I

These two quotes, despite being thirty-two years apart, represent the standard reactions to the sex educators’ argument for accepting adolescent masturbation. The two quotes above were addressed to two eminent socialist gynaecologists of interwar Hungary, Béla Totis and Imre Hirschler. They belonged to a group of socialist doctors in the 1930s who strived for progressive sex education for the working classes in a long-spanning Christian conservative regime. Their inspiration lay both in research visits to the Soviet Union and in the ideas and sex education practice of Wilhelm Reich, Max Hodann, Magnus Hirschfeld, and other leftist experts of the German-speaking world. How did it happen that Totis and Hirschler were both criticized by intellectuals on the political left and that, thirty-two years apart, they were considered both radical and not professional enough? How could masturbation be a danger in Hungary in the 1930s and still in the early 1960s?

As for why masturbation historically appeared and then disappeared as a problem, and for a periodization of the history of masturbation in the West,Footnote ³ we can turn to Thomas Laqueur's monograph, Solitary sex.Footnote ⁴ The medical discourse that made masturbation a source of all illnesses and a kind of ‘original sin’, as Laqueur documents, began in the early eighteenth century. For two centuries, sex educators demanded that adolescents stop this habit and asked parents to warn and punish their children.

Laqueur's longue durée history of masturbation shows two major breaks challenging the dominance of the pathologizing discourse on masturbation. The first is what he calls the ‘Freudian discourse’. Freud's theory on psychosexual development recognized a ‘pansexual’ phase in children in which attention was given to the self as there was no clear object of desire yet. Autoeroticism would arrive as a ‘natural’ stage of development, while the socialization of the adolescent into society made them control their masturbatory or other asocial desires and channel these energies into a socially acceptable (heterosexual, partnered) form.Footnote ⁵

Laqueur calls the second major discourse ‘liberationist’, galvanized by modern sexological research, beginning with Alfred Kinsey's books on sexuality in the late 1940s to early 1950s. Kinsey showed that masturbation was, shockingly, a ubiquitous habit among adults as well. In 1966, William H. Masters and Virginia E. Johnson found that the clitoris was the source of all female orgasms, thus challenging the Freudian dogma that ‘immature’ clitoral orgasms would be replaced by the ‘real thing’, i.e. vaginal orgasms by way of intercourse in adulthood.Footnote ⁶ According to Laqueur, the counter-culture of the 1970s in the West politicized masturbation and framed it in terms of sexual liberation.Footnote ⁷ They radically challenged the old register of sexual deviance, especially the taboos on sexual habits and partner selection. In this paradigm, providing oneself with the gift of pleasure became a synonym for the autonomous political subject.

In this article, I will look at how and why masturbation was emancipated in twentieth-century Hungary, focusing on the socialist, Kádár era (1956–89), which I claim was the time when the discourses concerning masturbation underwent profound transformation. The intellectual and political context in Hungary points towards a markedly different periodization than what Laqueur offers for the West. The sexual politics of both the Horthy regime (1920–44) and the Stalinist regime in Hungary (1948–56) allowed neither an open discussion of masturbation, nor an institutionalized approach to sexology. It was in the early years of the Kádár regime that debates about sexual morality enabled experts and intellectuals to express a wide range of opinions concerning issues like premarital sex, promiscuity, and masturbation. These debates also served to formulate an understanding of socialist morals. The idea of socialist humanism connected 1960s sex education with the interwar socialist discourse on sex, catalysed the emancipation of masturbation and the establishment of a post-Stalinist, socialist sexual ethics.

Laqueur's observation concerning the two major breaks in the discourses in the West does not emerge in the same way in Hungary. Proponents of socialist humanism acknowledged adolescent masturbation not simply as part of individual psychosexual development. They showed understanding to the pains of adolescent libido and saw guilt-free, responsible sexual conduct as a cornerstone of a new socialist society. In the 1970s and 1980s, a new generation of sexologists minimized the emphasis on the public, focusing more on the private: each citizen being responsible for their own happiness and that of their partner's. In this second reappraisal, there was a marked shift towards interpreting sex in light of the latest findings of contemporary Western science. Consequently, the emancipation of masturbation was extended to adults, linking it with learning how to find sexual pleasure. Expert knowledge was emancipatory but not liberationist and, due to a lack of sexuality-related feminist or LGBTQ activism in Kádár-era Hungary, emancipation occurred in a heteronormative context.

II

Since the first half of the twentieth century, sexual reform in both Western and Eastern Europe was largely associated with the political left.Footnote ⁸ The sexual emancipation of women, the liberalization of abortion and contraception, and the decriminalization of homosexuality were all related to freeing the working class from superimposed bourgeois morals. Masturbation was part of this trend. In Sweden, the left-wing National Union for Sexual Education used sex counselling and school campaigns to fight for the de-pathologization of masturbation in the 1930s and 1940s.Footnote ⁹ The World League for Sexual Reform, sexologist and reformer Magnus Hirschfeld's initiative, attracted researchers and activists mostly from the left.Footnote ¹⁰ Masturbation was a central topic of the 1932 meeting of the League in Brno and both the Brno venerologist Antonín Trýb and the Berlin sex educator Max Hodann emphasized that it was unthreatening.Footnote ¹¹ The handful of socialist experts of sexuality in interwar Hungary, inspired both by contemporaneous sexology and by a Marxist interpretation of psychology, were part of this network: Béla Totis, medical doctor and author of numerous books on sexuality, was invited to represent Hungary in Brno. Totis, in his 1931 book for adolescents (Az ifjúság nemi problémái: levelek fiamhoz – The sexual problems of youth: letters to my son) claimed: ‘medical science does not know of any physical or psychological illness that would come about as a result of onanism’, and that ‘it is the natural state of the developing person, one which almost everyone goes through’.Footnote ¹²

