The panic over masturbation was a method of control, a private act that could be used on any occasion to call into question a woman's motive. "Henry St. John Neale even suggests that women who refused offers of marriage must be 'capable of pleasuring themselves'; either she was a masturbator, or she would want to marry," (Sha 35). This double-bind created an understandable problem for women. "Anti-masturbation tracts were also important in keeping women--despite their greater sensibility (humanity) than men--out of the public sphere. By converting women's greater sensibility into a sexual pathology, these works made it clear that if women had the potential to be more sensitive and therefore more human than men, this potential would never be met since women's sensibility made her more subject to diseases," (Sha 39). This linkage between masturbation and health is made clear in the medical tracts during the Victorian era, while women did not lose much fluid through orgasm (which was thought to produce the physical wasting that men experienced) any loss of fluid was thought to cause much more severe reactions than a man because of the fragility of women. The medical community became preoccupied with the issue of female masturbation, giving advice and emphasizing the ways that the perpetrator could be caught and rehabilitated. One pamphlet published in 1847 Facts and Important Information for Young Woman, on the Subject of Masturbationby Samuel Gregory illustrates this anxiety and made the connection between text and female sexuality clear: 

With the gruesome ways that combated masturbation, it is clear that it was not seen as a light offense. Masturbation was thought to lead to consumption, moral ruin, and insanity and parents and guardians were obviously anxious to keep their children from that path. Medical professionals emphasized that “Numerous causes tend to deprave the feelings and pollute the imagination—conversation, books, pictures, the light reading that covers the land in the form of novels, magazines, papers filled with stories, tales, verses, all spiced with love or grosser sentiments, to adapt them to the popular taste,” (Gregory 61). The female reader came under attack and parents and teachers were urged to keep a close watch on what literature their daughters consumed. One tip was to "discourage passions" was "the cultivation of intellectual faculties. Great advantage would result to a young girl from the study of history, geography; and the various branches of natural history,--pursuits which at once dissipate the passions, and are useful to rural economy," (Gregory 51). As Richard C. Sha says "The persistent linking of novels with onanism within anti-masturbation tracts raises the problem of literary and imaginative pleasure generally: what is the relation between the public virtues of cultivation and that of pleasure?" (41). At the same moment that these dire warnings over girls being corrupted were springing up, "sensational" novels became the primary culprit. Yet even while the female readership was deplored, they were also eroticized. “Pornographic images from the late seventeenth century onward represent women masturbating with a book in hand or displayed nearby,” (Garrison 153). The female reader became an object for the Victorian public to simultaneously scapegoat and fetishize.