This time we’re going to talk about masturbation. It’s very important because there are so many myths around masturbation. The myths that we’re going to be talking about this month are those that involve the fact that – lots of people believe – that masturbation is physically and mentally harmful. And even though you might think that in the 21st century most people don’t believe it, I’m here to tell you from my experience as director of the Kinsey Institute for 11 years, and one of the directors of the Museum of Sex in New York City, as well as the writer of a syndicated newspaper column for almost 10 years, that was syndicated all over the world, many many many people all over the planet, and many many people in the United States still believe, whether they express it publicly or not, that masturbation is bad for them in one way or another. So it’s an important topic for us to discuss here. Now – there are lots of myths about masturbation and I’m sure we’re going to talk about it more than one time.

One of the first myths – and I’m sure it’s probably one that’s not as important in terms of hurting people but it’s important because it really provides a foundation for a lot of things we’re going to talk about – is that masturbation is a new activity, something that’s been “invented” recently by people. I think we have a lot of those kinds of ideas about a lot of sexual activities, when really nothing is new under the sun, and that’s another one we’ll talk about in different contexts, but masturbation is definitely not new, and we have lots of art and artifacts to show that masturbation is a very old activity of human beings, and has probably been around as long as there have been human beings with sex organs. So that’s since the beginning. I have one thing from my office here that just happens to be something that I own that’s a nice piece and it’s French, and it shows a French lady and she’s lying in her bed – this is from the last century, or two centuries ago now, the 19th century – and she is masturbating and looking at a picture of her lover on the wall. Looking at pictures and masturbating is an activity that lots of people enjoy doing. This is just one of millions of different kinds of pictures we have that artists have made and tradespeople have made that show for us that individuals have masturbated, not just in the 20th century, in the 21st century, but in the 19th, 18th, 17th, 16th, then we go all the way back to the Romans and the Greeks and the Persians and the Chinese and the Indians and all the way back until the beginning of time, probably on cave paintings. So – it’s not new. That’s the first myth that we’ve busted.

Now, another one is that masturbation is somehow abnormal. And if by abnormal we mean that it’s not average, that it’s unusual, that it’s not mainstream, then that’s obviously untrue. Depending on the study, and what age group you’re talking about and what cohort you’re talking about – let’s speak about men because that’s what we’re talking about in this particular myth-busting tape – and by cohort I mean when the people were born because obviously people are different if they were born 70 years ago or 50 years ago or 25 years ago. Things do change. But nevertheless we find that between 80 and 98 percent of men report that they have masturbated sometime in their lives. When we ask about frequency, that is, how often do you do this, the frequency ranges from once or twice a year to several times a day. So it’s clear that masturbation is very normal, very average for men. Now, I’m often asked “how much masturbation is too much?” That’s an interesting and a good question, and my answer is this. If it isn’t causing irritation of your penis, or other parts of your sex organs, if it isn’t interfering with work or school, if it’s not taking the place of romantic love or other sexual relationships, if it’s not more important than your friends or your other relationships, if it’s not your favorite activity or your favorite entertainment or your favorite hobby, then you’re not doing it too much. Like anything else, if masturbation is becoming the most important thing in your day, the thing that you look forward to the most, then it’s not fine. It’s not supposed to be the focus of your life. Masturbation will not make you physically ill. It’s a great opportunity or great way to relieve physical tensions, emotional tensions, and sexual tensions. Some of you may have found that if you’re working very hard, working on a project or getting ready for a test in school, that it’s a way of relieving that kind of tension, it’s very good for that and it’s fine and healthy to do that. So if you find that you don’t have a partner or your partner is busy, and you’re feeling sexual, it’s a fine way to do it. It’s also another kind of sexual release. There’s nothing wrong with masturbating if you’re a married person or a partnered person who is having great sex with your partner – masturbation sex is a different kind of sexual release. And it’s a good one all by itself. It does not mean that you’re not happy in your relationship. It does not mean that your sexuality with your partner is lacking in any way. It is just like you can like chocolate ice cream and you can also like vanilla ice cream – it doesn’t mean that you’re being unfaithful to your chocolate ice cream. So if you have that kind of problem, you tell your partner to tune in and listen to this tape.

Now – masturbation does not cause physical harm. Masturbation does not cause infertility; that is, I’ve had people ask me “will it use up all my sperm?” or “will it use up all my eggs so I won’t be able to make babies when I get older or when I’ve matured?” No. It doesn’t use up eggs, and the sperm that is used every day is replaced. The body makes lots of sperm. Nature, or God, depending on what you believe in, definitely wants to make more human beings, and there’s plenty – there’s hundreds of millions of sperm made every day, and the eggs that you have are not stimulated by the number of orgasms that you have. They come out regularly when it’s time for them to come out. In fact masturbation will not injure or cause illness in older individuals, and by masturbating to orgasm when you’re older, and perhaps have lost your partner, so you don’t have somebody to have sex with to orgasm, it will actually keep your urinary tract and your genital tract in good working order. So masturbating to orgasm is a healthy thing for human beings – it’s the opposite of what the myths say.