Sándor Schönstein, who established sex counselling à la Wilhelm Reich in a worker's district in Budapest in the 1930s,Footnote ¹³ believed that the fight for the individual's sexual freedom needed to be linked up with socialist revolutionFootnote ¹⁴ because ‘having a profound think-through of the sexual problem can in itself bring one to reject the current social order and the will to establish a socialist society’.Footnote ¹⁵ Another outspoken Freudo-Marxist and the so-called ‘Hungarian Wilhelm Reich’, Béla Neufeld,Footnote ¹⁶ who briefly worked at Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science, participated in the 1932 Brno conference, and in his report clearly sided with the de-pathologization of masturbation.Footnote ¹⁷

These Hungarian socialist doctors had various links to German-speaking Europe, but they also looked towards the Soviet Union as a model for sexual politics. They either visited the Soviet Union or read about it, and after the Stalinist turn still saw promising changes.Footnote ¹⁸ Neufeld claimed that Soviet youths ‘who did not know the atmosphere of sexual repression were happy and positive’.Footnote ¹⁹ At the same time, in Hungary these experts were on the margins: they were socialist and Jewish. In the conservative, anti-Semitic Horthy regime (1920–44, after Governor Miklós Horthy), the dominant discourse on sex education deemed masturbation a sin and a medical danger and often linked it to ‘unpatriotic’, Jewish influence.Footnote ²⁰ The Communist Party was banned and the Social Democrats remained a small opposition party.

The mostly Jewish, often left-leaning, members of the Budapest School of PsychoanalysisFootnote ²¹ were in high regard internationally but marginal at home.Footnote ²² They held similarly progressive views. Alice Bálint, expert in psychoanalytic pedagogy, claimed that masturbation was only problematic if it endangered the social integration of a child, and that it was not the cause of mental or physical illness, but a symptom of trauma. Bálint advised parents to search for the trauma rather than punish their child for masturbating.Footnote ²³

The growing anti-Semitism in Hungary followed by its entry into the Second World War posed a mortal threat to all these progressives. Most noteworthy members of the circle of psychoanalysts emigrated from Hungary before the war,Footnote ²⁴ while the socialist doctors were killed by the Hungarian Nazis or deported to concentration camps. The year 1945 therefore represents an important discontinuity in Hungary: almost all influential interwar sexual progressives were not around to see Soviet-style sexual politics materialize.

Stalinism in Hungary introduced an era of asceticism and silence on issues of sexuality,Footnote ²⁵ similar to other Eastern bloc countries, such as East GermanyFootnote ²⁶ or Poland.Footnote ²⁷ Béla Neufeld, returning from a concentration camp, documented his disappointment with the sexual conservatism of the time in his unpublished diary.Footnote ²⁸

This ‘great silence’ on sexuality in Hungary in the 1950s meant that the official line on masturbation was much less permissive than interwar socialists had imagined. A classic example of available sex education from this time is the Soviet pedagogue A. S. Makarenko, whose book on pedagogy was translated into Hungarian in 1949 and whose teachings became a point of reference for the pedagogical literature of the 1950s:

‘Excited imagination’ and praising the usefulness of exhausting children with work puts this squarely in the framework of a zero-sum game of sexual energy. In this context, the spilling of sperm consumes energies which should rather be used for productive work.

One source discussing masturbation openly in the Stalinist era was a fifteen-page brochure for parents published in 1952, titled A serdülő gyermek nevelése (Raising the adolescent child). The authors claimed that ‘masturbation is extremely widespread’ and if parents and teachers keep silent about it, this improper custom would become the norm. They recommended that advice not be guided by threats or irony since ‘onanism is not an illness or sin’, but rather a symptom, or ‘sign of a certain age’ that needed to be recognized. They told parents and educators to assist in the battle adolescents were fighting because, if it ‘becomes large-scale, it drains a lot of energy which distracts one from everyday work’.Footnote ³⁰ Just like Makarenko, the booklet told parents to keep adolescents busy with games, reading, and sports instead.

The year 1956 marked a break in Hungary not just because of the revolution that brought an end to Stalinism, but the Kádár regime (named after the party secretary János Kádár) inaugurated a new era of sexual politics. A 1956 decree made abortion free and easily accessible, homosexuality was decriminalized in 1961,Footnote ³¹ and 1967 saw the manufacture of contraceptive pills.Footnote ³² After a decade of almost complete silence, issues of sexuality could be discussed and debated in the open, which meant that new, more permissive sexual discourses appeared and gained momentum.

Yet, the truths of interwar Christian sex educators still prevailed, and masturbation remained a problem. It took a progressive doctor, already active in the interwar era, to make the first steps toward changing the attitudes of experts and laypeople in Hungary. Imre Hirschler was a contemporary of Totis, Neufeld, and Schönstein, and even though he did not publish anything on sex education before the Second World War, as a friend of Schönstein and member of the illegal Communist Party, was one of the doctors organizing the sex education talks held for Budapest workers in the early 1930s.Footnote ³³ Hirschler, already well known as a gynaecologist before 1945, survived the war and became head of the gynaecology department of the prestigious Central State Hospital in Budapest in 1950 where he remained for twenty-five years. Hirschler's 1958 book, A nők védelmében (In defence of women), became one of the most quoted and most read sex education books in Kádár-era Hungary. It was reprinted on six occasions between 1958 and 1969 and sold around 600,000 copies (in a country of 10 million).Footnote ³⁴ In 1964, the Academy of Sciences surveyed fifty-seven male university students on their sex education, thirty-two of whom said they had read Hirschler's book.Footnote ³⁵

