Name one thing that's great fun some kind of religious killjoy nut hasn't tried to ban, eh?
I didn't know we were just trying to establish that some religious nut somewhere has decried everything some people like. Heck, I was just reading some religious material last week, that condemned house plants and pets as idolatrous distractions from the things of God. I wish I was kidding.
But puritans were also against drinking, which I enjoy, playing poker for money, which I enjoy, probably would frown upon sports like long distance running .. because it feels way better than drinking, running long distances. Fortunately, religious nuts are usually not into sports.
Isn't this it in a nutshell? You have a stereotyped view of the Puritans, how they "probably would frown upon" anything that you think is fun. "Long distance running"? You know most people would rather wear those crazy bits of Victorian body jewelry than run longer than half a mile, right? So let's just admit that there are different ideas of "fun," and sometimes people oppose things for reasons other than "they're fun and I don't like fun."
You might want to go beyond the popular stereotype of Puritanism. After a quick Googling:
Puritans and alcohol and
Puritans and gambling.So you started with a rumor that circumcision was designed to discourage autoeroticism, then moved on to the horrors of cereal grains and some scary museum pieces. If this is the evidence of anti-masturbatory practices, then I'd call it inconclusive. On the one hand, if those devices of torture (or nineteenth-century medicine, it can be difficult to tell the difference) ever saw the light of day, it is entirely possible that they were condemned by a joyful culture. After all, they don't seem to have survived. On the other hand, I've never heard any condemnation of the anaphrodisiac qualities of Graham crackers, so maybe we live in some killjoy culture.
On the subject of joyful and killjoy cultures, we have the Greeks, Sumerians and Egyptians arrayed against the monotheists. I, for one, have always seen the ancient Sumerians and Egyptians as a rather bleak and fatalistic culture, but I had not yet learned to view them strictly through a lens of self-pleasuring enjoyment. Silly me.