Unusual connections

Did Portnoy's Complaint deserve the "Booker Prize"?

Mary Beard in The Times writes about a recent literary festival in which she was on a panel considering which books from 1969 should have won the Booker Prize. This entailed her re-reading Portnoy's Complaint, which she really disliked. (I have never read it, nor seen the movie, and have no interest in doing so.)

The point of this post, however, is to note this comment on her blog, which shows there are some quite unusual theories out there:

I cannot resist praising Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (ZONE BOOKS, 2003) by my colleague here, Thomas Laqueur, which rightly links concern about masturbation with the development of ideas of credit in the eighteenth century.

What other sexual/financial connections might there be? The rise of cybersex is behind the global financial crisis, maybe?

Anyhow, this is curious enough to make me look for reviews of the Laqueur book. This one starts in way which I find funny, although I am not sure if that was intended:

Thomas Laqueur has been preoccupied with masturbation for more than a decade...

But for more detail on Laqueur's ideas, try this summary:

He sees the promise of abundance offered by the new commercial economy, with its reliance on credit, as strikingly similar to the lure of masturbation, with its addictive pull and reliance on the imagination; the consumer, the speculator, and the masturbator were thus all engaged in the same kind of activity...

I guess it's entirely appropriate that banker rhymes with ...... then.

I think Laqueur may have spent too much time alone.