Even though both women and men read it, the book was dedicated to women's sexuality, as the experienced gynaecologist Hirschler believed that women were much more limited by social rules than men,Footnote ³⁶ and therefore, their sexual health needed more attention. Aside from arguing for gender equality, Hirschler took a humanist approach to raising adolescents. He maintained that there was no one-size-fits-all solution for every teenager boy and girl and therefore every parent needed to ‘attempt to direct the adolescents under their guardianship by a careful observation of their personalities, taking into account their individual qualities’.Footnote ³⁷ Hirschler added that parents should restrict their own ‘subjective point of view’ based on their own coming of age, as these might not align with their child's sexual needs.Footnote ³⁸ Hirschler's argument that emphasized the agency of adolescents rang familiar to Béla Totis, who, in 1931, had argued for ‘an individual solution that fulfils the wishes of one's own soul’, adding that one can only be ‘one's own guide in the maze of sexual life’.Footnote ³⁹ Hirschler's view on masturbation was very clear: he stated that it was not harmful for body or soul, only when somebody experienced guilt or was being shamed.Footnote ⁴⁰ He went out of his way to address the fear that masturbation could be practised too often. He emphasized that individual differences could vary, and balanced individuals would only resort to it when needed. As no number could be associated with ‘too much’, Hirschler saw a problem with threatening youths with ‘excess’, as it could cause unnecessary anxiety.Footnote ⁴¹

In the final part of the chapter on adolescents, Hirschler reiterated what educators/parents needed to do: become knowledgeable in the fields of natural and human sciences; then think about their own childhood to be able to empathize; finally, aim to understand and to help, and never to threaten or shame their children.Footnote ⁴² He believed that adolescents only needed to learn one golden rule: that in treating others in matters of love, they should always think about the happiness of ‘the other, of others’.Footnote ⁴³ Hirschler explained that in the new socialist society, devoid of exploitation and oppression, a ‘true humanism’ could come about in which ‘the happiness of the individual did not conflict with the happiness of other people and the interest of the whole society’.Footnote ⁴⁴

Lajos Székely, director of the Health Education Centre of the Health Ministry echoed Hirschler's humanism in one of the first guidelines for school-based sex education in 1967. He emphasized that the goal of sex education was for ‘youth to view sex as an organic part of life…and to recognize in time that one's sexual instinct needs to be controlled by reason and will and harmonized with the collectivist view of our society which is based on socialist humanism’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Székely shared Hirschler's ideas when discussing sexual norms in socialist societies, arguing that in sexual relationships youths must learn to ‘respect the other person, their rights, needs, desires, intention and bodily and mental health’.Footnote ⁴⁶

Given its immense success, it is fair to say that a generation of Hungarians encountered sex education to a large degree through Hirschler's work. Following the decades when masturbation was deemed sinful and a threat to (Christian) purity, a subsequent decade of near silence on the topic, and coming at a moment when the majority of experts considered masturbation dangerous, it is significant that it was an interwar socialist who inaugurated the emancipation of masturbation. Hirschler's socialist humanism was rooted in the discourse of the interwar left; his language on mutual respect, the happiness of the individual, and the good of the collective was in line with what he had been practisng in the 1930s, and thus established a continuity between interwar and post-war socialist discourses on sex. In fact, his ideas on raising adolescents as individuals with a will of their own, and his discourse of a guilt-free, natural sexuality, had a very different emphasis from Makarenko's and other contemporaries as it was one of agency and empathy, not of authoritarianism.

III

From the historian János Rainer M.'s overview of the sixties in Hungary, we learn that the decade between 1962 and 1972 was one of pluralization and opening up culturally, economically, and also politically.Footnote ⁴⁷ The 1968 New Economic Mechanism was one of the most profound and radical economic reforms in the Eastern bloc,Footnote ⁴⁸ Hungarians were allowed to travel to the West and a general amnesty was given to many political prisoners in 1963.Footnote ⁴⁹ Kádárist consolidation in Hungary was very much pragmatic, focusing on improving the living standard and – learning from the rigidity of the Stalinist regime that led to a revolution in 1956 – consciously non-ideological. For the Hungarian intelligentsia of the time, the increased cultural-intellectual autonomy that allowed a plurality of opinions and a more progressive lifestyle opened up a vision of a ‘Hungarian model’ of socialism that cared both for community and individual.Footnote ⁵⁰

The philosopher Miklós Lehmann contends that the decade up to 1973 was ‘the most prolific era of Hungarian Marxist philosophy’.Footnote ⁵¹ In his analysis, he points to two major debates of the 1960s, one on ‘alienation’ in socialism and the other on anthropology, that is ‘the place of the individual’Footnote ⁵² in Marxist society. In both of these debates, Ágnes Heller and Mihály Vajda, both renowned philosophers and disciples of Lukács, played an important role, imagining a humanist socialism, in which the existing social alienation could be overcome.Footnote ⁵³ Heller's most celebrated book searched for concrete ideas on how in modern socialism one could find day-to-day ideals that would enhance authentic community and work against capitalist type alienation.Footnote ⁵⁴ In this quest for a more humanist and less alienated socialist society, the debates also included sexuality.

