Masturbation becomes problematic when it feels compulsive or begins to interfere with daily life, relationships, or well-being. Excessive ma
Okay so “masturbation addiction” IS NOT REAL. People keep warning us of the morality creep as fascist ideology keeps pushing more and more, and if this isn’t a huge red flag idk what is.
Take it from a former evangelical. Purity culture and abstinence and a completely ascetic (heterosexual) view of sex is about one thing and one thing only: control.
You’re saying it’s not real? Someone should just go spill their most private thoughts & behaviors to doctors and/or religious leaders? In this climate??? Even though “masturbation addiction” is not real??
Twice in the article they point out it’s not real, yet they want people feeling icky and dirty and gross and guilty of rubbing one out. Like what the actual fuck????
Masturbation actually does help regulate mood. It gives us a release and brings some of those good good brain chemicals to the party. It can even help with physical pain! This isn’t a symptom, it’s a feature. This part is both true and positive. If you choose to masturbate, this is one of the plethora of reasons to do so.
Distress and preoccupation is where we can see the pernicious christofascist thought creeping in. Now you’re feeling distressed and preoccupied by the thing they’ve been telling you *technically* isn’t real but that you should feel bad and worried about. Society is telling you that masturbation, which is normal for a very large portion of society, is wrong and that you should feel shame. Once you feel shame, you should go to authority figures to get insight into how to curb your natural proclivity to engage in a natural behavior in a normal way. Not for help dealing with shame and the mental & physical ramifications of dealing with being told you’re abnormal when you in fact are not.
Of course there are people who choose not to masturbate for a variety of reasons, but done in a safe and private way there’s not a damn thing wrong with masturbation; there’s not even thought crime for what people think about while they’re doing it. Masturbating in front of people without their consent, like Louis CK or some creep on the subway, is wrong, but that’s not what this article is about. Those people aren’t addicts, they are sexual predators breaking actual real life laws. There are no laws about masturbating if it’s not harming anyone else. It’s really no one’s business whether someone does or does not choose to jerk it.
This is another canary in the coal mine, along with the age verification bullshit, deplatforming “adult content”, talk about “porn addiction”, the spread of manosphere ideology, increased kinkshaming, gender essentialism, and so much more. If you’re not strictly adhering to what cishet Christian majority culture has prescribed to you as a role, you’re degenerate and therefore need to be beaten back into line or eliminated. A good christofascist husband-man or woman-wife especially doesn’t desire or even deserve sexual pleasure. They start preaching this early and often as kids enter their preteen and teen years. Just as bodies are charging and hormones are raging, they tell you the Jesus & God that love you unconditionally are actually like super duper icked out by feelings and even natural bodily functions you can’t help. And of course that it is all your fault for being a nasty dirty little sinner. (I think I personally dodged a bullet but I must assume that plenty of kids I grew up with ended up with a wicked humiliation kink.)
I know tumblr talks all the time about how you gotta be more of a pervert nowadays, but it scares me how much the mainstream goes along with all of this. People clutch pearls that there are vibrators at Target and CVS. People willingly say “seggs” with their actual mouths in real life. People who aren’t even deep in the conservative Christian lifestyle are now feeling the shame and guilt over self-pleasure that kids my age were feeling at the height of purity culture and True Love Waits in the late 90s and early 2000s.
I don’t have a solution except this one: protect your own mind and your own sanity whether you jack off three times a day or never or anything in between. The only way I didn’t become completely and irrevocably fucked up by extreme conservative Christian guilt and shame and oppressive ideology in my youth is because I extracted myself from that environment. It’s harder now since it has permeated so much of our culture, but exposure is probably the best tactic to fight back. That doesn’t mean exposure to masturbation or porn or whatever else, it just means not treating sex as a dirty word and replacing it with s*x, not treating porn or kink or polyamory or whatever else deviates from “the norm” as bad, and accepting that the full breadth of the human experience includes things that exist solely for the individual that cannot be mined for profit.
