioned above, Australia leads the way with the world’s highest minimum wage. To view a complete list of minimum wage laws in countries around the world, check out this Wikipedia article for a good summary.

Countries with No Minimum Wage Laws

Certain countries in the world have no minimum wage laws. As you might expect, many of these countries are in poorer parts of the world, like sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Middle East.

A rare few developed countries also have no minimum wage laws, including Hong Kong, Saudi Arabia, Chile, Denmark, Singapore, and United Arab Emirates.

You Should Not Have Let Your Baby Die

You Should Not Have Let Your Baby Die

Gary Comstock NY TIMES

Sam, your newborn son, has been suffocating in your arms for the past 15 minutes. You’re as certain as you can be that he is going to die in the next 15. He was born two days ago with “trisomy 18,” a disease that proved no obstacle to his cementing himself immediately and forevermore as the love of your life. Your wife has already composed his own lullaby, “Sam, Sam, the Little Man.” But she and you and your three other children have spent the past 24 hours learning about the incredible uphill battle Sam faces.

“Trisomy” means “three chromosomes.” Each cell in your son’s body should have a healthy pair of the chromosomes scientists call No. 18. The unkind twists of the genetic lottery have given him instead a crippling threesome.

Sam was born breech in an emergency procedure in Mary Greeley Hospital, in Ames, Iowa. You and your wife accepted the attending physician’s advice to Life Flight him immediately in a helicopter to the Infant Intensive Care Unit at the Iowa City Hospitals. You were told that Sam could not breathe on his own, although no one ever asked whether you approved his being hooked up to a ventilator. You overheard the emergency personnel relaying in medicalese the reasons for the flight to Iowa City: microcephaly, low-set ears, flat midface, short stature, proximally placed thumb and potentially abnormal male genitalia. All signs, you have since learned, of genetic abnormality, and indicators that he will be, as a friend puts it — choking on the words — “mentally retarded.”

Not all people with trisomy 18 have problems. The literature reports a dozen cases of individuals living for 10 years, and S.O.F.T., a trisomy 18 support group, lists even more living into their 20s and 30s. Those with the conditions known as mosaicism and translocation of the 18 chromosome may live relatively long and happy lives, bring joy to their parents, siblings and friends, and be relatively free of adverse symptoms. But there is a wide range of disorders associated with trisomy, and for those with Sam’s symptoms, life expectancy is brutally short.

Sam’s case is classified as one of the worst. His brain cannot regulate his lungs. He grew successfully in your wife’s body and came to term because her blood provided him with oxygen. Now that his mother can no longer breathe for him, there is, the genetic counselor gently tells you, little chance that he will ever breathe on his own.

Some 1,100 infants are born annually in this country with trisomy 18. Many of them die of heart failure or apnea, irregular breathing that stops temporarily. Sam cannot breathe on his own at all. In an era of less technologically sophisticated medicine, your wife suggests, Sam would have died at birth? Yes. Even with today’s respirators, cardiac support equipment and antibiotics, nearly 30 percent will die in the first month; 90 percent will die before their first birthday. Of those who survive, most will have radical cognitive limitations, a condition the most recent revision of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders refers to as “profound intellectual disability.”

How do you know? You pose the question to Sam’s geneticist, a kindly man in his mid-40s. He measures his response. He has an M.D. and a Ph.D., and has worked with trisomy infants for 15 years. You like him. You hear in his voice the ring of years of medical practice, scientific research and practical wisdom. You see in his eyes the face of a father. Well, he says, as to the diagnosis of the genetic problem, the results of chromosome analysis are accurate 99.9 percent of the time. As for the prognosis? Unfortunately, Sam seems to have a version of trisomy 18 that makes it impossible for his brain to successfully stimulate and coordinate the activities of the respiratory tract.

Are you sure? What would happen if you removed that air hose taped to his face? Have you tried it? Yes, once, for a few seconds. His lungs showed no signs of beginning to operate on their own. It would be inhumane to experiment on him by leaving the tube out for any longer period of time. He cannot breathe.

But couldn’t that change? Yes. Some trisomy 18 babies in Sam’s condition eventually improve to the point at which they no longer need the respirator. Some leave the hospital and begin to respond to their parents’ affection. But a majority never leave the hospital, never respond to the presence of others and die while still connected to the respirator.