Despite Hirschler's presence, the discourse in the late 1950s remained dominated by a handful of old-style experts, including doctor István HarasztiFootnote ⁵⁵ and the Lutheran clergyman László Dezséry.Footnote ⁵⁶ The first public debate on sexual morality started in 1962 when a young writer, László Gyurkó, attacked Dezséry's sexual conservatism.Footnote ⁵⁷ Gyurkó maintained that the socialist revolution and the end of economic exploitation would soon automatically bring about a positive change in sexual morality, and ethics that included pleasure not just work.Footnote ⁵⁸ Two other prominent pro-pleasure participants in the debate were both of Gyurkó's generation, coming of age after the Second World War: philosopher Ágnes Heller and sociologist Tibor Huszár. They likewise argued for a liberation of sexual pleasure and the right for youths to decide for themselves what was right and wrong in matters of sex.Footnote ⁵⁹

The 1962 intellectual debate on sexual pleasure had an important follow-up round in Pedagógiai Szemle (Pedagogical Review) in 1963–5. At the heart of this expert debate was István Haraszti's 1958 book and the issue of masturbation. Invited by the editors to contribute to the discussion, Imre Hirschler debated with child psychologist István Harsányi. Hirschler targeted Haraszti's 1962 book for failing to sufficiently de-pathologize masturbation, taking issue with the fact that Haraszti deemed masturbation as ‘usually’ unharmful and, during one's coming of age, ‘almost’ normal. Hirschler believed that Haraszti also erred by attributing significance to masturbation in the etiology of premature ejaculation, impotence, and frigidity. Hirschler ultimately reiterated the message of his own book, citing the importance of eliminating all possible guilt surrounding masturbation.Footnote ⁶⁰

Harsányi, whose views were supported by a handful of other participants in the debate, argued that ‘the goal of all sex education is to educate people so that they can live a healthy, harmonious life, which begins with shaping healthy, well-trained, solid and obedient bodies’.Footnote ⁶¹ He thought that adolescents who developed in a healthy way would be much less tempted by the pernicious path of teenager sexuality: excessive masturbation, becoming sexually active too soon, and homosexuality.Footnote ⁶² Even though Harsányi seemed to have rallied a conservative majority of sex educators, doctors, and pedagogues behind him, when Pál Bakonyi, deputy head of the National Pedagogy Institute, closed the debate, he endorsed the paradigm advocated by Hirschler instead. Bakonyi underlined that Hirschler's argumentation on masturbation was ‘logical’ in that it was mainly the guilt that led to harm and not masturbation itself; he called for a more concrete set of explanations and guidance for teachers and parents dealing with youth masturbation.Footnote ⁶³

By 1965, after a round of public intellectual and expert debates, it was clear that a new wave of thinking had emerged: one that supported the principle of pleasure-seeking in sex, that looked at the necessity of teen masturbation with great understanding, and that sought to pass the baton to adolescents in determining their own sexual ethics.

A 1977 interview with Hirschler, already two years into his retirement, revealed much of the principles of his humanist generation. He stood by his convictions that socialist morals were not prudish and that adolescents had to face difficulties in the long shadow of bourgeois morality. When the interviewer pointed to the fact that socialist morals were at some point ‘ascetic’, Hirschler argued that socialism ‘in its essence wants to change human life so that it becomes a society of people who approve of pleasure’.Footnote ⁶⁴ He added that nobody had ‘laid down the theses of socialist morality’ but that it could definitely be said what it did not stand for: ‘it did not believe in asceticism and sexual abstinence’.Footnote ⁶⁵

In this interview, Hirschler overlooked the passionate debates he himself had been part of in the 1960s, which sketched out a socialist sexual morality and sex education in Kádárist Hungary. It was the Marxist humanism of the 1960s, partly inspired by Hirschler and interwar socialist ideas on sexuality, that eliminated the asceticism that Hirschler in 1977 remembered as never having been a true socialist approach. The first steps towards a wide-scale emancipation of masturbation came from those who believed it part of a ‘true humanism’, one that could only be accomplished within the framework of a socialist society.

This humanist and progressive approach to adolescent sexuality had traces elsewhere in the Eastern bloc, but in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries the 1960s did not bring about similarly profound changes in expert opinion on masturbation. Igor Kon indicates that in the 1960s – after decades of silence – an article calling for sex education stirred a debate in the Soviet Union as well.Footnote ⁶⁶ However, the Soviet vision of sex education was rather conservative: two sex education books from the GDR were translated into Russian in the 1960s and a foreword written to one of them by the eminent sexual psychologist Victor Kolbanovsky reflected Makarenko-like aspirations: youth were to be educated away from sex and shepherded towards work and exhausting activities.Footnote ⁶⁷ Kon, a Soviet sociologist and promoter of progressive sex education, noted that it was the Hungarian publisher, Kossuth Kiadó that invited him to write his first book on sexology, which was first published in Hungarian in 1981,Footnote ⁶⁸ then in German in 1985, but only in 1988 in Russian.Footnote ⁶⁹

East German experts, similarly to Hungary, published a number of sex education books in the 1960s–70s but we cannot find a Hirschler-like approach to masturbation. Siegfried Schnabl's Mann und Frau intim from 1972 endorsed adolescent masturbation, ‘with perhaps the exception of individual cases of excessive addiction to masturbation’Footnote ⁷⁰ but warned, ‘it would certainly be wrong to encourage masturbation. Sexuality becomes meaningful only through the love of two people.’ To choose masturbation over sex with a loving partner was perverse.Footnote ⁷¹ Rudolf Neubert, who had more or less the same prestige in the GDR in the 1960s as Hirschler enjoyed in Hungary,Footnote ⁷² in his 1969 book advised that masturbation was normal for adolescent development, but excess was dangerous, and that the ‘nervous system’ might be overexcited, which could cause damage.Footnote ⁷³ Neubert also assumed that girls, if raised well and if healthy, would not be interested in masturbation, except if ‘seduced by an overexcited girl’.Footnote ⁷⁴ The two leading Polish sexologists in the 1960s, Tadeusz Bilikiewicz and Kazimierz Imieliński, were similarly limited in their progressiveness: masturbation, though acceptable for adolescents, had to be avoided in excess and it was ‘immature’ and ‘unaesthetic’, needing to be replaced later by married sex.Footnote ⁷⁵ In Czechoslovakia, the 1960s marked a turnaround towards a more ‘normalized’ sexualityFootnote ⁷⁶ and a 1977 expert publication by sexologist Vladimír Barták advised men to seek an expert on abnormality if they preferred masturbation over sex, plus did not acknowledge the existence of female masturbation.Footnote ⁷⁷

It is beyond the scope of this article to provide a comprehensive overview of expert knowledge on masturbation in the Eastern bloc,Footnote ⁷⁸ but the above summary indicates that Hungary, more specifically Hirschler's humanism, was unique in at least two ways. First, it did away with the notion of ‘excess’, and thus took a leap towards de-pathologization. Secondly, it did not gender masturbation as much as in other socialist countries: female adolescent masturbation (and desire) was acknowledged and accepted. It could therefore be argued that Hungary spearheaded the emancipation of masturbation in the Eastern bloc and, importantly, this process was rooted in early socialist ideas.

