Masturbation, Constipation, and Bernarr MacFadden

June 17, 2025

This is the story of Physical Culture, the pioneering health and prosperity pulp magazine, the advertisers who supported it, the messianic self-promoter who founded it, and the metastasizing exploitation culture it helped spawn.

Bernarr MacFadden (1868-1955) loved few bodies more than his own. Here he serves as the model in an ad for his idiosyncratic hair treatment plan from a 1901 edition of Physical Culture, the founding magazine of his publishing empire.

A cleaned-out colon, a lustrous head of hair, a Caruso-like voice? Whatever you needed to clear your way to success and acceptance among the select, you’d find it for sale in the pages of Physical Culture, a monthly health and prosperity pulp foundational to a publishing empire that, across the first decades of the twentieth century, rivaled that of Henry Luce and William Randolf Hearst.

Physical Culture was the creation of Bernarr MacFadden, a man who, after withstanding a childhood of poverty, orphanhood, and a vaccination-gone-wrong case of measles, had, through a self-directed program of exercise, fresh air, and dietary experimentation, fashioned himself into a leaner variant of the strongmen then wowing circus sideshows and international exhibitions. Educated in salesmanship and sexual spectacle through a 6-month gig at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, MacFadden, after flailing through several failed business efforts, trailed through Great Britain on the heels of pioneering bodybuilder Eugen Sandow, then, at around age 30, returned to New York, rented an office, copied Sandow’s schtick, and set to work on his pioneering magazine.[1]

Heralded as the first bodybuilding magazine, Sandow’s Physical Culture promoted and featured strongman Eugen Sandow, who came to prominence in the U.S. through his shows at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago. There is no evidence Sandow and MacFadden met, either in Chicago or later when MacFadden visited Europe.

First published in 1899, MacFadden’s Physical Culture was a mashup of photos of nearly naked models striking athletic poses, both male and female, first-person stories of adversity overcome through exercise and diet (and by avoiding doctors at all costs), guest articles by birth control advocates and eugenicists, the publisher’s own grammar-corrected screeds, and ad after ad for sexual advice manuals, crank medical devices from violet rays to vibrators (yes, you can let your imagination run) to head straps that promised to reshape one’s nose to constipation remedies of every sort.

The ads are easy to mock, or, depending on one’s mood, be angered by.[2]

In the decades following MacFadden’s death in 1955, the once multi-millionaire, senatorial candidate, and presidential aspirant was all but forgotten. Academics expressing interest in MacFadden were warned away, with advisors counseling that nobody cared about this barely literate blowhard who, if remembered at all, was remembered as a crackpot who walked 20 miles to his Manhattan office barefoot and claimed he would live to 150. However, over the last couple of decades, MacFadden’s career and influence have come under renewed examination.

Revisionist views of MacFadden position him as a pioneer of exercise, vegetarianism, anti-censorship, and body positivity. These compete with views of him as the granddaddy of today’s commodified, woo-woo wellness culture. New York Times guest essayist Jessica Grose draws a direct line from MacFadden and his anti-vax, anti-medical establishment, pro raw milk rhetoric to Robert Kennedy, Jr., the current U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary. Then there are MacFadden’s many flirtations – with women, eugenics, pronatalism, Stalinism, and fascism.

Surviving a botched measles vaccination as a child, MacFadden maintained a lifelong skepticism of germ theory, believing instead in the body’s capacity to ward off disease through diet, exercise, and various crank cures. As Jessica Grose writes in a recently published guest essay in the New York Times, “It is impossible to read about Mr. MacFadden — who was using the term “medical freedom” in 1920 — without thinking about Robert F. Kennedy Jr., our new secretary of health and human services, and the raw-milk-drinking, vaccine-skeptical, psychedelic-loving Make America Healthy Again movement that has coalesced around him.”
Physical Culture, April 1901.

But back to Physical Culture … and its ads.

Because his magazine appealed largely to a working-class audience, MacFadden struggled to attract national advertisers. With a few exceptions, notably cereals and other food products that promised swift elimination, large advertising agencies hesitated to associate their clients’ brands with MacFadden’s rabble. It didn’t help that MacFadden was fiercely opposed to alcohol and tobacco use and made no secret of his opposition in his articles and editorials, all but writing off two major revenue streams.[3] But this left room for a full range of second- and third-tier promoters and hucksters.