What are the choices? Some parents choose to use all possible means of continuing their child’s life in the hope that their child will beat the odds and eventually overcome problems. Others choose to let the children die to spare the babies the pain of the ordeal.

Forget the statistics and what others do or don’t do. We would like to know what our Sam’s chances are for reaching the point where his life is valuable to him. But there is no answer to that question. No one can tell you whether your son’s life is worth living from his perspective, or yours. We cannot say whether your son will ever breathe on his own or look at you. We can say only that the literature suggests the odds are stacked heavily against him.

You and your wife had no warning during the pregnancy that the child might be genetically abnormal. You were offered the services of amniocentesis, a test that may have revealed his condition. You and your wife refused to have genetic testing done on the fetus because your wife opposes abortion on theological and moral grounds. Knowing ahead of time that the child was genetically abnormal would not have provided any useful information. Genetic testing is done to allow parents the choice to abort fetuses with severe problems. But your wife would never abort her baby, so there was no point in having the tests performed.

The two of you have support in deciding to let your baby die: your wife’s best friend from church, her mother and sister from 2,000 miles away, your own mother and father, your two brothers and sister, and every member of their families, gathered from 300 miles away. They help you think through the decision to remove the air tube. They squirm with you, hesitating to give their opinions. In the end, they express support for your decision. Your brother calls it “courageous.”

There seems to you both a difference between killing your baby and letting him die. You are letting Sam die. Your father gathers the family, nearly 20 adults and children, in the room. You hold hands, collectively sing a psalm, weep through Grandpa’s prayer. Everyone leaves. Your wife tries to sing Sam’s lullaby to him, one last time, goodbye, Sam, but her voice fails her. She hands him to you. She cannot bear to go through it. Your brother and mother have offered to sit with you, but you decide it is something you must do alone. Just you and Sam.

The nurse comes in, mute. You look at him, sleeping. He seems at peace. You nod your head. She gently pulls the tube. It slides out quickly, as though he were helping to expel it. Without his lifeline, he does not move. A minute later, his eyes open. It is the first time you have seen them. His head jerks slightly forward. He does not cry. He gasps silently for breath. His eyes close. You almost yell for the nurse, to beg her to put it back in. To keep from doing so, you pray, arguing with God that letting him die is best for him. After five minutes, his face pales, then turns a sickly purple. His tiny chest convulses irregularly in an unsuccessful attempt to draw air into the lungs. After 20 minutes, he lies still. His fingers turn gray.

Thirty minutes. There are no visible signs of life. You rock his limp body as tears fall on the blue blanket. You wonder what sort of beast you are. Forty-five minutes. Grandma looks in, ashen faced, seeing in a glance that it is over. Shortly your wife appears. She immediately takes her son’s body in her arms and coddles him. She sits there with him for three hours.

You should not have let your baby die. You should have killed him.

This thought occurs to you years later, thinking about the gruesome struggle of his last 20 minutes. You are not sure whether it makes sense to talk about his life, because he never seemed to have the things that make a life: thoughts, wants, desires, interests, memories, a future. But supposing that he had thoughts, his strongest thought during those last minutes certainly appeared to be: “This hurts. Can’t someone help it stop?” He didn’t know your name, but if he had, he would have said: “Daddy? Please. Now.”

It seems the medical community has few options to offer parents of newborns likely to die. We can leave our babies on respirators and hope for the best. Or remove the hose and watch the child die a tortured death. Shouldn’t we have another choice? Shouldn’t we be allowed the swift humane option afforded the owners of dogs, a lethal dose of a painkiller?

For years you repress the thought. Then, early one morning, remembering again those last minutes, you realize that the repugnant has become reasonable. The unthinkable has become the right, the good. Painlessly. Quickly. With the assistance of a trained physician.

You should have killed your baby.

Gary Comstock is a professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University.

Masturbation A handy history

Masturbation A handy history

Condemned, celebrated, shunned: masturbation has long been an uncomfortable fact of life. Why?

Barry Reay AEON

is a professor of history at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His latest book, co-authored with Nina Attwood and Claire Gooder, is Sex Addiction: A Critical History (2015).

Is masturbation still taboo?