IV

In 1973, a handful of disciples of the Marxist philosopher György Lukács, including Ágnes Heller and Mihály Vajda, were officially banned from doing research and participating in public debates.Footnote ⁷⁹ As these philosophers were at the centre of the key debates (including the one on sexuality), this state ban marked the end of the 1960s in Hungary. The 1973 crackdown on Heller, Vajda, and others was part of a conservative backlash that slowed down economic and social reforms as part of Kádár's more cautious politics in the early 1970s, which was somewhat related to the invasion of Czechoslovakia.Footnote ⁸⁰ This turnaround meant that the Party lost interest in and toleration of Marxist humanism or calls for plurality within Marxist thought.Footnote ⁸¹ Instead, the regime supported a gradual turn towards consumerism, individualization, and depoliticization. Hungarians in the coming years would increasingly focus on ‘tending to their gardens’, living a less political life, caring for private happiness, which was guaranteed by economic security, the relative freedom of movement, and hopes of ‘catching up’ with the West. These political changes were reflected in the discourse on sexuality as well.

In 1972, a young psychiatrist Béla BudaFootnote ⁸² published a book with the ambitious title, A szexualitás modern elmélete (The modern theory of sexuality), which provided an overview of the contemporaneous state of sexology both in Hungary and abroad. Buda painted a bleak picture of local research afflicted by ‘omissions’ of the 1950s and a limited access to foreign publications.Footnote ⁸³ Buda made it his mission to educate Hungarian experts about the advancement of sexology.Footnote ⁸⁴ He referenced 150 English-language sources out of a total of 195, yet Hungarian sexological experts from the 1960s did not make it into his sources.Footnote ⁸⁵ In Buda's 1976 in-depth article on masturbation, 17 sources were English-language, 11 German (only 2 from East Germany), while 3 out of the 4 Hungarian references were his own publications.Footnote ⁸⁶ Buda relied on Western sources in all his publications,Footnote ⁸⁷ arguing that Hungarian sexology was lagging behind.

In August 1979, he and two other Hungarian sexologists visited the Meeting of the International Academy of Sex Research in Prague.Footnote ⁸⁸ Buda praised Czechoslovak sexologyFootnote ⁸⁹ and criticized the situation at home. He demanded that the ‘two-three leading people in the field of neurology and psychiatry’Footnote ⁹⁰ give the go-ahead for an organized sexology in Hungary. The open complaint sparked a debate in Orvosi Hetilap (Medical Weekly),Footnote ⁹¹ and shortly afterwards institutionalization began. In 1980, the Hungarian Psychiatry Association was established and then in 1983 Buda helped set up a Sexological Working Committee within the Association.Footnote ⁹²

Buda's example is just one of several attesting to a changing of the guard. The emerging sexuality experts in the 1970s – Vilmos Szilágyi, Jenő Ranschburg, Péter Popper, or Elvira Lux – all came from the psy-sciencesFootnote ⁹³ (as opposed to gynaecologists Totis and Hirschler, and the dermatologist and VD expert Haraszti) and as a group, at least compared to their predecessors of the 1960s, they took less interest in the struggle to define ‘socialist morality’ or ‘socialist humanism’.Footnote ⁹⁴ By turning to Western sources, they opted for a break with the past: if Hungarian sexual science was backwards, it did not make sense to go back to Hungarian classics, but rather emulate advanced schools of sexology, which in the 1970s, by and large, meant the West. Even though in the 1970s and 1980s both Czechoslovakia and Poland were regularly regarded as having exciting and advanced schools of sexology,Footnote ⁹⁵ Hungarian psy-scientists continued to focus mostly on American and West German expert knowledge.

Historians of psychology and psychiatry writing in the 1990s predominantly placed the work of psy-scientists in the Kádár era within a dichotomy of freedom versus oppression:Footnote ⁹⁶ by turning away from Soviet science and bringing in Western ideas, psy-scientists were supposedly contributing to the liberalization of the regime. Melinda Kovai challenged this narrative in her 2016 book, arguing that these experts rather abandoned the (socialist) objectives of using science for broader social change by ignoring large-scale social problems like alcoholism, suicide, and adolescent deviance. These experts, says Kovai, saw these problems as a pathology of the individual's personality and did not link them to the social.Footnote ⁹⁷ In the discourse on sexuality, similarly, the new generation of experts seem to have abandoned the idea of transforming society through a change of sexual morality and habitual behaviour. There was no more talk about a Marxist sexuality that potentially could be less alienated than its capitalist twin.

