Archive for the ‘Sex Science and History’ Category

Better known for his cornflakes, he published one of the great crank classics of medical science: “Plain Facts for Young and Old”. A complete digital edition is available in our upcoming Sex, Books and Censorship. More information on this can be found on the Sex and Censorship site. The book attempts to blame all disease on masturbation. Kellogg believed that any sex was debilitating, and never consummated his own marriage. It was a very popular book in the late 1800’s. Originally published in 1877, our library has the 1891 edition. Interestingly, cornflakes were developed because he believed that they helped reduce sexual desire.

I kinda like Wilhelm Reich. He was actually a pretty sex positive guy. And then he jumped the shark for me and most scientifically minded people with Orgone energy. I like the idea of it, and wish that there was something to it. It’s a cool magical sex sort of thing.

Let me be lazy and quote directly from Wikipedia: “Reich claimed that life was founded upon bioenergetic phenomena, and characterized by the pulsation of bioenergy, as with heart-beat, respiration, and bladder functions. Emotions and sexuality, he argued, also followed a similar basic bioenergetic pulsation, and optimal health necessitated open emotional expression and periodic sexual release of accumulated bio-energy. He measured bioelectrical signatures of emotional-sexual human subjective experiences, using sensitive millivoltmeters, interpreting these as expressions of a specific “bio-electric” life-energy. He later observed and developed objective measures to identify energetic fields around humans and other living forms, including microbes, and claimed the same bio-energy also charged non-living matter, and existed in a free form in the atmosphere. He argued the “orgone” bore a similarity to the older concept of cosmological ether of space. The orgone accumulator was developed as a means to objectively capture this energy from the atmosphere, and later was claimed to have both anomalous biological and physical effects. ”

What amazes me is that the idea has not died out, and there are people still experimenting with orgone energy. Perhaps they could develop an orgone collector that also collected n-rays.

What does get lost is that Reich was a pioneer in sexual research, attempting to use the scientific method to better understand sexuality. Unfortunately, his understanding of the scientific method went horribly awry.