What People Are Doing Wrong This Week: Is Masturbation Bad for You?
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The following post by user X @hood_grimes has been shared nearly ten million times since it appeared on August 25th (I saw it on Snopes ):
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This AI-generated kid in a baseball jersey is talking about some pretty serious medical consequences of “frequent masturbation,” including brain damage, acne, and “shrinking penis size.” On the other hand, my own (albeit frivolous) research, which included “everyone I’ve ever met,” shows that many healthy people enjoy masturbation without any negative physical consequences. So who’s wrong this week? Let’s look at the evidence.
Masturbation: friend or foe?
The specific claims made in X’s post are false. There is no scientific research to support the idea that masturbation causes back pain, lowers testosterone, or has any of the negative effects listed in the meme (other than point 11, which is subjective). In fact, research shows that masturbation is (marginally) beneficial. In men, high ejaculation frequency (whether from masturbation or sex) is correlated with a lower risk of prostate cancer overall . Research shows potential benefits for women in masturbation in combating “psychological stress and improving overall well-being.” Additionally, masturbation appears to help everyone sleep better.
To be fair, excessive masturbation can have (limited) negative physical effects. It can cause skin irritation and chafing, though this is more “common sense” than “research-backed.” Masturbation may play a role in anorgasmia (the inability to achieve orgasm despite adequate sexual stimulation), but it doesn’t seem to depend on how often you masturbate, but how you do it. Research supports a link between habitual, very specific masturbation styles and anorgasmia — in plain English, if you do something unusual to get off on your own, and you do it often, you may find it difficult to get off in the usual ways with someone else.
When you weigh the evidence (while giving the best possible justification to the “masturbation can be harmful” crowd), it becomes abundantly clear that masturbation is far more likely to cause physical benefit than physical harm.
What is “frequent” masturbation anyway?
Masturbation is cool, case closed, right? Not exactly. Masturbation won’t make your body parts smaller, but like everything else, it can become harmful to your psyche if it starts taking up too much of your time, interfering with your relationships, or becoming an obsessive way to cope. The same rules apply to video games and working out, by the way.
If you feel like masturbation is negatively impacting your life, that’s worth looking into, but the definition of “harm” is subjective, and it’s entirely possible that what feels like “harm” is actually inherited guilt about how your great-great-grandparents thought about sex.
Victoriana is reborn!
In researching the medical aspects of this meme, I realized that the baseball player’s entire point had its roots in an earlier time. As Faulkner said, “The past is never dead. It is not even past,” and nowhere is that more true than in the hysteria surrounding masturbation (and racism, for that matter). Strip away the modern AI imagery, and this meme looks like it was lifted straight from a 19th-century medical pamphlet warning of the dangers of “self-mortification.” Take this early work in the genre, for example, Onania: or the Vile Sin of Self-Defilement, and All Its Dreadful Consequences (in Both Sexes), Considered with Spiritual and Physical Advice to Those Who Have Already Injured Themselves by That Abominable Practice , written around 1716, or this one, A Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism, Masturbation, and Self-Defilement, from 1838.
Similar passages can be found in Victorian anti-masturbation literature on nearly all 11 points of the meme. “I have great pains in my stomach, arms, and legs, and sometimes in my kidneys,” reports a chronic masturbator in the Treatise . “I feel great pain from the kidneys downwards, especially in the small of the back,” agrees another masturbator in an earlier work. A physician describes a self-defiled person as follows: “The person becomes feeble, unable to work with his accustomed energy, or to fix his mind on study; his gait is slow and feeble, he is listless, irresolute, plays sports with less energy than usual, and avoids intercourse; when at rest he instinctively assumes a reclining or semi-recumbent posture.”
The only thing missing from the earlier works is the bit about masturbation making the penis smaller. Even the Victorians weren’t that stupid.
However, not all Victorians
There’s no point without a counterargument. Even in the Victorian era, people like sex pioneer Havelock Ellis looked at sex scientifically, devoting an entire volume of his Studies in the Psychology of Sex to masturbation, concluding that it was normal and healthy. So did Richard von Krafft-Ebing, whose 1886 bookPsychopathia Sexualis still shapes the way we think about sex. Even occultist Aleister Crowley made masturbation part of his magical practice. So the next time someone shares a viral meme, remember that you’re picking a side in a 300-year-old culture war, and all the cool Victorians were pro-masturbation. Be on Team Ellis, not Team Onanism: the evidence and history are on your side.