While the Western-oriented sexological trend gained momentum in the 1970s, the emancipation of adolescent masturbation still did not meet unanimous expert approval. Leading experts, like Lajos Székely of the Health Enlightenment Centre, continued to label masturbation a ‘bad habit’,Footnote ⁹⁸ while László Dobos, a long-time sex educator, asked fathers not to let their children ‘spend too much time on the toilet, or rest for too long in the warm bed or take coloured theatrical magazines to bed’.Footnote ⁹⁹ Imre Aszódi and János Brencsán, authors of one of the most popular books on sexuality in the 1970s, A házasélet abc-je (The ABC of married life), would still ‘recommend against going into excess’ as the adolescent years were ‘the last opportunity to prepare a meaningful life, to read, to study, to improve one's skills, to do sports’, and that masturbation would ‘steer one's attention away’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

Béla Buda himself was at points contradictory in his 1972 A szexualitás modern elmélete. First claiming that ‘in itself, the significance of masturbation is minimal’Footnote ¹⁰¹ and that ‘the natural development of sexuality is inhibited by the guilt connected to masturbation’,Footnote ¹⁰² emphasizing how natural and normal it was for adolescents to masturbate. Later in the book, however, he linked masturbation to pathologies like female frigidity and male impotence, if ‘it took place for too long or very intensively, for [many] years’.Footnote ¹⁰³ He explained, however, that this was due exclusively to psychological reasons: the fear of failure in sexual encounters and the additional taboos that one's individual upbringing put on sexuality.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Moreover, in cases of ‘excessive, too frequent, and too long-lasting masturbation’,Footnote ¹⁰⁵ one could become focused on the orgasm only. For men, this could mean a shorter time to ejaculation and increasingly simpler fantasies. For women, it meant that the ability to have an orgasm would be linked to the clitoris only and so ‘normal’ intercourse could never live up to masturbatory pleasures.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

By 1976, Buda showed less concern about the above dangers. In his article dedicated to masturbation (Az önkielégítés – Masturbation),Footnote ¹⁰⁷ he argued that even if it happened ‘with great frequency and for a long period of time’, masturbation did no harm.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ He contended that there was no evidence of a history of more frequent masturbation in men with sexual disorders, while for women he even linked regular orgasms in coupled sex to the habit of masturbating, arguing ‘masturbation is beneficial for the sexual development of women’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Like Hirschler, Buda warned medical experts not to use the word ‘excessive’ so that adolescents did not develop unnecessary guilt and shame.Footnote ¹¹⁰

Advice sections in popular youth and women's magazines emerged as a new and important forum for discussing sexuality in the 1970s. Even though the authenticity of the submissions can be questioned,Footnote ¹¹¹ such columns can be a useful source when looking for the dominant norms in sexual knowledge. In Hungary, most experts running such columns were medical doctors and/or sexologists.Footnote ¹¹² A study published in 1983Footnote ¹¹³ documented that 43 per cent of such health advice concerned sexuality. These columns, the study reported, had a dual function: education, as for the lack of institutionalized sexology, and entertainment, as erotic magazines were unavailable.

A key finding of the study was that experts seemed to provide contradictory answers to the same questions. On the topic of sexual freedom of teenage girls, one doctor in Magyar Ifjúság (Hungarian Youth) told a sixteen-year-old that she was ‘playing with fire’ as any sexual activity with her partner would surely lead to intercourse and further dangers. At the same time, Sándor Székely in Családi Lap (Family Paper) told another 16-year-old to avoid penetrative sex but rather ‘satisfy her desires without intercourse’, via petting; in Új Tükör (New Mirror) experts advised two thirteen-year-olds to wait or to buy a book on sex education and read it ‘if they cannot wait’.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Székely, when asked about this ‘inconsistency’, referred to the ‘international sexological experience’ he drew upon, emphasized similarities (neither expert suggested intercourse to teenagers), and added: ‘basically, for sexually mature girls, masturbation should be recommended’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ All in all, it seems that by the 1980s experts were not particularly bothered about the plurality of sex advice.

Advice on masturbation was similarly inconsistent. In 1983, the expert in Ifjúsági Magazin wrote: ‘doctors only say that masturbation is not harmful – but not that one should do it all the time! So one should resort to this makeshift solution only if one really feels the need for it.’Footnote ¹¹⁶ Doctor László Buga, expert in the rural magazine Szabad Föld (Free Land), was even less permissive in 1981, claiming: ‘masturbation is dangerous because it is done alone’, and telling youths if they are unable to stop to ‘go to a psychiatrist…for tranquillizers or treatment’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Yet, when reading Családi Lap in 1975, youths could be reassured that ‘it has clearly and without a doubt been proven that masturbation is a normal phenomenon of sexual satisfaction and in itself does not cause any physical or mental harm’.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In 1983, Dr B. P. in Új Tükör promoted the excess theory once again, writing that ‘masturbation is not harmful, especially not in adolescence: it fosters psychosexual development. We only have a problem with it if it happens too often or if it is a solution for frustrations (lack of success).’Footnote ¹¹⁹ Finally, Pál Veres, perhaps the most famous ‘agony aunt’ of the time, tended towards the ‘harmless’ end of the spectrum when writing in 1982: ‘I don't recommend pursuing any form of satisfaction until total exhaustion, this is – just like it is for any other activity – harmful. For humans, and this is true here as well, what one can do with ease will be the border [between harmful and acceptable].’Footnote ¹²⁰

The shift in expert discourse was discernible; despite the few examples warning of excess both in advice columns and books, by the end of the 1970s, sexual modernity meant accepting the scientific fact that masturbation was normal adolescent sexual behaviour, not causing physical or mental diseases, rather to be encouraged than discouraged. There was one exception, however, on which both ‘progressives’ and ‘ascetics’ agreed.