The anonymous author of the pamphlet Onania (1716) was very worried about masturbation. The ‘shameful vice’, the ‘solitary act of pleasure’, was something too terrible to even be described. The writer agreed with those ‘who are of the opinion, that… it never ought to be spoken of, or hinted at, because the bare mentioning of it may be dangerous to some’. There was, however, little reticence in cataloging ‘the frightful consequences of self-pollution’. Gonorrhea, fits, epilepsy, consumption, impotence, headaches, weakness of intellect, backache, pimples, blisters, glandular swelling, trembling, dizziness, heart palpitations, urinary discharge, ‘wandering pains’, and incontinence – were all attributed to the scourge of onanism.

The fear was not confined to men. The full title of the pamphlet was Onania: Or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences (in Both Sexes). Its author was aware that the sin of Onan referred to the spilling of male seed (and divine retribution for the act) but reiterated that he treated ‘of this crime in relation to women as well as men’. ‘[W]hilst the offence is Self-Pollution in both, I could not think of any other word which would so well put the reader in mind both of the sin and its punishment’. Women who indulged could expect disease of the womb, hysteria, infertility and deflowering (the loss of ‘that valuable badge of their chastity and innocence’).

Another bestselling pamphlet was published later in the century: L’onanisme (1760) by Samuel August Tissot. He was critical of Onania, ‘a real chaos … all the author’s reflections are nothing but theological and moral puerility’, but nevertheless listed ‘the ills of which the English patients complain’. Tissot was likewise fixated on ‘the physical disorders produced by masturbation’, and provided his own case study, a watchmaker who had self-pleasured himself into ‘insensibility’ on a daily basis, sometimes three times a day; ‘I found a being that less resembled a living creature than a corpse, lying upon straw, meager, pale, and filthy, casting forth an infectious stench; almost incapable of motion.’ The fear these pamphlets promoted soon spread.

The strange thing is that masturbation was never before the object of such horror. In ancient times, masturbation was either not much mentioned or treated as something a little vulgar, not in good taste, a bad joke. In the Middle Ages and for much of the early modern period too, masturbation, while sinful and unnatural, was not invested with such significance. What changed?

Religion and medicine combined powerfully to create a new and hostile discourse. The idea that the soul was present in semen led to thinking that it was very important to retain the vital fluid. Its spilling became, then, both immoral and dangerous (medicine believed in female semen at the time). ‘Sin, vice, and self-destruction’ were the ‘trinity of ideas’ that would dominate from the 18th into the 19th century, as the historians Jean Stengers and Anne Van Neck put it in Masturbation: The Great Terror (2001).

There were exceptions. Sometimes masturbation was opposed for more ‘enlightened’ reasons. In the 1830''s and 1840's, for instance, female moral campaign societies in the United States condemned masturbation, not out of hostility to sex, but as a means to self-control. What would now be termed ‘greater sexual agency’ – the historian April Haynes refers to ‘sexual virtue’ and ‘virtuous restraint’ – was central to their message.

Yet it is difficult to escape the intensity of the fear. J H Kellogg’s Plain Facts for Old and Young (1877) contained both exaggerated horror stories and grand claims: ‘neither the plague, nor war, nor smallpox, nor similar diseases, have produced results so disastrous to humanity as the pernicious habit of Onanism; it is the destroying element of civilized societies’. Kellogg suggested remedies for the scourge, such as exercise, strict bathing and sleeping regimes, compresses, douching, enemas and electrical treatment. Diet was vital: this rabid anti-masturbation was co-inventor of the breakfast cereal that still bears his name. ‘Few of today’s eaters of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes know that he invented them, almost literally, as anti-masturbation food,’ as the psychologist John Money once pointed out.

The traces are still with us in other ways. Male circumcision, for instance, originated in part with the 19th-century obsession with the role of the foreskin in encouraging masturbatory practices. Consciously or not, many US males are faced with this bodily reminder every time they masturbate. And the general disquiet unleashed in the 18th century similarly lingers on today. We seem to have a confusing and conflicting relationship with masturbation. On one hand it is accepted, even celebrated – on the other, there remains an unmistakable element of taboo.

When the sociologist Anthony Giddens in The Transformation of Intimacy (1992) attempted to identify what made modern sex modern, one of the characteristics he identified was the acceptance of masturbation. It was, as he said, masturbation’s ‘coming out’. Now it was ‘widely recommended as a major source of sexual pleasure, and actively encouraged as a mode of improving sexual responsiveness on the part of both sexes’. It had indeed come to signify female sexual freedom with Betty Dodson’s Liberating Masturbation (1974) (renamed and republished as Sex for One in 1996), which has sold more than a million copies, and her Body sex Workshops in Manhattan with their ‘all-women masturbation circles’. The Boston Women’s Health Collective’s classic feminist text Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973) included a section called ‘Learning to Masturbate’.

