Corn Flakes Were Invented as Part of an Anti-Masturbation Crusade

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In the 18th and 19th centuries, the Western world worked itself up into a mass hissy fit over the idea of people touching themselves. Judeo-Christian tradition had already been damning masturbation as a misuse of sexuality for ages, but Victorian era prudishness and the Great Awakening and other religious revivals in America created a perfect storm for people to really get obsessed with it.

Books like the anonymously authored Ononia: Or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences... and Samuel Tissot's Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism [masturbation] laid the groundwork for medicalizing “the solitary vice.” Soon, masturbation was no longer just a moral failing, but also a physical and mental ailment that required treatment and cures.

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In the young United States, one of the most ardent anti-masturbaters was a Michigan physician named John Harvey Kellogg. The good doctor was a bit uncomfortable about sex, thinking it detrimental to physical, emotional and spiritual well-being. He personally abstained from it, and never consummated his marriage (and may have actually spent his honeymoon working on one of his anti-sex books). He and his wife kept separate bedrooms and adopted all of their children.

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