V

Aside from acknowledging masturbation as essentially harmless during adolescence, both socialist humanists and the 1970s ‘Westernized’ discourse warned of one problem: masturbation coupled with homosexual fantasies or activities. Back in 1931, Totis argued that homosexuality was an ‘acquired psychological quality’:Footnote ¹²¹ through masturbation, boys could fixate on the pleasure of their own genitals, which might keep them attracted to bodies similar to theirs.Footnote ¹²² Despite these anxieties in interwar Hungary, Totis can be considered a progressive because he lobbied for repealing the law criminalizing male homosexuality. Decriminalization occurred in the early Kádár years (in 1961), but despite the change in the legal framework, experts kept presenting homosexuality as abnormal and dangerous for adolescents. Imre Hirschler repeated Totis's arguments that homosexuality was not an inborn result of ‘hormonal disturbances’, but the outcome of ‘effects that a young person is subjected to in the course of sexual coming of age.’Footnote ¹²³ Thus, Hirschler warned, it was dangerous to masturbate with same-sex peers, as one's first sexual experience was crucial in determining sexual orientation.Footnote ¹²⁴

Béla Buda linked the same argument to Konrad Lorenz's theory on imprinting. Lorenz's famous duck experiment, he argued, could probably be applied to humans as well, where the first sexual encounters might compel the individual to look for the same kind of excitement for the rest of their life.Footnote ¹²⁵ Buda linked the mechanism of imprinting to all types of ‘perversions’, including ‘fetishism’ and ‘transvestism’Footnote ¹²⁶ before turning to homosexuality, claiming that the ‘orgasm could be attached in an imprinting-like manner to this abnormal form of release’, adding, ‘homosexuals usually take adolescents or even smaller children as the most desirable partner or sexual object and therefore they try to get closer to them, to seduce them’.Footnote ¹²⁷ What Buda was saying is very much in line with other Eastern European sexologists, who at the time, according to Kateřina Lišková, tended to explain sexual deviations by way of social factors, including imprinting theory, while Western sexology was moving towards a biological etiology of sexual ‘abnormalities’.Footnote ¹²⁸

Buda became more permissive later on, declaring in 1978 in Ifjúsági Magazin that homosexuality was not a deviance but ‘a unique version of sexual attitudes and behaviour’. Consequently, he argued, the solution to the question of homosexuality was a ‘mature, patient, non-judgemental social attitude that respects the psychological rights of others’.Footnote ¹²⁹ However, he still described it in terms of deficient psychological development: (male) homosexuality mostly a result of a distant, absent father and a controlling mother maintaining sexual taboos.Footnote ¹³⁰ He stressed: ‘homosexuality, even if we don't see it as an illness biologically – and perhaps psychologically – is a less desirable state than heterosexuality. Therefore, preventing it is important.’Footnote ¹³¹

This article represented the most progressive attitude one could openly express within the confines of the existing discourse on sexual orientation.Footnote ¹³² Still, it mirrored the predominant expert view that homosexuality was an undesirable occurrence, and as adolescents could be seduced, one had to make sure that masturbation was not coupled with homosexual activities or fantasies. This was the old discourse inside out: not anymore was masturbation responsible for ‘illnesses’, including homosexuality; suddenly the sexual orientation threatened the otherwise innocent act.

There was no alternative that would challenge the accepted truths created by this expert discourse. Hungarian sexology, inspired by state-of-the-art Western science, was selective in its sources of inspiration, failing to represent the ‘liberationist’ discourses. Learning about non-pathologized experiences of homosexuality directly through gay and lesbian voices was out of the question both in sexological literature and in the mass media: no gay rights organizations were formed until 1988, and even in the sex-advice columns we find very little evidence of the lived gay experience.Footnote ¹³³ This negative association between imprinting, early adolescent sexuality, masturbation, and homosexuality remained part of scientific knowledge until the late 1980s and was a major exception to full emancipation: even if socialist humanists and Western-oriented sexologists contributed to a major turnaround with relation to masturbation, their association of imprinting theory and homosexual seduction with early adolescent masturbation showed no major evolution since the work of Béla Totis in the 1930s.

VI

In the 1980s, with the institutionalization of sexology and the dawn of sexual therapy in Hungary, a further emancipation of masturbation took place: for adults, especially for women. After the ‘Sexological Working Committee’ was established in 1983 with the help of Béla Buda and Vilmos Szilágyi (Imre Hirschler receiving an honorary position), it soon organized the first major sexological conference (in 1985).Footnote ¹³⁴ One of its focal subjects was sex therapy. In the conference volume, Vilmos Szilágyi reported on the seventy-two-hour sex therapy course they put together,Footnote ¹³⁵ Miklós Tóth wrote about the latest international developments in the field,Footnote ¹³⁶ while Imre Aszódi contemplated the obstacles to introducing systematic sex therapy in Hungary.Footnote ¹³⁷ The beginnings of the institutionalization of sexology in Hungary thus went hand in hand with a growing number of psychiatrists learning about and practising the methods of modern (Western) sex therapy.

As it focused on achieving the ‘satisfying orgasm’, the advent of sex therapy affected the discourse on masturbation. One of the most important sexual dysfunctions identified by Masters and Johnson was female ‘orgasmic dysfunction’,Footnote ¹³⁸ and thus sexologists Miklós Tóth, Vilmos Szilágyi, and Elvira Lux made an effort to address the issue. Lux, a psychiatrist at the Semmelweis Medical University in Budapest, in her influential 1981 book Szexuálpszichológia (Sexual psychology)Footnote ¹³⁹ was the first sexologist to create visual material focusing on the importance of the clitoris and its stimulation during intercourse. The book, just like other publications intended for expert use was read by a much wider audience and had to be republished several times. She recommended a therapy for women to ‘dissolve masturbatory guilt’Footnote ¹⁴⁰ originating in the childhood taboo of touching their genitalia. This taboo was often carried over to coupled sex and extended to their male partners. She detailed a way in which women could learn to accept clitoral orgasms and how men could (here is where the visual material became important) use their hands to rub the clitoris during intercourse.Footnote ¹⁴¹

