masturbation

masturbation There are many expressions for this practice, including auto-eroticism, self-abuse, the solitary pleasure, and onanism (incorrectly; the sin of Onan in Genesis was practising coitus interruptus, not masturbation). According to George Ryley Scott's Encyclopaedia of Sex (1939), it is ‘as old as the world itself … the vice of all races, classes, and ages’, and has been observed in animals as well as humans. The Greek Cynic philosopher Diogenes remarked that it was a pity that the pangs of hunger could not be assuaged as easily as the pangs of lust, simply by rubbing the affected part. The early-twentieth-century Viennese satirist, Karl Kraus, remarked that one met a better class of partner in masturbatory fantasy. Nonetheless, it has been abhorred as a vice for centuries and is still somewhat stigmatized. Even in the 1990s, when the AIDs epidemic placed safe sex high on the agenda, advocating this safest of practices led to the dismissal of a US Surgeon-General. No questions on it were included in the British survey sponsored by the Wellcome Trust, published in 1994 as Sexual Behaviour in Britain. The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles. If no longer regarded with horror and loathing, it may be considered the resort of the sad loser unable to find a suitable partner.

This stigmatization seems particularly odd for what is probably the most universal of all sexual practices, at least among men. The evidence accumulated by surveys since Kinsey suggests that over 90% of men masturbate at some time during their lives, although the figures for women are significantly lower, at around 50–70% according to different surveys, and the frequency of masturbation in women is around half that in men. There is some evidence that the practice has become more common among women but still not as near-universal as it is among men.

Masturbation has not been the subject of legal regulation, though at least one British case is recorded of a man arrested for ‘procuring an indecent act with himself’: an element of exhibitionism would appear to have been present. The stringent objections advanced about the practice have been both moral and medical. On moral and religious grounds masturbation has been regarded as a sin of lust. As a non-procreative act, in medieval Christian theology it counted as an act against nature, more serious than adultery or rape.

On health grounds, it has been regarded as leading to depletion of the energies contained in the seminal fluid; in ancient Chinese medicine various practices were resorted to in order to conserve vital yang energy by avoiding ejaculation. In the West, the major medical case against masturbation emerged in the eighteenth century. Following Tissot, authorities declared it to be a habit leading to a gothic plenitude of ailments, physical, mental, and moral, with repercussions not only upon the individual himself but his offspring. This belief in the debilitating effects of masturbation (rather than its being something morally deleterious which it might benefit the soul or character to struggle against) led to the introduction of various stringent means of preventing it (and even of preventing involuntary nocturnal emissions).

Although it is often supposed that infantile masturbation was the focus of these anxieties, it is clear from the literature that it was young men at puberty and in the years immediately following who were the group at which much of the agitation against self-abuse was directed. The perception of the dangers of masturbation and the outcries against its practice have been directed overwhelmingly towards men. Although there have been occasional diatribes against masturbation in women, this never generated the virtual industry of pamphlets and preventive and curative prescriptions dealing with the apparent epidemic of sexual debility caused by ‘the secret vice’ in males. During the heyday of belief in a clear distinction between immature clitoral and mature vaginal orgasm, masturbation was supposed to interfere with women's capacity to achieve the correct kind during intercourse. However, being neurotic and immature, though deplorable, was hardly as serious a threat as the major mental and physical debilitation men allegedly risked. These proliferating fears around the sexuality of young men from the mid-eighteenth century may bear some relation to the increasingly late age of marriage. Many authorities even believed masturbation to be a far greater danger than intercourse with prostitutes (even though these might well be diseased). There is indeed some evidence of fornication being recommended as a ‘cure’ for masturbation during the nineteenth century. When, from the early twentieth century, sex educators began to disseminate reassuring messages that masturbation would not cause consumption, tabes dorsalis, or insanity, the practice was still said to be best avoided and not indulged to excess. From being physiologically damaging it became an indicator of some psychological defect, neurosis, immaturity, or an inability to form proper interpersonal relationships. At a half-folkloric, half-joking level, the belief that it causes hair to grow on the palms of the hands is still bandied about.

The false etymology deriving the term ‘masturbation’ from ‘manustupration’ — from the Latin meaning to defile with the hand — alludes to the commonest, but by no means the only, method of self-stimulation. Much of the fear around self-abuse was exacerbated by this awareness that the means was always to hand. However, some men masturbate by rubbing or thrusting against something, or by using vibrators, inanimate objects with holes in, or water jets. Pornography in its various forms may also be regarded as an appurtenance to masturbation. In women, in spite of the long historical tradition of dildos, the preferred method is direct stimulation of the clitoris, occasionally with additional vaginal stimulation. Some women are capable of achieving orgasm simply by squeezing their thighs together. Of recent decades masturbation has been recommended to women as a means of familiarizing themselves with their own sexual responses in order to overcome difficulties in achieving orgasm. And of course, more recently, it has had advocates as a safe form of sexual activity which does not transfer bodily fluids.

Lesley A. Hall