How To Avoid Feelings of Guilt or Shame Every Time You Masturbate

When will we finally look beyond dirty?

Lily Tomlin offers a clever argument: “We have reason to believe that man first walked upright to free his hands for masturbation.”

According to World’s Largest Masturbation Survey, 92 percent of American men do it, but people think only 83 percent of men do. And 76 percent of American women do it, but people think 66 percent of women do. An average person masturbates three times a week.

You will forget these statistics soon. You may feel comfortable for a few weeks when you masturbate. But then, somebody will say something that may agree with your prior conditioning, and you’ll remember that it is dirty.

Mark Twain, writing On Masturbation, says, “The signs of excessive indulgence in this destructive pastime are easily detectable. They are these: A disposition to eat, to drink, to smoke, to meet together convivially, to laugh, to joke, and tell indelicate stories — and mainly, a yearning to paint pictures.”

But everything involving masturbation has been given a negative twist. I quote Neil Gaiman:

“I wanted to put a reference to masturbation in one of the scripts for the Sandman. It was immediately cut by the editor [Karen Berger]. She told me, “There’s no masturbation in the DC Universe.” To which my reaction was, “Well, that explains a lot about the DC Universe.” ~ Neil Gaiman, author and writer

Eve Ensler, in her book The Vagina Monologues, reports a horrible account. “In the United States, the last recorded clitoridectomy for curing masturbation was performed in 1948 — on a five-year-old girl.”

Healthline says that many people experience guilt after they masturbate — usually because of their theological, social, or spiritual beliefs.

We, human beings, have been masturbating since we started walking upright. How many more years do we need to admit the beauty of this act?

What do the sexy people feel in the act? Is it shame and guilt, or is it an indescribable freedom and joy?

People like Alfred Kinsey have tried to free masturbation since 1948. Kinsey is known as the father of sex research. He established the Institute for Sex Research at the University of Indiana.

I call these people heroes of masturbation. In the 1940s, Kinsey and his team began questioning men about their sex lives, interests, and habits. In 1948, he published the book ‘Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male,’ and in 1953, he wrote ‘Sexuality and the Human Female’.

William Masters and Virginia Johnson wrote about masturbation in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, when it was frowned upon. Oral sex between a husband and wife was banned in some states, and homosexuality was a mental disorder.

Masters and Johnson talk about four stages: 1)excitement — you read, see or imagine sexually exciting stuff, 2)plateau — you maintain your focus as arousal slowly intensifies, 3)orgasm — the release, and 4)resolution — your body returns to normal functioning.

Also, Master and Johnson proved that women could have more orgasms than men. They said that “women could achieve five or six orgasms in as many minutes, while men had to wait for a ‘refractory’ period of an hour after every performance.”

Tracing the origins of the bad reputation of masturbation, Masters and Johnson say in their 1988 book, “Sex and Human Loving,” say that it owes its bad reputation to a Swiss doctor — Dr. S. Tissot. Tissot regarded masturbation to be a “particularly ‘dangerous’ form of sex. Because it was convenient and could be started during the vulnerable years of childhood, and because the guilt he or she felt over their sinful act further impacted the nervous system and made it more susceptible to harm.”

“By the time Tissot’s ideas had crossed the Atlantic to America, the average doctor thought that masturbation caused epilepsy, insanity, acne, blindness, decreases mental capacity, weight loss, weakness, laziness, and — the ultimate suffering — an early death.”

But all of it was a lie. Kinsey, William Masters, and Virginia Johnson exposed how the society preached one thing, but those very people did the opposite in their own private lives. They encouraged people to see themselves as sexual beings.

The work of these greats made it clear that masturbation did not cause any emotional or sexual issues.

But even today, it is not ‘normal’ to talk about masturbation.

It remains a taboo topic.

When I write about masturbation, I only really have two questions in mind:

What does a world without this dirty hypothesis look like? And how do we get there as joyfully and lovingly as possible?

According to Healthline, sexual stimulation, including touching yourself for masturbation, may help you to:

• Relieve built-up stress
• Sleep better
• Boost your mood
• Relax
• Feel satisfaction
• Relieve cramps
• Release sexual tension
• Have better sex
• Better understand what you like and dislike during sex.

To anybody whose first instinct when hearing these ideas about masturbation is to reject it, I’d encourage you to read a few books and learn more about feeling yourself.

I recently wrote a story explaining how it clears your head:

Circling back the lighter tone, in 1879, on an evening in Paris, The Stomach Club, a society of American writers and artists, met to eat and drink and listen to a talk by Mark Twain.

He gave a humorous talk on a topic hardly ever mentioned in public in the 1870s. It was printed 64 years later, and it was a satire about masturbation. His words rubbed Victorian society the wrong way. The talk was censored for a century.

Mark Twain, in On Masturbation, says a lot more:

“Homer, in the second book of the Iliad, says with fine enthusiasm, “Give me masturbation or give me death.”

Caesar, in his Commentaries, says, “To the lonely it is company; to the forsaken it is a friend; to the aged and to the impotent it is a benefactor. They that are penniless are yet rich, in that they still have this majestic diversion.”

In another place, this experienced observer has said, “There are times when I prefer it to sodomy.” Robinson Crusoe says, “I cannot describe what I owe to this gentle art.”

Queen Elizabeth said, “It is the bulwark of virginity.” Cetewayo, the Zulu hero, remarked, “A jerk in hand is worth two in the bush.” The immortal Franklin has said, “Masturbation is the best policy.””

Final thoughts

Masturbation is great. “My first time I jacked off, I thought I’d invented it. I looked down at my sloppy handful of junk and thought, This is going to make me rich,” says Chuck Palahniuk, the author of the novel Fight Club.

Masturbation is a natural and good activity. There is no need to feel embarrassed about it.

If you ever feel guilty about masturbating, talk to somebody about it. Always remember that therapists recommend masturbation to feel relaxed these days.