Masturbation is highly pleasurable and widely prevalent – around 94% of men and 85% of women do it – so, of course, someone has to come along and (falsely) tell us it's terrible.
Historically, puritanical peoples and uninformed medical practitioners insisted that pleasuring ourselves sexually is a "sin against nature" and leads to all sorts of maladies like blindness, insanity, infertility, and even the loss of one's sexual organ!
This was all utter nonsense. In actuality, masturbation offers a plethora of benefits including stress relief, a reduced risk of prostate cancer in men, and even fewer urinary tract infections for women.
Yet despite the growing evidence for, and feel-good nature of, self-pleasure, male masturbation is becoming newly demonized today for supposedly lowering sperm quality, inhibiting testosterone levels, and fueling sex addiction that hurts the formation of relationships. None of these deleterious effects are supported with empirical evidence, but they are touted on various online communities and pushed by organizations like NoFap, which suggest that masturbation is holding back men from achieving their full potential, and abstaining can help them unlock it.
Amidst this modern rise in anti-masturbation sentiment online, psychologists Felix Zimmer and Roland Imhoff from Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz in Germany sought to explore the motivations of men seeking to abstain from masturbation. For their study, published in March to the Archives of Sexual Behavior, they extensively surveyed 1,063 men (average age 27, predominantly college-educated) recruited from online communities about their masturbation habits, attitudes toward the practice, and personal beliefs.
Zimmer and Imhoff found that men who scored high on hypersexuality – an excessive preoccupation with sexual fantasies or behaviors that negatively affects other parts of one's life – were more likely to want to abstain from masturbation. Thinking that masturbation negatively impacts social and physical health, distrust in science, higher religiosity, and conservative ideology were also strongly linked to motivations to abstain from masturbation.
They noted that negative misperceptions about the social and health effects of masturbation seemed to be the strongest drivers to avoid masturbation.
"Clearly, these data rely on self-report rather than objective data and may thus reflect men’s subjective reality more than an “objective” truth," the authors wrote of their results.
Correcting masturbation misconceptions could help people worry less and grow more comfortable with their sexuality, Zimmer and Imhoff say.
"Understanding the constituents of... abstinence from masturbation might eventually be a basis for reducing pathologization of average and healthy frequencies of sexual behavior."
Source: Zimmer, F., Imhoff, R. Abstinence from Masturbation and Hypersexuality. Arch Sex Behav 49, 1333–1343 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-019-01623-8
