I've just finished studying at theological college. I found your web site by accident a couple of months ago and I feel like I've come home. At last I've found somewhere where I can be frank and admit to masturbating, and where others are frank enough to admit to it, too. I was also very interested in the recent entry on Catholic masturbation guilt, as I had a similar experience myself. I was fairly carefree about masturbation as a teenager. My mother gave me a "talk" when I was 13. She told me that now I was growing up and I might find that I sometimes "wet myself" in bed. She told me not to feel embarrassed or ashamed if this happened. Then she handed me a booklet and said, "It's all in here." The booklet said very general stuff about men impregnating women with their semen. It didn't mention erections, but near the end it did say that boys sometime have nocturnal emissions of their semen and that some boys find they like to masturbate. That was fairly clear – masturbation and "wet dreams" were part of growing up. It was something most boys do and it was not an issue for my parents. I matured sexually at age 15 with a couple of "wet dreams," and then I started masturbating regularly. At that time I shared a room with my older brother. We had a tacit agreement that we could each masturbate if we wanted, but we never talked about it. As such I got away with masturbating right under everybody's noses at home: my mother acquiesced to the stains on my sheets, and my brother to the rubbing sounds and gasps of pleasure that I made (even though he rarely did it himself). Everybody in the family knew I masturbated every night, and I had great fun doing it. I was "pleasantly surprised," for want of a better expression, when I hadn't grown out of it by my early 20s. I'd gotten a clear impression that it was a teenage thing, but here I was still playing with myself, still getting spontaneous erections and "wet dreams" just the same. So I carried on.
I don't think the Bible teaches specifically against masturbation, but when I started at theological college I realized the fact that I masturbated would not be what most people expected of me – that people would expect I had grown out of it by now, or should be able to "control myself" better. I knew that some people would even regard me as degraded or dirty. Then I found an article about "owning" your sexuality. It didn't have much to do with masturbation as such. It talked about recognizing patterns and rhythms in your sexuality, acknowledging whether you were hetero, bi, or gay, and how strong your sex drive was. However it did make me think about why I masturbated, and shortly after I read that article, I gave myself "consent" as it were to carry on doing it. There were clearly patterns and rhythms in my sexuality that made me want to masturbate, that were always going to be there, and I had to be realistic. As a Christian I have committed myself not to have sexual relations outside marriage, but masturbation is accessible to me and I figured I owed it to myself to go along with the natural instincts and urges of my own body and enjoy the sexuality I have been given (that I "own") – in other words, to be myself.
That's how I resolved it. Reading JackinWorld has made me more aware that for all the people who don't expect it of me to be a masturbator, there are an equal number of people who regard it as perfectly normal and practice regular masturbation themselves.
- age 29, United Kingdom
Do you find yourself masturbating more often during some seasons than others? Why?
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