MASTURBATION AND CONSTIPATION

Until I read Bernarr MacFadden’s Womanhood and Marriage (1918), his follow-up to Manhood and Marriage (1916), I didn’t know that people once thought pimples were proof a teen was masturbating, “self-polluting” in the language of the day. MacFadden set his readers straight. Masturbation didn’t cause pimples, he assured, constipation did.

Not that a parent or one potentially personally “afflicted” needn’t remain vigilant, for, according to MacFadden, though it didn’t cause blackheads, “masturbation was the greatest of all sexual evils,” a habit that was the “predisposing cause of death in thousands of cases in which the death certificate by the physician names some specific disease.”[4] Masturbation, MacFadden claimed, led to neurasthenia, failing memory, premature ejaculation, impotence, lowered vitality, and a general derangement of the internal functions. Though it did not, MacFadden reassured, directly lead to insanity as writers across the nineteenth century had commonly suggested, its general debilitating effect, combined with the mental strain of the shame, left the practitioner vulnerable to all manner of potential assaults.

MacFadden’s central mission and lifelong obsession was his fight against sexual prudery. His two bibles, Marriage and Manhood (1916) and Marriage and Womanhood (1918), offered frank, though often contradictory advice, on sexual relations.
Physical Culture, October 1917

All this feels strange relative to MacFadden’s overriding obsession, prudery, which he claimed was the primary impediment to frank discussions of the importance of robust (hetero) sexual relationships within marriage. How was it that masturbation was an unalloyed evil, leading to the debilitating paroxysms of orgasm, and in men, the loss of vital fluid, while, in marriage, orgasms and ejaculation were critical to health and long life?

And then there was constipation.

With increasing awareness of germ theory from the late 1800s on, medical professionals and the public alike grew increasingly panicked that the “sewer,” which was one’s colon, could not help but leak disease-causing microbes into one’s blood if not regularly cleared. Promotions for laxatives and “internal baths” represented about 10% of Physical Culture’s ads.

But, because MacFadden believed microbes attacked only the weak, and was equally sure medical professionals were a community of quacks that, conspiratorially, preferred to keep their patients dependent rather than prescribe treatments that would make them well and keep them that way, he pitched regularity as essential, though less about ridding the body of microbes and more about removing bulk in order to fight lethargy.

TOEING THE LINE OF TITILATION

The Comstock Act, which prohibited the mailing of obscene materials, was in full force when the first issue of Physical Culture went to press in 1899. The magazine challenged its many prohibitions, and MacFadden came into regular conflict with the Act’s titular figure, Anthony Comstock, then United States Postal Inspector and secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice. He was twice convicted and sentenced to jail, though he managed to avoid imprisonment both times, the second time pardoned by President William H. Taft.

It was great publicity.

By medicalizing taboo topics and claiming that prudery prevented frank discussions of sexuality which led to all sorts of social ills while publishing photos of nearly naked men and women and articles and book promotions that offered plenty of frank talk, MacFadden found a way to encase titillating content in a protective shell that could pass through Comstock’s censorious gauntlet.

Advertisers flooded in.

THE PROJECT AND THE PROMISE

The ads that fill the brittle and crumbling pages of MacFadden’s Physical Culture are a unique archive. Uncrowded by national advertisers (except Kellogg’s, Post, Quaker Oats, and other purveyors of backed-up bowel aids), and under the cover of MacFadden’s medical claims, the products advertised open a window on the suspicions, insecurities, and aspirations of a class of people often left unstudied by historians.

The ads generally fall into the following categories:

1. Sexual advice books
2. Bodybuilding programs and equipment; self-defense training (typically jujitsu)
3. Constipation remedies, including laxatives, enemas, and devices that would pound the stomach, birth control information, hair treatments, and diet recommendations
4. Holistic medications, including yeast, the aforementioned grain cereals, and other whole foods, and drugless cures
5. Weight loss, weight gain, bust development, mole and freckle removal, and other beauty treatments
6. Medical and cosmetic devices, including trusses, nose shapers, prostate probes, face exercises, toothpastes, scales, back and leg straighteners, bunion treatments, vibrators, “violet rays” and other light treatments, shoes, and bath showers
7. Medical advice, including smoking cessation and urinalysis
8. Camping equipment, outdoor wear
9. Sanitariums, hotels, and health spas
10. Etiquette, grammar, speech and voice, ventriloquism, and music lessons; shyness and stammer cures; hearing and sight improvement
11. Sales training, memory improvement, psychology, hypnosis and mind control, and “New Thought” manuals (a precursor to the tapes or “tools” sold by multi-level marketers)
12. Correspondence courses in screenwriting, stenography, drafting, wireless operation and repair, electrical engineering, chiropractic, etc.; musical instruments and typewriters
13. Investment opportunities, government jobs
14. Watches, diamonds, perfumes, dresses, suits, classic literature (by the foot), and other signifiers of wealth
15. Cross-promotions for other MacFadden publications.

