Denis Diderot and the Masturbating Girl

In Diderot's Le Reve de D'Alembert (1769), a character based on the vitalist physician and theorist Theophile 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.