Mels van Driel is the Author of : WithThe Hand: A History of MasturbationDoes everyone do it? or has everyone done it? the answer is yes! For some people masturbation is actually the high point of your day. The celebrated gynecologist Hector Treub put it succintly: "We've all masturbated & those who say they've never done are still doing it!"
Of all sexual actions masturbation remains the most difficult one to discuss openly. When it is good it is a strictly personal experience, w/c many people have learned quite wrongly is dirty, sinful, shameful, or even unhealthy. It is however, the most common human sexual expression & is perfectly normal.
Why do we do it? It is because sex w/ your partner does not satisfy? Because there is no partner? Because men watch porn & can't contain themselves? Because women need exciting erotic books? Is it a universal physical need? In my view, none of these questions are very relevant. Masturbation is not a hobby of profligate, hedonistic individualist. The cranking up of the machine is a thing in itself, w/o moral component. Nothing to worry your head about. Masturbation is relaxing for both men & women & acts an excellent soporific w/o side effects. Apart from that it is free.
Many modern sex education books suggest that masturbation is a good way of discovering of one's own body. In that way, they argue, the adolscent is better prepared when he or she starts having sex w/ partner. That seems to imply that masturbation is fine, but is unneccessary once one is in a relationship. The percentage of women who masturbate is lower than that of men. Many women still feel embarrased when asked about masturbation & the suspicion is consequently that a considerable proportion still answer uncorrectly in the negative. In fact, for many women it is their only means of achieving orgasm and then there is a fact, in comparison w/ men, women have the great advantage that for them masturbation causes no men & usually leaves no visible trace.
For several centuries masturbation was considered as "sinful affliction". In around 1712 the British surgeon John Marten, in a treatise entitled Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self Pollution (inspired by the Old Testament figure of Onan, punished for choosing to pour his seed on the ground rather than father a child on his late brother's wife), describes onanism as a new disease Marten explains that masturbation is widespread & frequently practiced out of sheer ignorance. Though solitude or vanity boys learn self-abuse & self-pollution, w/c knowing how wrong & dangerous it really is. His treaties became a veritable sensation & sold widely. Publish in medical journals & ordinary newspaper it found its way all round Europe.
Like many of his collegues Marten, did not act completely w/o self-interests & in fact placed advertisements for all kind of medicines, such as vaginal drops, penis ointments & powders.All design to curb solitary sexual gratification in the same papers in w/c his article on the "new" disease disappeared. In view of historians, the great success of both of his moral condemnation & the sales of his cures - he created his own pharmaceutical industry - made Marten the originator of the taboo. In his wake, progressive philosophers like Kant & Rousseau adopted the same vision: masturbation did not fit into the new image of man as a rational, social being who had to keep his own desires & urges completely under control. Masturbation sprang from the imagination & bore no relation to reality it made people susceptible to addiction.
Much more understanding about masturbation can be traced back to the 18th century physician Samuel - Auguste Tissot (1728-1797). A world renowned doctor, he produced one of few texts of the time about masturbation despite knowing little about the topic. Sadly, it was his fame, & not the documents content that made it an influential work. Tissot assumed that sperm was a form of concentrated blood so release w/o the prospect of imprognation was not just wasteful but dangerous. His list of ailment afflicting those who masturbate: including as you may expect, eye disease & blindness - fills pages. He also described how the masturbator's brain could dry out to such an incredible extent that it could be heard rattling in the skull! His theory was as follows: orgasms achieved through masturbation were produced via imagination. In other words, the brain overheated.
At any rate, Tissot's ostensibly scientific approach did have a considerable influence on the development of the anti-masturbation movement. Not only doctors, but many clergy & pedagogues accepted his ideas. The masturbation fallacy was certainly grist to the mill of the Chriatian churches - the moral theoligians could not believe this luck! "Go forth and Multiply", as it says in Genesis. Down the ages, generally speaking, spilling one's seed has been regarded as sinful on as a neccessary evil in most cultures & religions. The history of the safeguarding of the postion of sexual intercourse for the purpose of reproduction is as immensely long one.
For centuries, the commandment "thou shalt not masturbate" w/c became a parodoxical fusion between the progressive spirit of the Enlightenment & conservative ecclessiastical views, held the community morally on its thrall. For into the 20th century, masturbating patients were informed of the gruesome consequence of their behavior: mutilation, blindness, aggression, & madness (particularly in women), kidney disorders, or a deformed spine, the familiar endless litany. The pathology sparked a new industry, supplying products like erection alarm apparatuses, penis sheaths, & for girls, special gloves & bandages to prevent them from opening their legs.
The fact that knowledge did not prevent people from continuing to masturbate indicates that moral crusaders have little or no influence over human actions. Possibly, prohibitions actually gave a stimulus to the precursors of today's porn industry, since the denunciation of the sin on an even - wider scale was paralleled by a lively-trade in prints showing men & women, state of society, blissful sensual abandon.
Are there steps that can be taken to prevent people agonizing about masturbation? Yes, simple sex education from parents whether or not w/ the support of booklet, or a good internet site, a few lessons at secondary school, & perhaps it would make good sense also in the education of social workers, nurses, doctors & psychologists to have a few lectures or evolutionary biology, since it is clear from that science that masturbation is not only a pleasurable but also a very meaningful activity. Evolutionary biologists see masturbation as an important aid in what is called the "sperm competetion". Sperm cells that have been stored for too long to show abnormalities, such as abnormal heads, or no heads at all. For that reason a regular turnover - of between the three or five days. It is estimated - is important is, the context of reproduction. If that for whatever reason, is not posssible through sexual intercourse, masturbation offers a way out. However, daily masturbation is not sensible, because in that case the number of the sperm cell per milliliter falls too sharply.
Perhaps masturbation in a sociological sense is comparable w/ the ambivalent stigmatization of the single individual opposed to the individual on a permanent relationship. The former is not only pathetic, because he or she lacks love & care, but is also selfish. The same thing may apply to women. I fear that for many people it will be a long time before they achieve non-competetive fantasy-filled masturbation. The same applied to adequate sex education for our children. It will definitely never reach the point where masturbation lessons take their place alongside swimming & traffic awareness lesson. That can only happen when we have left behind the eternal glorification of sex issuing is sexual intercourse behind us. That attempt is no doubt doomed to failure. The reality is that the number of singles is rising. Masturbation has a deeply murky past, but solitary sex has a "golden future" ahead of it.