Now – we might ask ourselves, where do all these myths come from? Why is it that we have all these terrible ideas about what masturbation will do to us when in fact clinical science tells us that the very opposite is the case. Well, it’s a very interesting story. The history starts with a man named Tissot, who was a French physician in the 1700’s. He got his information from Asian philosophy and medicine and he wrote a book in the 1700’s in which he asserted that the loss of “vital fluid” – and what he meant by vital fluid was seminal fluid, that’s what you ejaculate from the penis when you have an orgasm – he said that it was very dangerous for a man to ejaculate too much because if he did, in fact, every time he ejaculated, there was a loss of energy, of vital energy, and that that was dangerous for your health. But at least when you had sexual intercourse you got something back from the woman – you got some of her energy back. But when you had an ejaculation and an orgasm from masturbation, all you had was loss, and that loss made you weak and open to illness and sickness and mental disturbance, and maybe even mental retardation. And so he felt that masturbation was very very dangerous – but even intercourse was dangerous if you had it too often. Again, this was based on traditional, pre-scientific thinking from Asia, which was sort of a Taoist view. Now his ideas were picked up by an American thinker of the early 19th century who wrote a book – his name was Sylvester Graham – and he wrote a book called “A Lecture to Young Men on Chastity” around 1837. And Graham was a health food nut, kind of like some of the ones we have today. He was a very influential American – he was a kind of quasi-medical/scientific expert, he was not really a physician, although physicians in those days were not physicians like we have today, by any means. He provided the first really basic powerful inaccurate negative American perspective on sexuality and particularly on masturbation. His ideas still persist to this day. He was a preacher, and as I said he was a health reform zealot. And he was kind of seen as the prophet of bran bread. He invented a cracker that you could eat in the morning, and that cracker which we all know and which we all ate as kids and in fact many of us still eat for dessert today, was called – named after him – the graham cracker. This cracker was made as an anti-masturbation food. You were supposed to eat it in the morning – it was supposed to lower your lust so that you would not want to have sex or you’d have sex as little as possible and you certainly wouldn’t masturbate. That’s what graham crackers were made for. This was done to help people not to feel sexual, or to feel less sexual because it was unhealthy for them. And it would help them not to have venereal disease, they believed, not to have other diseases, and to have less physical illnesses of all kind, particularly they were concerned about what they called consumption, which was tuberculosis. That was his philosophy. He made it quite clear in his health recommendations that sex was a very important cause of all kinds of mental and physical diseases. So sex should be had no more than once a month. This was his recommendation. More than that was dangerous, and if you exceeded more than once a week it would lead to absolutely dire consequences.

Now he was followed 50 years later by another very powerful health expert who also invented a morning food. Now this man had a very big health clinic – it was the number one health clinic in the United States. All the rich and wealthy went there to get the cure, or if they had anything wrong with them, or to keep their health. He had a big health clinic that was in Battle Creek, Michigan. He wrote also an important book called “Man the Masterpiece” and he also, based on Graham’s work and his own, believed that one’s health and one’s lack of health was very much based on too much sex, and particularly too much masturbation. And he also invented a morning breakfast food, and it’s one that we all know very well. His name was John Harvey Kellogg, and the name of his breakfast food was Corn Flakes! Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, another one that lots of us grew up on. We didn’t know that we were eating an anti-masturbation food – and this is it. John Harvey Kellogg – his brother was the big advertising guy – but John Harvey Kellogg invented Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, which you were supposed to eat in the morning, which were supposed to lower your lust so that you wouldn’t masturbate and you’d only have sex no more than once a month, never more than once a week, or you would again have all kinds of problems. In fact, he said self-abuse or masturbation is probably the most common and certainly one of the most damaging of all forms of sexual abuse. And he felt that doing this more than once a month would bring on general decline. People would lose flesh, they would get weak, they would cough, and they would end up with tuberculosis, which of course he called consumption. He subscribed to all of Graham’s views. So this is where this came from, and doctors all over the country, physicians believed this, when people got sick they would first ask them whether they were masturbating. People were very nervous about this – it was in the Boy Scout manuals, it was in the Girl Scout manuals. Alfred Kinsey worried about this, his father had a problem with this and Kinsey was concerned about his own masturbation because he was told by his father that it would hurt him. They were stopped from doing it. And in fact one of the great things that came out of Kinsey’s book was that he showed people – from the surveys that he did that everybody was masturbating, and if that was true the whole nation would have been sick with consumption, but they weren’t. So that was the beginning of learning in fact that masturbation was really very normal because everybody was doing it, the whole nation would have been ill if it wasn’t normal! We know of course that Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, boxes of cereal, there are 3 billion a year that are sold, but of course, nobody knows that what they are doing is eating anti-masturbation foods. But it was Graham’s theories that gave Kellogg the justification for his ideas, which gave the medical community justification. People then felt that everybody should not masturbate. There were all kinds of anti-masturbation devices developed by people. There were many, I think more than 20, that were registered by the US Patent Office. And as a result of these erroneous theories that were developed in the 18th and 19th centuries, medical authorities often did all kind of terrible things, gave people medicines and all kinds of other things in order to stop them from masturbating, when in fact we know today that masturbation is healthy. So this is one of the reasons why research is so important, and of course Kinsey’s research started this. But these myths persist – they persist right into the 20th century and the 21st century. So today we’ve busted a myth about the fact that masturbation is healthy, it’s not unhealthy, so a little bit of masturbation or maybe not such a little bit of masturbation, as long as it’s not interfering with the rest of your life, is a good thing for you and it’s not something for you to be worrying about. So if it’s something that you have worried about, stop worrying.

© 2004