Miklós Tóth, psychiatrist in the city hospital of Szentes, published a lengthy scientific article on the female orgasm in 1983.Footnote ¹⁴² His complex analysis was based almost exclusively on contemporaneous English-language literatureFootnote ¹⁴³ and differentiated between physiological, technical, and experiential levels of orgasm, focusing not just on the biology (clitoral vs vaginal orgasms), but also on how women could reach an orgasm and what the experience of the orgasm meant to them and their relationship.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ In the article, he mentioned ‘masturbatory programmes’ developed by Western scientistsFootnote ¹⁴⁵ in which negative attitudes towards masturbation needed to be eliminated for both men and women, success often depending on how quickly these attitudes changed. He even mentioned the use of erotic material in therapy for both women and men, as ‘women are stimulated just as well as men are’.Footnote ¹⁴⁶

Vilmos Szilágyi published a book on sexual culture in the same year. He emphasized the importance of masturbation in treating both female orgasmic dysfunction and male premature ejaculation. For the former, he referred to Kinsey's findings that masturbation increased a woman's ability to orgasm, and cited the Soviet sexologist A. M. Sviadosh's claim that masturbation therapy had already proven beneficial in treating frigidity.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ As for men, Szilágyi contended that premature ejaculation often stemmed from a lack of sex education and taboos that forced youths to masturbate quickly and secretly. Importantly, Szilágyi emphasized that masturbation could be the cure for premature ejaculation: practising delaying the orgasm alone was the easiest way to unlearn bad reflexes.Footnote ¹⁴⁸

Sex therapists and sexologists around the Sexological Working Group were actively emancipating female pleasure and masturbation for both sexes. Their primary aim was improving psychosexual health and helping the sex life of the heterosexual couple. Even though Lux focused on explaining the importance of the clitoris to both sexes, she added that women should not strive to orgasm during every intercourse, because if they were always satisfied, their male partners would become less active.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ Thus, despite having done much to bring female sexual pleasure to the forefront, Lux's goal in doing so was nonetheless geared toward making heterosexual coupled-life work better. There was no sign of a ‘clitoral sexuality’ that would exit the hetero/homosexual binary, steer away from coupled life, and put female sexual pleasure in the spotlight.

VII

In this article, I have argued that the emancipation of masturbation in Hungary that started out in the late 1950s was a product of ‘socialist humanism’ rooted in the work of interwar socialists. Imre Hirschler, the catalyst of this emancipatory process, was a member of this Freudo-Marxist group. I also showed that both the periodization and the intellectual background of the emancipatory discourse on masturbation was different for Hungary from what Thomas Laqueur observed in the West.

Instead of a wave of interwar ‘Freudian’ discourse, and then another wave of ‘liberationist’ discourse in the 1960s–70s, in Hungary we find a marginal socialist humanist discourse in the 1930s, which triumphs only three decades later, as neither the interwar Christian nor the ‘Stalinist ascetic’ regime allowed masturbation to be freed from the moral and medical stigma of the preceding centuries. The pluralization of sexual discourses in the early 1960s allowed socialist humanism to co-exist with conservative views on sex. Socialist humanism emphasized individual agency for adolescents and recommended an approach based on empathy. It differed in its arguments from both discourses that transformed masturbation in the West. First, it was not as focused on individual psychosexual development as the Freudian discourse because it regarded society as having a more profound influence on sexuality than an immediate family set up. Secondly, it emphasized that socialism needed its own sexual morality to strike a balance between individual pleasure and the good of the collective. However, unlike the Western liberationist discourse, socialist humanism did not make masturbation into one of the means of combating patriarchy. Hirschler's work, which was mirrored later by sexologists like Elvira Lux, underscored that women's sexual problems required more attention than men's. Still, masturbation was not a goal in and of itself: it remained rather a milestone on the road to adult, coupled sexual pleasure.

For sexology, just like for the psy-sciences in general, Melinda Kovai's argument stands: that from the 1970s on, experts primarily aimed at improving the life of the individual within the context of their immediate milieu, with little view of the broader, social perspective.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The ideas of the New Left did not gain much traction in Hungary, partly due to censorship;Footnote ¹⁵¹ local feminist discourses did not focus on sexuality, and LGBTQ voices also did not have space for public expression. The Hungarian emancipation of masturbation did not bring about changes in the discourses on homosexuality. With homosexuality only tolerated after 1961, while actively discouraged by both socialist humanists and 1970s psy-scientists, the newly emancipated practice of masturbation was markedly heterosexual. Masturbation was supposed to help prepare adolescents for adult heterosexual life, and it provided a way to treat sexual dysfunction in adult heterosexual couples. The association of masturbation with homosexual fantasies appeared and reappeared in the scientific literature as a source of danger; in fact, the old logic was turned around: it was no longer that masturbation would lead innocent adolescents to homosexual behaviour, rather it was the ‘homosexual temptation’ of adolescents that would be reinforced by otherwise harmless masturbation.

I have also argued that while socialist humanism triumphed in the 1960s, in the following decade a new generation of psychologists and psychiatrists, led by Béla Buda and Vilmos Szilágyi, turned towards contemporaneous Western science to look for arguments supporting the emancipation process already underway. In the 1980s, the institutionalization of sexology in Hungary took place in parallel with a boom in (Western-style) sex therapy, where adult female masturbation was encouraged for couples who sought a more fulfilling sex life.

What then, in light of the above, constitutes socialist morality? First, the plurality of sex education in the Kádár era points towards a deliberative answer. Experts (and officials, intellectuals, etc.) were in constant discussion, debate, and negotiation as to what moral principles should serve as the foundations of the ‘new’ socialist society. Secondly, a clear process towards de-pathologization is evident, even if in the 1960s its sources were different than in the subsequent two decades. In the end, we might agree with Imre Hirschler that nobody had a real monopoly over socialist sexual morality in Kádár-era Hungary and there were no specific theses for sexual reform; but one thing is for sure, socialist morality did not represent asceticism and sexual abstinence.