Masturbation

Yesterday I was reading an article about an online trend for mutual masturbation among men. It turns out there's a website where they can go and do it on camera together.

The Church Strikes Again

America in particular has a very conflicted view of masturbation. Both the Catholic church and protestant churches condemned it using the biblical story of Onan as their reasoning against it. What it comes down to is that masturbation is non-reproductive sex which carries no risk of pregnancy or venereal diseases. To the religious leadership there were two acceptable states of being: completely abstinent or married and making babies. Pleasure didn't come into it and they didn't want there being any kind of compromise between abstinence and sex for reproductive purposes. To this end, they told a lot of children that they were dirty and told them lies about how they'd go blind and grow hair on their palms.

A Brief History of Masturbation In America

As I've said, America has a conflicted history with masturbation. Around the end of the 19th century America started a crusade against it. They would put what amounted to chastity belts on their children to prevent them masturbating in their sleep. They told stories about how it would sap the vitality of anyone who did it and turn them sickly. They didn't say it would kill you, but they came close. They struck upon the idea of circumcision making it harder to masturbate, and at around the same time women were going more and more to hospitals to have their babies. As an added service, the hospitals started including circumcision of babies before they left the hospital. If a child hadn't been circumcised or a man was feeling guilty enough about having done it too much, they too would go in for circumcision. If it was a girl, she might get her clitoris burned off with carbolic acid. That was one of the stories that came out of the Kellogg sanitarium. 

A large part of this comes from the efforts of a man named Anthony Comstock, who believed that all sex was bad and that we had to legislate morality in the US. He was a civil war veteran who worked extensively for the YMCA when it first began. In 1873 he started the New York Society For the Suppression of Vice, which had a heavy influence on the laws made in New York state at the time. He would condemn any expression of sexuality which made it into the public sphere with the claim that it violated public decency. He even believed that sex within marriage was a necessary evil which the truly strong would resist committing. Ideally, according to him, everyone would be absolutely celibate.

God And Cornflakes

Speaking of John Harvey Kellogg, you might recognize the name. The same guy who invented cornflakes. Graham crackers are another anti-masturbation food from the same period. Kellogg was a believer in Comstock's doctrines. Kellogg ran a sanitarium to nurse people back to good health. He also a Seventh Day Adventist who believed in clean living and moral austerity. He used things like cold water and electrical currents to treat his patients, and he often performed procedures on them like the aforementioned carbolic acid to burn off the clitoris of a female patient. He believed that masturbation sapped the vitality and caused people to become sickly and degenerate. 

Kellogg and Sylvester Graham were proponents of the "Clean Living Movement". It included things like the temperance movement or the public morality legislation and drug legislation going around at the time. There was a fair bit of eugenics and racism mixed in. Basically they believed that everyone should live an ascetic life devoid of things that stimulated the humors. If it wasn't clean and no fun at all, then it was dirty. 

Hysteria

Ironically at around the same time, the vibrator was invented. This is because America believed that any woman who had a breakdown was suffering from hysteria. They medicalized women's mental health issues as having a physical cause, a wandering womb. The cure for this was either confinement to bed with a healthy dose of laudanum or manual stimulation of the clitoris. In the beginning, doctors did this by hand. In the age of anti-masturbation, they were masturbating female patients to calm them down. Needless to say, the treatment was wildly popular among women who could afford it. Not so much among doctors who were getting repetitive strain injuries from having to spend all day masturbating their female patients. Not just that, but since it involved a man and a sexually frustrated woman most of the time it left the door wide open to things like patients becoming infatuated with doctors or doctors taking sexual advantage of their patients. This would never do. So one of them tinkered around and came up with the first vibrator and once it was ready for the market they were sold for home use. They were marketed as "massagers", a euphemism to avoid any awkward questions about what they were for. Sexually frustrated women retreated to the bedroom and did their "treatments" in private. For some reason this was the exception to the masturbation rule. Then the idea of "hysteria" fell out of fashion and female masturbation was not spoken of again for a long time. 

