JoAnn Wypijewski: The Media's Odd Hysteria Over Masterbation
[JoAnn Wypijewski is a writer in New York.]
Religion was never alone on the ramparts of sexual repression. Science, in the form of the New Orleans Medical & Surgical Journal, contributed the above-cited opinion in 1850. In the same era, American hospitals began circumcising infants as a pre-emptive strike against future self-abuse. The procedure was no more prompted by hygiene than graham crackers or corn flakes were invented to relieve constipated geezers. Such bland high-fiber foods, Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg theorized, would dampen a boy's lustful enthusiasms. Dr. Kellogg, a respected sex educator who had a sexless marriage and a fetish for enemas, advocated the circumcision of incorrigible adolescent masturbators, without anesthetic, for its "salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment." Alternatively, a boy's penis could be stitched into his foreskin with silver sutures; for girls, Kellogg suggested a touch of carbolic acid to the clitoris. Cheerio.
It took more than a century of suffering or shaming or both, but masturbation is finally out of the closet, if not exactly into the streets. Science, this time in the form of the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, conducted by researchers at Indiana University, asked 5,865 Americans between the ages of 14 and 94 detailed questions about their sexual practices and found what any realist has always known: people enjoy getting off. They get themselves off from adolescence to old age, alone or with a partner; and the army of avowed self-abusers appears to have swelled with time.
Among people 70 or older, according to preliminary data from the study, published October 1 in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 80 percent of men and 58 percent of women have masturbated solo over a lifetime. Not bad, but the figures increase with each younger age cohort until we find a veritable generation of wankers, people age 25 to 29, whose lifetime rates peak at 94 percent among men and 84 percent among women. Masturbating with a partner is skewing in the same generational direction, only more dramatically....
Read entire article at The Nation
Religion was never alone on the ramparts of sexual repression. Science, in the form of the New Orleans Medical & Surgical Journal, contributed the above-cited opinion in 1850. In the same era, American hospitals began circumcising infants as a pre-emptive strike against future self-abuse. The procedure was no more prompted by hygiene than graham crackers or corn flakes were invented to relieve constipated geezers. Such bland high-fiber foods, Sylvester Graham and John Harvey Kellogg theorized, would dampen a boy's lustful enthusiasms. Dr. Kellogg, a respected sex educator who had a sexless marriage and a fetish for enemas, advocated the circumcision of incorrigible adolescent masturbators, without anesthetic, for its "salutary effect upon the mind, especially if it be connected with the idea of punishment." Alternatively, a boy's penis could be stitched into his foreskin with silver sutures; for girls, Kellogg suggested a touch of carbolic acid to the clitoris. Cheerio.
It took more than a century of suffering or shaming or both, but masturbation is finally out of the closet, if not exactly into the streets. Science, this time in the form of the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, conducted by researchers at Indiana University, asked 5,865 Americans between the ages of 14 and 94 detailed questions about their sexual practices and found what any realist has always known: people enjoy getting off. They get themselves off from adolescence to old age, alone or with a partner; and the army of avowed self-abusers appears to have swelled with time.
Among people 70 or older, according to preliminary data from the study, published October 1 in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, 80 percent of men and 58 percent of women have masturbated solo over a lifetime. Not bad, but the figures increase with each younger age cohort until we find a veritable generation of wankers, people age 25 to 29, whose lifetime rates peak at 94 percent among men and 84 percent among women. Masturbating with a partner is skewing in the same generational direction, only more dramatically....