Modern Masturbation

According to every conceivable scientific metric, masturbation is healthy, or at the very least harmless. You are not risking hairy palms, or depleted reproductive potency, or psychosexual deviancy by taking pleasure into your own hands. And yet, for as long as we’ve intellectualized human sexuality, a whole cabal of prudish authorities have attempted to convince us of the opposite. Anti-masturbation rhetoric is everywhere—from the sermon pulpit to seedy message boards—and Eric Sprankle, a sex educator and professor of psychology at Minnesota State University in Mankato wants to know why.*

His new book, DIY: The Wonderfully Weird History and Science of Masturbation, examines a millennia of masturbation freakouts in order to solve one of the enduring mysteries of reproductive health: Why is jerking it—an instinct that overlaps with the entirety of human existence, and often the first sexual experience most of us encounter in our lives—so often caked in shame? I called up Sprankle looking for answers and found myself talking about puritanical 18^th-century pamphlets, the dearth of well-funded self-pleasure research, and how we can all orgasm with dignity. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Luke Winkie: What made you want to write a book about masturbation?

Eric Sprankle: It started with an Instagram comment. I posted something about masturbation being normal and healthy, and some random dude called me unprofessional because I didn’t mention that masturbation causes depression, social anxiety, loss of testosterone, and a loss of zinc. My first thought was, “Hm, maybe I missed that day in my training.” I looked into it, and no, none of those things are true. He was just wildly misinformed, and certainly not alone. There are whole subcultures online that spout the same nonsense. That sparked my interest to explore exactly what’s going on here.

Is your book positioned as a response to some of the new-fangled anti-masturbation rhetoric you find in those digital subcultures?

A little bit. The NoFap movement—if you can even call it a movement—or the semen retention groups that have co-opted Eastern philosophies and spiritualities are all featured throughout the book, but it’s much larger than that. Anti-masturbation crusades have very strange bedfellows. There are the religious moralists, who are anti-masturbation because of religious values. Or the wellness gurus, or the groups of white supremacists, who are anti-masturbation and porn because it’s wrapped up in an antisemitic conspiracy theory for them. I try to touch upon all the different groups who believe that masturbation is a destroyer of bodies, souls, and civilizations.

It’s been pretty well-established that masturbation is healthy, and it’s not going to make you grow hair on your palms or turn you into a sexual deviant. So why and when did humans start clutching their pearls about masturbation? And have there been times in history where masturbation was more normalized?

There were definitely times like that. Masturbation was once a behavior that was accepted—nobody thought one way or another about it. But then you insert some of the religious prohibitions that were around for a few thousand years, who started tainting masturbation with the idea that it is sinful. Especially for men—women were ignored in the religious texts, which is its own brand of misogyny. But for men, the focus was on not wasting your seed or the God-given purpose of your genitals.

But really, the selling of masturbation as a disease didn’t come into the picture until the early 1700s. There was this anonymous pamphlet circulating around London at the time called Onania. It was rooted in a lot of hellfire preaching about the sinfulness of masturbation, but it was also peppered with medical information—that masturbation would cause a whole host of diseases. That gave more ammunition to the preachers, who can now say that masturbation will condemn you to hell, and also give you leprosy. And it also caught on with physicians, who parroted this nonsense. They would say that masturbation could lead to paralysis, and tooth loss, and discharges from the anus—whatever they meant by that.

How has the scientific truth about masturbation been suppressed over the years?

Research into masturbation is just not that common. Depending on the university you’re affiliated with, there might be pressure on a professor to attract large grant fundings to support their research. If you’re at an institution where that is the expectation, you’re not going to be doing masturbation research. There aren’t funds for that. That’s the larger barrier.

I think most people who aren’t zealots understand that masturbation is essentially harmless. But is self-pleasure truly healthy? Or is it simply not bad for you?

That was one of the surprising things in writing the book. The slogan in sex education and sex therapy is that masturbation is healthy, and they list a lot of things explaining why it’s helpful. That it can reduce stress, and alleviate pain, or other ridiculous claims—like that it can boost your immune system. I started challenging those claims, because I wanted to know if sex educators were misinterpreting the research, and there’s a little bit of that. When we say masturbation is healthy, we’re saying that it’s not harmful for you. You’re going to get out of it what you want to get out of it. Masturbation can be harmful to people who think masturbation is wrong—that it’s unhealthy, that it’s a sin. When they do it anyway, that leads to a whole host of psychological distresses for them. For those who view it as healthy? It’s not going to hurt them in any capacity.

As far as the health benefits goes, my take is a bit nuanced. An orgasm, which obviously doesn’t have to be from masturbation, does have the properties to lead to stress reduction, or ease and contentment. But I’d never advocate something like, “Oh, you have insomnia? Masturbation is the treatment.” I think all of this stuff is coming from this place where we want to make masturbation more acceptable, and to do that, it needs to become self-care. But the No. 1 reason people masturbate? To feel pleasure, and that should be good enough. It doesn’t need much justification beyond that.

In general, masturbation—and sex positivity—has been trending in a progressive direction for decades. However, more recently, it does seem like we’ve been inundated with a lot of anti-masturbation campaigns, especially from some right-wing corners of the internet. Do you think there’s been a backslide in our sexual culture?

I do think there’s been a bit of a backslide. I make a joke early in the book that sexual progressiveness is not a linear process. It’s two orgasms forward, one orgasm back. And I think we might be in a one-orgasm-back period right now, because of the message boards and the proliferation of this anti-masturbation content. The way we talk about porn factors into this too, because when we talk about porn, we’re talking about masturbation. I don’t think the culture is in a better place than it was in, say, the 1970s where you had activists like Betty Dodson pushing for masturbation liberation. It felt more revolutionary and exciting. But right now, we’re at least in a stuck point.

So much of the anti-masturbation rhetoric is cached in much larger issues of loneliness, or masculinity, or misogyny. Why do you think masturbation has been conflated with all of those other vectors? Why do these men perceive masturbation as the key to solving their much larger psychological and social hangups?

I was never able to pinpoint a source for that. It bleeds into the last 200 years of masturbation discourse. But masturbation has become a scapegoat for these guys, a place to put all of their failures, insecurities, and problems. One way to make sense of this is that masturbation is the one thing you have most control over. If you don’t have the body you want, the girlfriend you want, or the job that you want, and you get information online that masturbation is leading you down this path—that it’s sapping you of your testosterone—and that if you cut it out, all of your problems will be solved, you can understand how that might sound like a good blueprint. Even though fully abstaining from masturbation is nearly impossible for most people. It’s effective because we already have so many taboos around masturbation, and we’re already uncertain if it’s good for us. It’s easy to buy into that language.

Do you have any thoughts on how, in general, we can develop a healthier personal relationship with masturbation?

As I said earlier, our attitudes about masturbation will impact how we feel towards it, and our feelings of satisfaction and pleasure. It’s a good idea to elevate masturbation to be at the same level of partnered sex. Oftentimes it gets reduced to a poor substitute, a backup, something less than. But masturbation is the form of sex we have most often in our lives, and based on the research, the sex that most reliably leads to arousal and orgasm. To think that masturbation is not “the real thing” is an insult to our genitals and ourselves. It’s a valid form of sexual expression.