Alfred Kinsey and his team are mainly remembered for the sex surveys that publicized the pervasiveness of same-sex desires and experiences in the US, but they also recognized the prevalence of masturbation. It was, for both men and women, one of the nation’s principal sexual outlets. In the US National Survey (2009–10), 94 per cent of men aged 25-29 and 85 per cent of women in the same age group said that they had masturbated alone in the course of their lifetime. (All surveys indicate lower reported rates for women.) In the just-published results of the 2012 US National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, 92 per cent of straight men and a full 100 per cent of gay men recorded lifetime masturbation. 

There has certainly been little silence about the activity. Several generations of German university students were questioned by a Hamburg research team about their masturbatory habits to chart changing attitudes and practices from 1966 to 1996; their results were published in 2003. Did they reach orgasm? Were they sexually satisfied? Was it fun? In another study, US women were contacted on Craigslist and asked about their masturbatory experiences, including clitoral stimulation and vaginal penetration. An older, somewhat self-referential study from 1977 of sexual arousal to films of masturbation asked psychology students at the University of Connecticut to report their ‘genital sensations’ while watching those films. Erection? Ejaculation? Breast sensations? Vaginal lubrication? Orgasm? And doctors have written up studies of the failed experiments of unfortunate patients: ‘Masturbation Injury Resulting from Intraurethral Introduction of Spaghetti’ (1986); ‘Penile Incarceration Secondary to Masturbation with A Steel Pipe’ (2013), with illustrations.

‘We are a profoundly self-pleasuring society at both a metaphorical and material level’

Self-stimulation has been employed in sexual research, though not always to great import. Kinsey and his team wanted to measure how far, if at all, semen was projected during ejaculation: Jonathan Gathorne-Hardy, Kinsey’s biographer, refers to queues of men in Greenwich Village waiting to be filmed at $3 an ejaculation. William Masters and Virginia Johnson recorded and measured the physiological response during sexual arousal, using new technology, including a miniature camera inside a plastic phallus. Their book Human Sexual Response (1966) was based on data from more than 10,000 orgasms from nearly 700 volunteers: laboratory research involving sexual intercourse, stimulation, and masturbation by hand and with that transparent phallus. Learned journals have produced findings such as ‘Orgasm in Women in the Laboratory – Quantitative Studies on Duration, Intensity, Latency, and Vaginal Blood Flow’ (1985).

In therapy, too, masturbation has found its place ‘as a means of achieving sexual health’, as an article by Eli Coleman, the director of the programme in human sexuality at the University of Minnesota Medical School, once put it. A published study in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology in 1977 outlined therapist-supervised female masturbation (with dildo, vibrator and ‘organic vegetables’) as a way of encouraging vaginal orgasm. Then there is The Big Book of Masturbation (2003) and the hundreds of (pun intended) self-help books, Masturbation for Weight Loss, a Woman’s Guide only among the latest (and more opportunistic).

Self-pleasure has featured in literature, most famously in Philip Roth’s novel Portnoy’s Complaint (1969). But it is there in more recent writing too, including Chuck Palahniuk’s disturbing short story ‘Guts’ (2004). Auto-eroticism (and its traces) have been showcased in artistic expression: in Jordan Mackenzie's sperm and charcoal canvases (2007), for example, or in Marina Abramović’s reprise of Vito Acconci’s Seedbed at the Guggenheim in 2005, or her video art Balkan Erotic Epic of the same year.

On film and television, masturbation is similarly pervasive: Lauren Rosewarne’s Masturbation in Pop Culture (2014) was able to draw on more than 600 such scenes. My favorites are in the film Spanking the Monkey (1994), in which the main character is trying to masturbate in the bathroom, while the family dog, seemingly alert to such behavior, pants and whines at the door; and in the Seinfeld episode ‘The Contest’ (1992), in which the ‘m’ word is never uttered, and where George’s mother tells her adult son that he is ‘treating his body like it was an amusement park’.      

There is much evidence, then, for what the film scholar Greg Tuck in 2009 called the ‘mainstreaming of masturbation’: ‘We are a profoundly self-pleasuring society at both a metaphorical and material level.’ There are politically-conscious masturbation websites. There is the online ‘Masturbation Hall of Fame’ (sponsored by the sex-toys franchise Good Vibrations). There are masturbation authons, and jack-off-clubs, and masturbation parties.