Porn

For a country with such a deep-seated feeling of shame around masturbation, America produces the most porn in the world. Essentially all porn is is a visual aid to assist masturbation. Some people watch it while they have sex, but most of the time pornography is masturbation fuel. America developed a split personality from the conflict between their healthy sexual urges and the social condemnation for masturbation. The demand for porn soared. Unfortunately it fed a lot of girls through the meat grinder to do it. It was the unintended social cost of our repression. 

In the 70's Times Square in New York City was a mecca for porn theaters and peepshows. Men (and occasionally women) would pay to go into a darkened room full of other people and masturbate to porn on the big screen or a woman playing with herself in a room surrounded by peepholes. PeeWee Herman was caught in one such adult theater in Florida doing exactly what everybody else did in those theaters. 

Modern Day

Once the VCR was invented, people didn't have to go to the porn theater anymore or own a projector of their own. They could rent porn in the video store. It was kept behind a curtain in a separate part of the store. That or they could go to the "adult bookstore" and buy it so that they didn't have to return it and risk the clerk at the video store reading out the title. Then the internet came along and nobody has to know. 

In 1993 Joycelyn Elders was appointed Surgeon General of the United States. She ran the office in charge of public health policy in the US. In 1994 she made the mistake of suggesting that masturbation might be a healthy alternative to underage sex and the HIV crisis that was going around. She was hounded out of office for daring to make such a suggestion. Between that and Paul Reubens being arrested for public indecency for masturbating, it should tell you how recently we still held these views. Many people still hold them. I've spoken to other women in private conversations in which they admitted that they had never masturbated. Kids still figure it out, obviously. Puberty and natural curiosity about their bodies makes sure of it, but since nobody is willing to talk about it out in the open they don't know that what they're doing is normal. All they've ever heard is that it was dirty and something we don't talk about in polite company. 

I've often had the thought that the sexual maturation process in Americans is stunted by the lack of information. It comes to a halt around puberty and no information about healthy sexuality is offered to them at this time of their lives. Even in sexual education classes the subject doesn't come up. Teenagers end up taking their cues from porn or else experimenting among themselves. What I found sad about the article I was reading about Bateworld was how conflicted people still are surrounding the subject. They did a user survey asking the men using the site whether they viewed mutual masturbation with another man as "gay". Most of the users asserted that it was not, and that kissing another man was more "gay" and forming an emotional attachment to another man was the most gay of all. Think about that. I actually agree with them in a way, but I think the attitudes say something about both the lingering stigma around homosexuality and the even stronger stigma surrounding masturbation, especially shared masturbation. Many of the men doing this remember their experimentation as teens with friends, or later on finding other men to whack off with as adults. Often they use pornography as an intermediary, a bit of stage-setting to make it look as if they're both getting off on the picture of a woman. I find it incredibly sad that they feel like they have to do that. Women's masturbation, by contrast, has been commodified to make masturbation fuel for men. To my knowledge, women don't have circle jerks. 

Personally I think it's healthy and natural. It's free and it carries no risk of pregnancy or disease. I would even go so far as to say that people who don't masturbate would probably be pretty lousy in bed because they don't know their own bodies and what feels good. And yet we go on treating it as a dirty secret spoken of only in hushed tones or adolescent giggles. This is why America is like that about sex in general and masturbation specifically. This is the history behind that.

It strikes me that what the social mileau is discouraging is both honest exploration of our own sexuality but also indiscriminate bonding. We categorize people into neat sexual identities and discourage them from doing anything that isn't strictly contained in that identity. If you're straight, you can't do anything that might be seen as gay. If you're gay, you can't do anything that might be seen as straight. We're made to pick an identity and stick to it. If it were considered harmless and acceptable for people to masturbate with other people, what would happen to marriage and monogamy and the reproductive rate? With married monogamy as the only acceptable sexual outlet, at least there are people reproducing.

People are afraid to be human or ashamed of it. What kind of world would it be if they were allowed to give each other a handjob and bond without risk of stigma or commitment? I suspect that a lot of people would lose their fear of their own bodies. If incels could just help each other, for example, perhaps they could get that need filled by another person and stop feeling sorry for themselves. We're the only species that makes up dumb rules like this. No wonder people are so unhappy and sexually frustrated all of the time. And maybe we wouldn't have hangups that Russian hackers can use against us, because it's pretty ridiculous when you get right down to it..