I keep seeing this "fact" being shared online, and it has been circulating for about a decade:
"In Europe, until the 17th century, teenage boys were routinely masturbated by their nannies for a good night sleep."
This is from 2014, but I've found examples from as far back as 2012 (Facebook) or 2013 (open Internet) and as recently as 2022 (open internet) or March 29 2024 (Facebook).
Digging through the (rare) sources for this, I have traced the original claim to The Tyranny of Pleasure (Jean-Claude Guillebaud, 1999). On reading it, it sounds dodgy. No wonder it was removed from Wikipedia (the fact that no other source talks about it doesn't help):
"Researchers like Michel Foucault and Peter Brown, to cite just two, were ironical about this misplaced condescension for the past and the “smug, even malicious, familiarity with which modern man feels he can mock the sexual anxieties of the men and the women of a distant past.” In this “distant past,” however, one would find a thousand examples of an art of compromised which we have lost. The anxious societies are not always the ones we think they are.
In the 17th century, no one saw anything wrong in the nannies’ practice of masturbating little boys to help them sleep. As for the famous medieval repression of homosexuals, it was so seldom put in practice since the 14th century that historians have barely managed to come up with 38 cases of capital punishment actually applied between 1317 and 1789, i.e. in four and a half centuries! And most of those were instances of criminal pedophilia perpetrated on boys or girls of ten years or even younger (acts which would be punished similarly in the post-modern America of today). Let us add that most of the penalties that the famous ecclesiastical courts of the Middle Ages imposed for sexual transgressions consisted of prolonged fasts or voluntary penitences — punishments well on this side of the sentences given today. Contrary to our own practices, in moral matters the traditional societies combined severity of principles with moderation in practice.
Our conduct is pretty much the opposite, today. We are dizzy with theoretical license, but cannot, in reality, indulge. A man from the Renaissance or the 18th century would be shocked by certain contemporary legal restrictions — restrictions which are very strictly fol- lowed. For example, in 1986 the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a law in the State of Georgia, by five votes against four, making crimes of sodomy and fellatio even between a married couple. Or another decision by the same Supreme Court, in Bowers vs. Hardwick, allowing the States to declare homosexuality between two consenting adults a crime.
Thus we find ourselves, without fully realizing it, in the bitterest contradiction between apparent permissiveness and a niggling repression. Our daily life is a constant conflict between solicitation and suspicion, a proselytizing pan-sexuality and a nosy vigilance, extraordinary “sexual invitation” and the maniacal threat of an inquisition (sexual harassment, etc.). We are caught in a double bind. That is undoubtedly one of the explanations for the flood of proclamations and noise we en- dure, the inexhaustible discourse about love. It betrays a strange exis- tential discomfort, as if the presumptuous Western societies had lost the art of measure, the capacity for amicable “arrangements,” the virtue of silence which still prevails, for example, in African cultures. It is as though we are orphans of an erotic, patient culture made up of internalized rules and consenting transgressions, devastating inclinations and accepted risks, license and the half-light of prudence, which yesterday perpetuated — more intelligently than is imagined — the unstable equilibrium of desire.
An African scholar describes it beautifully. “What Westerners take. . . for a lack of transparency, even duplicity, is only a modest reserve that surrounds human relations like a halo of mystery, a protective opacity and something impalpable connected with respect, especially self respect. Damma rouss (‘I am ashamed’), the Wolofs say. We are shocked by the distance which traditional cultures place between men and women. But we should be aware that the terrible face-to-face discussion of the Western couple, stripped of decency and reserve, is profoundly destroying relations in love, desire and any closeness.”"