It would be a mistake, however, to present a rigid contrast between past condemnation and present acceptance. There are continuities. Auto-eroticism might be mainstreamed but that does not mean it is totally accepted. In Sexual Investigations (1996), the philosopher Alan Soble observed that people brag about casual sex and infidelities but remain silent about solitary sex. Anne-Francis Watson and Alan McKee’s 2013 study of 14- to 16-year-old Australians found that not only the participants but also their families and teachers were more comfortable talking about almost any other sexual matter than about self-pleasuring. It ‘remains an activity that is viewed as shameful and problematic’, warns the entry on masturbation in the Encyclopedia of Adolescence (2011). In a study of the sexuality of students in a western US university, where they were asked about sexual orientation, anal and vaginal sex, condom use, and masturbation, it was the last topic that occasioned reservation: 28 per cent of the participants ‘declined to answer the masturbation questions’. Masturbation remains, to some extent, taboo.

When the subject is mentioned, it is often as an object of laughter or ridicule. Rosewarne, the dogged viewer of the 600 masturbation scenes in film and TV, concluded that male masturbation was almost invariably portrayed negatively (female masturbation was mostly erotic). Watson and McKee’s study revealed that their young Australians knew that masturbation was normal yet still made ‘negative or ambivalent statements’ about it. 

Belief in the evils of masturbation has resurfaced in the figure of the sex addict and in the obsession with the impact of internet pornography. Throughout their relatively short histories, sexual addiction and hyper sexual disorder have included masturbation as one of the primary symptoms of their purported maladies. What, in a sex-positive environment, would be considered normal sexual behavior has been pathologised in another. Of the 152 patients in treatment for hyper sexual disorder in clinics in California, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Texas and Utah, a 2012 study showed that most characterized their sexual disorder in terms of pornography consumption (81 per cent) and masturbation (78 per cent). The New Catholic Encyclopedia’s supplement on masturbation (2012-13), too, slips into a lengthy disquisition on sex addiction and the evils of internet pornography: ‘The availability of internet pornography has markedly increased the practice of masturbation to the degree that it can be appropriately referred to as an epidemic.’

Critics think that therapeutic masturbation might reinforce sexual selfishness rather than sexual empathy and sharing

The masturbator is often seen as the pornography-consumer and sex addict enslaved by masturbation. The sociologist Steve Garlick has suggested that negative attitudes to masturbation have been reconstituted to ‘surreptitiously infect ideas about pornography’. Pornography has become masturbation’s metonym. Significantly, when the New Zealand politician Shane Jones was exposed for using his taxpayer-funded credit card to view pornographic movies, the unnamed shame was that his self-pleasuring activities were proclaimed on the front pages of the nation’s newspapers – thus the jokes about ‘the matter in hand’ and not shaking hands with him at early morning meetings. It would have been less humiliating, one assumes, if he had used the public purse to finance the services of sex workers.

Nor is there consensus on the benefits of masturbation. Despite its continued use in therapy, some therapists question its usefulness and propriety. ‘It is a mystery to me how conversational psychotherapy has made the sudden transition to massage parlor technology involving vibrators, mirrors, surrogates, and now even carrots and cucumbers!’ one psychologist protested in the late 1970s. He was concerned about issues of client-patient power and a blinkered pursuit of the sexual climax ‘ignoring … the more profound psychological implications of the procedure’. In terms of effectiveness, critics think that therapeutic masturbation might reinforce individual pleasure and sexual selfishness rather than creating sexual empathy and sharing. As one observed in the pages of the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy in 1995: ‘Ironically, the argument against masturbation in American society was originally religiously founded, but may re-emerge as a humanist argument.’ Oversimplified, but in essence right: people remain disturbed by the solitariness of solitary sex.

Why has what the Japanese charmingly call ‘self-play’ become such a forcing ground for sexual attitudes? Perhaps there is something about masturbation’s uncontrollably that continues to make people anxious. It is perversely non-procreative, incestuous, adulterous, homosexual, ‘often pederast’ and, in imagination at least, sex with ‘every man, woman, or beast to whom I take a fancy’, to quote Soble. For the ever-astute historian Thomas Laqueur, author of Solitary Sex (2003), masturbation is ‘that part of human sexual life where potentially unlimited pleasure meets social restraint’.

