Male Masturbation, A Primer for Women
In most households, this topic is never discussed.
Every young male at some age, we’ll say 12 to pick a number, begins to get erections. Sexual pressure seems omnipresent, and masturbating half a dozen times in a day is not unusual.
Little girls are much more mature than little boys, but little boys are sexually mature at a much earlier age. They don’t have the brains to go with it, but boys are the ones who feel an insistent need for sexual release. They are sexual beings years before girls, and their sexuality does not have the repercussions of pregnancy.
Male sexuality isn’t encumbered by menstruation. Male organs are also external and so far more easy to manipulate, and unlike females, virtually all men are orgasmic. It isn’t the same thing in girls of the same age.
By the time a male has sexual intercourse for the first time he may have masturbated to orgasm thousands of times. In most households, this topic is never discussed.
That’s the history of most males as they approach maturity. So far, we haven’t talked about pornography. Why? Because the development pattern we’ve sketched doesn't depend on pornography, at least not pornography as normally described.
Look at men’s magazines from 1950, and you will find young women in tight sweaters, shorts, or both. Many of them are starlets trying to advance a career. These pictures are not what we would currently call pornography, but they were more than sufficient for the 1950s male imagination.
Men use explicit images when they are available, and when they are not, they will use the Sears catalog, or, in a highly restrictive society, the memory of a well-turned ankle glimpsed years before.
In understanding male masturbation, the place for a woman to start is with male physiology and the history of individual males.
For a male in a relationship, intercourse may seem like a stage production while masturbation is a zip-zip-zip, nonpublic affair. In two minutes he can take the edge off the day and nobody is the wiser.
Let us make two comparisons which may help a woman understand how her boyfriend or husband might view masturbation as opposed to sex with her.
For a male, sexual intercourse can be like waffles. In our hectic Monday through Friday existence we may love waffles, but we don’t have time to make them from scratch every morning. So we eat the kind you pop in a toaster. Saturday morning, though, we are ready for the real thing.
Or to take another example… The Wall Street Journal once ran an article about products which failed in the marketplace. One of these products was a line of canned foods which tasted remarkably fresh.
But these foods failed in the marketplace. Why? Because people who buy canned peas expect them to taste like canned peas. We might think these consumers would prefer the taste of fresh to the taste of canned, but they didn’t. A woman might reasonably expect a man to prefer the real thing to the simulation, but the simulation may be so well-established it takes precedence over the real.
Many women who write us try to understand male sexuality by reasoning from analogy. They think what is true of their sexuality should be true of a male. But unless the woman was having orgasms at 12, and going through days, at 12, when getting off was going through her waking mind every 15 minutes, she doesn’t share the male experience.
When a woman becomes sexually involved with a young man, he brings a history of masturbation to the relationship. What is true of the young male is true of an older man who has not been in a sexual relationship for a period of time. He likely has a regularly established habit of masturbation.
When, a woman says, she would be more than willing to have sex with her man anytime, she may be sincere, but that doesn’t change his history. It doesn’t matter how well-reasoned a woman’s arguments are, they are inadequate to explain male behavior.
Some women who write us act as if the root cause of male masturbation is pornography. It isn’t.
The fundamental point we make, and a point some women don’t understand, is normal male masturbation exists independent of pornography and independent of them.
Male masturbation and the natural attraction of men to images of nude females are common, average, and normal.
Let us be clear about what should be warning signs to a woman: masturbation that affects a man’s ability to hold a job, a male exposing himself in public parks, or a male spending large sums of money on pornography. Other warning signs are: torture porn, kiddy porn, peeping, masturbating with stolen underwear, and any compulsive sexual activity.
Individuals with these various fixations need help, and they have a problem far beyond the ability of a woman to fix.
Our aim is to give women an idea of what’s involved in male masturbation. None of this is a “philosophy” endorsing dehumanizing images of women or deviant sexual practices.
When a man looks at images of women he will never meet, it is not a threat to a woman. If she tries to outlaw it, her boyfriend or husband may find himself thinking about her girlfriend as her girlfriend bends over. If a woman tries to outlaw male masturbation, she shouldn’t be surprised that her celebrity magazines end up on his nightstand.
You can screw up a little boy by how this is handled. Forbid the activity, and you risk creating a man who is impotent. Expose males to deviant behavior or horrible images, and some men will become monsters.
The wisest course is to accept average, run-of-the-mill, male masturbation for what it is. Just another fact of life.
Sources:
• James Dobson quote is from The Big Book of Masturbation by Martha Cornog.
