Is Masturbation Bad for You? What People Are Getting Wrong This Week

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The message below of the user of X @HOOD_GRIMES has been shared almost ten million times since it appeared on August 25 (I saw it on SNOPES):

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This kid generated by AI in a baseball jersey establishes fairly serious medical consequences of “frequent masturbation”, including brain lesions, acne and “withdrawal”. On the other hand, my own study (certainly anecdotal) which includes “all those I have ever encountered” suggest that many healthy people like a masturbation without negative physical side effects. So who is wrong this week? Let’s look at the evidence.

Masturbation: Friend or enemy?

The specific affirmations made on the post X are false. There is no scientific research to support the idea that masturbation causes back pain, lowers testosterone or to one of the negative effects listed in the same (beyond number 11, which is subjective). Instead, research indicates that masturbation is (marginally) good for you. In men, high ejaculation frequency (whether masturbation or sex) is correlated with a reduction in the risk of total prostate cancer. For women, research suggests potential advantages of masturbation to deal with “psychological distress and to improve general well-being”. And masturbation seems to help everyone sleep better.

To be fair to “masturbation is harmful”, excessive masturbation can have negative (limited) physical effects. This could cause skin friction and irritation, although it is more “common sense” than “supported by research”. Masturbation can play a role in anorgasmia (inability to achieve orgasm despite adequate sexual stimulation) but that does not seem from the frequency to which you masturbate, but how You masturbate. Research supports a link between the usual and very specific masturbation styles and anorgasmia – in terms of the secular, if you do something unusual to take off by yourself, and you do it a lot, you can find it difficult to finish conventional with someone else.

Putting the evidence (while offering all the possible advantages of doubt to “masturbation can hurt the crowd”) shows very clearly that masturbation is much more likely to be physically beneficial than physically harmful.

What is “frequent” masturbation anyway?

Masturbation is great, closed box, right? Not totally. Masturbation will not shrink the parts of your body, but, like everything, it can become mentally unhealthy if it begins to take too much time, gets relationships or becomes a compulsive adaptation mechanism. By the way, the same rules apply to video games and training.

If you feel that masturbation negatively affects your life, it is worth paying attention, but that the definition of “harmful” is subjective, and it is possible that what resembles “damage” is in fact inherited from the guilt of what your great-great-arrival-arrival-Grand-Grand-Grand-Grand-Grand-Grand-Grand-Grand-Grand has thought of sex.

Victoriana is the Victoriana!

While I was looking for medical affirmations on this meme, it has become clear that all the Baseball-Boy discussion points have their roots in previous ages. As Faulkner said: “The past has never been dead. It has not even passed” and nowhere is it more true than masturbation hysteria (and racism, I suppose). Eliminate Modern AI imaging, and this even reads as if it had been raised directly from a 19th century medical brochure warning against the dangers of “auto-abus”. Like this early entry into the genre: “Onania: or, the odious sin of self-pollution and all its frightening consequences (in both sexes) considered with spiritual and physical advice to those who have already injured this abominable practice of 1716, or that of 1838,” a treatise on diseases produced by onanism, masturbation, self-pollution “.

You can find a similar passage in the Victorian anti-masturbation literature for almost all 11 points in the same. “I have violent pain in my stomach, my arms and legs; and sometimes in the kidneys,” reports a chronic masturbator Treaty. “I feel great pains of my kidneys down, and in particular in the bottom of my back”, accepts another onanist from previous work. A doctor thus describes a self-pollute: “The individual becomes weak, is unable to work with a regular vigor, or to apply his mind to study; his approach is late and weak, he is dull, irresolved, engages his sports with less energy than usual, and avoids social relationships;

All that is missing in previous work is the piece of masturbation narrowing the penis. Even victorians were not that silly.

Not all victorians, however

There is nothing without a counterpoint. Even in the Victorian era, people like the pioneer sexologist Havelock Ellis have taken a scientific look at sex and devoted an entire volume Sex psychology studies To masturbation, concluding that it was normal and healthy. Richard von Krafft-Ebing too, including the book of 1886 Psychopath sexualis Always defines how we think of sex. Even the occultist Aleister Crowley made the pleasure of self -part of his magic practice. So the next time someone shares a viral meme, remember that you choose sides in a 300-year cultural war, and all cool Victorians were pro-Masturbations. Be Team Ellis, not the Onanism team: evidence and history are on your side.