Why did masturbation become such a problem? For Laqueur, it began with developments in 18th-century Europe, with the cultural rise of the imagination in the arts, the seemingly unbounded future of commerce, the role of print culture, the rise of private, silent reading, especially novels, and the democratic ingredients of this transformation. Masturbation’s condemned tendencies – solitariness, excessive desire, limitless imagination, and equal-opportunity pleasure – were an outer limit or testing of these valued attributes, ‘a kind of Satan to the glories of bourgeois civilization’.

In more pleasure-conscious modern times, the balance has tipped towards personal gratification. The acceptance of personal autonomy, sexual liberation and sexual consumerism, together with a widespread focus on addiction, and the ubiquity of the internet, now seem to demand their own demon. Fears of unrestrained fantasy and endless indulging of the self remain. Onania’s 18th-century complaints about the lack of restraint of solitary sex are not, in the end, all that far away from today’s fear of boundless, ungovernable, unquenchable pleasure in the self. 

Vatican Sex Abuse Scandal Reveals Blind Spot for Francis

By JASON HOROWITZ and LAURIE GOODSTEIN NY Times

VATICAN CITY — Pope Francis came to power promising not only to create a more inclusive church and to clean up an ossified Vatican bureaucracy, but also to remove the stain of child sex abuse.

A global pedophilia scandal plagued his two immediate predecessors. With Francis’s election in 2013, many expected progress. Francis talked about powerful committees to safeguard children, tribunals to try bishops and a “zero tolerance” policy for offending priests.

It hasn’t exactly worked out that way.

On Thursday, the Vatican announced that Francis had granted a leave of absence to Cardinal George Pell, now the highest-ranking Roman Catholic prelate to be formally charged with sexual offenses, and one the pope had brought into his inner circle even as a cloud of allegations swirled over the cardinal in Australia.

“We talked about my need to take leave to clear my name,” Cardinal Pell, 76, stone-faced in simple black cleric’s clothes, said as he sat next to the Vatican’s spokesman and reiterated his innocence. “So I’m very grateful to the Holy Father for giving me this leave to return to Australia.”

But for all of Francis’s good works, good will and popularity, disappointed critics saw Cardinal Pell’s removal as only the latest evidence that a pope who has focused the world’s attention on issues from climate change to peace on earth has his own blind spot when it comes to sex abuse in his ranks.

“What happened today clearly demonstrates that the revolution of Francis in the church, when it comes to the issue of sex abuse, is in name only, and not in deeds,” said Emiliano Fittipaldi, an Italian journalist and the author of “Lust,” a book published this year about sex abuse in the Vatican that begins with a chapter about Cardinal Pell.

He said that despite the pope’s talk, “the fight against pedophilia is not a priority for Francis.”

Some have long questioned why Francis brought Cardinal Pell to Rome in 2014 in the first place, charging that he had offered the prelate an escape hatch just as the Australian Royal Commission examining institutional responses to child sexual abuse had begun its work in earnest.

At the very least, the choice seemed to demonstrate that the pope’s determination to dismantle the power hierarchies of the Roman Curia, which he had hoped Cardinal Pell could help him with, was a greater priority and had led him to overlook warning signs.

Despite serious ideological differences, Francis handpicked the arch-conservative Cardinal Pell to lead his Secretariat for the Economy, bringing him to Rome to use his well regarded financial acumen to clean up the church’s muddied finances. Right away, Cardinal Pell acknowledged that “hundreds of millions of euros” had been “tucked away” off the Vatican’s books.

Pope Francis then brought Cardinal Pell onto his powerful Council of Cardinals, a nine-person group that wields enormous power in the Curia. The Australian’s brashness made him enemies among entrenched Vatican officials who took his calls for financial transparency as a threat to their power.

Even as Cardinal Pell struggled to improve one aspect of the church’s image, he came with a separate cloud of scandal. The Australian Royal Commission found more than four thousand people who alleged they had been sexually abused in the church as children.

Cardinal Pell testified that he had made “enormous mistakes” in failing to remove priests accused of abuse when he served as archbishop of Melbourne, and then Sydney.

But if the Pope was displeased with Cardinal Pell, it was not publicly evident.

When allegations that Cardinal Pell had been an abuser himself began leaking into the Australian press, and when he testified for hours to the Royal Commission in February 2016 via video link from a Rome hotel, the cardinal insisted that he had “the full backing of the pope.”

