MASTURBATION.
"A SOLO PLEASURE"
Almost all boys masturbate (let's say
98%).
Those who don't may be extremely sexually repressed, have a low sex
drive, or have sexual/emotional problems that might result from childhood
emotional or sexual abuse, such as being forced to absorb fundamentalist
religious views imposed on them by their family.
Even so, many boys in this
situation still masturbate, and try to deal with the guilt afterwards.
In my
book, the oppression of healthy, normal male sexual instincts during puberty by
religious fanatics ranks as a crime against the soul.
Only the sexually weird
and the socially or emotionally disturbed would try and tell a teenage boy that
masturbation is abnormal or sinful.
Men are born with a powerful sexual urge,
and expressing it is fundamental to normal male development.
So why so much
guilt?
The profound pleasures of masturbation,
which releases sexual tension and enables a boy to learn about his body, is
something to be honoured.
Guilt comes form the repressed guilt and shame of those
who bring a boy up: it's not inherent to the act of masturbation!
I'd say that a
boy who doesn't masturbate has a problem - not one who does. (Unless it becomes
obsessive or happens many times a day.)
Masturbation needs to be celebrated, not
allowed to induce guilt.
But overcoming the guilt can be difficult - for many
men, it was instilled at the hands of their mother, at a very early age, when
she told them not to touch themselves "down there".
Well, there never was going
to be a less effective instruction to a boy than that!
But of course the
consequence of our mothers' difficulty with our innocent sexuality when we were
babies may be that the experience and enjoyment of our own bodies is taken away
from us, or we are made to feel ashamed in some way of our maleness and what we
can do with it: hardly a good position from which to achieve true emotional
health.
The question is, what can men do to feel
better about masturbation?
One thing's for sure, men will do it, whether or not
they feel guilty or bad about it.
The answer, then, lies in changing our
attitudes so that we can enjoy masturbating, and indeed celebrate it, as an
essential part of our maleness.
Perhaps our masturbation becomes more
controlled as we get older but it still goes on, even when men have sexual
partners.
For heterosexual men, masturbation is often secret, and a wife who
discovers what her man is doing will fail to understand his need to masturbate,
and assume in some way it reflects badly on her.
We need to explain that it is a
normal part of our experience of maleness, a healthy and rewarding thing to
do.
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