MASTURBATION
November 7, 2008
I have had this website for five years now and have yet to offer an essay on the subject of masturbation. I have mentioned it before, to be sure, in the essay Sex With a Clone, for example, but I have never dedicated an essay to it. Come to think of it, I never once even mentioned it in my book Watching the River Flow, which was a journal I kept for an entire year. Now that (to me) is really odd.
One of the best things I ever heard on the subject was spoken by no less a personage than my high school science-and-health teacher:
I am sure that this was not original with him, but I will somehow always associate it that way.
We have all heard that there are two sides to every story, and in that spirit I am going to consider the pros and cons of this highly popular personal sport.
pro: safe vicarious pleasure
con: conditions social withdrawal and aloofness
I think this is a pretty good way to size up the issue. I highly doubt that anyone still believes that masturbating has any serious health effects other than those of a mental nature.
From a purely physical standpoint, masturbating is safe, but in the context of society it may create, well ... difficulties for us.
If you are masturbating, the chances are that you are not interacting so much with real flesh-and-blood people, at least in a way that you would if you were not masturbating.
In this day and age, this is happening in a totally different way, with the personal computer. I think it is perfectly valid to view our obsessive involvement with computers and the internet as a new form of masturbation. It fits the basic masturbation paradigm: the derivation of pleasure through impersonal interaction.
It is nigh irresistible to wonder whether or not this ok. Who could say? But we can most emphatically state that relationships with real people are risky.
And people are dangerous. For the most part, only people get us into trouble, legal trouble. On the other hand we must be around people to be truly human. Being human requires human interaction. Feral children prove this most dramatically. They were not around humans and could hardly be described as human, except in outward appearance, in their physical manifestation.
Something of the same may be seen in animals, like ducks for example, which, newly hatched, latch onto the first thing they see as their parent. To be a duck, a duck has to be around other ducks. It is the same with humans. To be one you have to be around them. But who can say it is a good thing to be human? Only other humans. So it seems almost pointless to pursue this line of questioning.
I would like instead to pose questions about some possible varieties of masturbation and their association with cheating.
1. Would you consider it cheating if you discovered your spouse masturbating with the aid of a magazine (the so-called making-the-scene-with-a-magazine moment)? Most everyone I pose this question to just laughs and answers in the negative.
2. Would you consider it cheating if scenario 1 were associated with watching porn, especially live porn?
3. Would you consider it cheating if you found your spouse having sex with one of those fancy love dolls? (I'm not talking about those $39.95 specials. I'm talking about those Real Dolls that cost upwards of $5,000.) Most everyone answers this in the negative also, but they don't laugh so much. They start to get a little more serious when giving their answer.
4. Would you consider it cheating if your husband used the services of a prostitute? Most of the women I present with this question insist that this would most definitely be cheating.
5. Would you consider it cheating to have sex with a clone? I offered this question in the essay Sex With a Clone, and took the position that it would be just another form of masturbation.
My personal position on the matter is that all of the above are instances of masturbation. Why? Because they are all impersonal. The involvement with a prostitute could of course become personal, but it doesn't have to be, especially if the man is consorting with different women all the time. If he's going to the same girl on a regular basis, then I'm going with the cheating as well. Seeing the same girl consistently is unquestionably an indication that things have become personal.
Finally, there is a valid argument to be made that all sex is masturbatory. If people truly are the selfish bastards that they are made out to be (and I have a hard time arguing with this contention), then a man is engaging in a form masturbation when he is having sex with an actual woman. Instead of using his hand, he's using her vagina.