Victims rights groups generally see the pontificate of John Paul II as a disaster with respect to sex abuse in the church, as he presided over vast cover-ups and a period of little accountability.

His successor, Pope Benedict, who read many of the ghastly reports during his time as the Vatican’s doctrinal watchdog, made key policy changes to protect children and hold priests accountable for abuse. But he largely left bishops untouched.

Francis initially raised expectations that he would be more serious than his predecessors about rooting out abusers and demanding accountability.

Nine months after he became pope, he created a commission of outside experts to advise the church on how to protect children and prevent abuse.

Skeptics pointed out that the commission was announced in the midst of hearings by a United Nations panel in Geneva that subjected the Vatican to blistering criticism over the handling of sexual abuse cases.

The commission initially included two survivors of sexual abuse who had been openly critical of the church. Since then, one was forced out and the other left, with both saying the Vatican had failed to follow through on its promises.

Pope Francis acted on the commission’s proposal to create a tribunal to discipline bishops who covered up abuse — but then dispensed with the tribunal when it hit resistance within the Vatican.

The pope later issued an edict, titled “As a Loving Mother,” saying that the Vatican already had all the offices necessary to investigate and discipline negligent bishops, and would do so. But no discipline or sanctions have ever been announced.

“Pope Francis has a lot of explaining to do,” said the Rev. James E. Connell, a priest in Milwaukee, a canon lawyer, and a founding member of Catholic Whistleblowers, a group of priests, nuns and others who advocate for victims. “He sets up these things and then kills them and doesn’t follow through. And these are all matters of justice.”

Father Connell said the group had sent files of documents to Pope Francis and the Vatican on three American bishops the group accused of particularly egregious cover-ups of child abuse, and heard nothing back.

Pope Francis’ focus on mercy as a central teaching may also be a blind spot, Father Connell said. “We hear a lot from the pope about mercy, and fine, we hope the Lord is merciful. But at the same time, justice must be rendered,” he said.

Marie Collins, one of the two survivors who served on the commission that Francis created, said in a blog post on Thursday that it was already clear that Cardinal Pell was guilty of the “appalling mishandling” of priests who abused children while he served as a bishop.

She said Cardinal Pell should have stepped down from his Vatican position long ago, even before he faced charges of sexual offenses.

“He should never have been allowed to hide out in the Vatican to avoid having to face those in his home country who needed answers,” she wrote, adding that Cardinal Pell’s case has shown “how little reliance we can put on assurances from the Catholic Church that bishops and religious superiors will face sanctions if they mishandle abuse cases.”

Francis also provoked outrage when he appointed as bishop Juan Barros, an acolyte of Chile’s most infamous serial abuser connected to the church — the Rev. Fernando Karadima. Bishop Barros stood by Father Karadima, who was tried and found guilty by the Vatican and was forced to retire.

Then Francis stood firmly by Bishop Barros when priests and parishioners disrupted his installation ceremony and wrote letters pleading with the pope to rescind the appointment. Francis was later caught on videotape in Rome calling the Chileans who objected to the bishop “stupid” and “leftists.”

Advocates of sex abuse victims were affronted once again in February when, in keeping with his vision for a more merciful church, he reduced sanctions against some priests convicted of pedophilia. The Vatican has also been criticized as retreating into a bunker mentality when accusations were made against its own.

Jason Horowitz reported from the Vatican, and Laurie Goodstein from New York.

From David A Fairbanks

There is no blind spot, what there is, is sincere mortification and squeamishness. Pope Francis is 80, all of this creates a terrible ache and a want to evade and ignore it as much as possible. John Paul II was deeply affected and engaged in absolute denial as did Pope Benedict 16, Talking about sexual abuse cuts deep in all of us, what greater devastation to a sense of 'Self' can there be? No one can justify or explain away sexual abuse, no one. Human dignity especially that of a child should be sacred, but we all know better. What is offensive here, is that Cardinal Pell willingly deceived friends who trusted him and gave him a place at the Vatican, a respected position at the top of Catholicism. Decent men humiliated by a friend who should have stayed away or at the least confided in them and sought a reasonable solution. All of this damages public respect for the Catholic Church. Perhaps Pope Francis can use this tragedy to nudge his church toward a more modern and responsible approach to sexuality and liberate the priesthood from a ruinous culture of celibacy?