It takes very little “reading into” to identify the project and promise Physical Culture was promoting: build your body, order your mind, attract a partner, rid yourself of lower-class signifiers and embarrassing personal ticks, acquire signifiers of success and taste, learn to pass as a person of talent and training, gain employment and status, and do it all independently and kind of on the sly, at a retreat, or better yet, in the privacy of your own home. This was the formula: embarrassment, resentment, and aspiration, triggered and salved, with solutions neatly packaged, attractively priced, and delivered anonymously. Note that, with the exception of the sanitariums, health spas, and hotels, virtually all the promises, products, and services offered through Physical Culture were mail order.

Montgomery Ward in the 1870s, followed by Sears in the 1880s, pioneered mail order. But it wasn’t until the Post Office began offering Rural Free Delivery (RFD) in the late nineteenth century, and more dramatically, when RFD was supplanted by Parcel Post in 1913, that mail-order boomed.

Today, we look at ads for “violet rays,” nose shapers, vibrators (for reducing fat), and various get-rich-quick schemes and think, how could anyone be so gullible as to think a few dollars would deliver a solution? But in a world awash in essential oils, woo-woo wellness come-ons, and multi-level marketing schemes of every sort, one might check one’s judgments.

As with the department store catalogs, Physical Culture operated as a dream book, a window on an imaginable world, a carnival of happiness, wealth, status, and beauty. Were MacFadden’s readers all rubes and marks? Perhaps. But perhaps they knew in their hearts that the come-ons for correspondence carpentry or fat reducers were a kind of magic show, not really real. A diversion that, for a couple of bucks, offered a few weeks of pleasant, suspended disbelief between the time they clipped a coupon and sent for an offer and the moment they received their disappointing brochure or useless instructional manual by return mail.

BUT WAIT, THERE’S MORE

To be seen by one’s community as worthy of membership is pretty much a universal human desire. We need fellowship. We need protection. We are not equipped to live on our own. But, according to Jane Borden, author of Cults Like Us, we Americans don’t want to be part of just any group; we want to be a member of the select, those worthy of inheriting, basking in the glory of a New Jerusalem as foretold in the Book of Revelation. We are a culture that equates, despite all evidence to the contrary, wealth with virtue. The rich are rich because they’ve worked hard and earned God’s grace. The poor are poor because they are sinful.

A typical Physical Culture back-of-the-magazine spread. Ads for “New Thought” training, trusses, get-rich-quick schemes, correspondence lessons, birth control, anti-vax, stammer correction, psychology, exercise equipment, hair treatments, watches, diet, sex manuals, and quack medical devices and medications.
Physical Culture, March 1921.

Since the rise of the market economy, this all-but-inborn desire to be accepted as one of the select has proved a bonanza for marketers packaging a path to membership and selling it for a price. During times of radical change, inequality, and uncertainty, our fear of being on the outside and forever closed from entry increases, as does our vulnerability to the pitch. From the salesperson’s perspective – whether merchant, politician, or cult leader – it is a miraculous grift, a promise always shimmering tantalizingly at a horizon, but forever receding, and demanding continuous payment in its pursuit.

References

[1] For a detailed and contextualized biography of Bernarr MacFadden and the history of his publishing company, see: Fiztpatrick, Shannon. 2022. True Story: How a Pulp Empire Remade Mass Media. Harvard University Press: Cambridge.

[2] Ball State University maintains a public digital archive of 100 or so issues of Physical Culture published between 1910 and 1948 at https://archivessearch.bsu.edu/repositories/7/resources/3226/digitized. Additional issues can be sourced via the Internet Archive.

[3] MacFadden’s True Story, first published in 1919 and considered among the first confessional magazines, found a more mainstream audience, and consequently, attracted more mainstream advertisers, including tobacco, and after Prohibition ended, booze brands.

[4] Manhood and Marriage, pp. 150 and 168/69.