sin

My nearly 9 years of masturbation have been plagued with misinformation. I keenly recall one of my early experiences: I was watching Saturday Night Live, and Dr. Joycelyn Elders was being portrayed, just after all the hoopla over her now-infamous remarks. At that time, I had just turned 12 and had been getting erections for some time, but was still uncertain exactly what they were good for other than embarrassment. Speaking with my parents on anything sex-related was, and still is, difficult.

About 6 years ago, at the age of 12, I discovered the many joys of masturbation. It was a regular night, and I retired to the bathroom to take a bath before I went to bed. I liked to take long baths; sometimes I would even read in the bathtub, but most of the time I just relaxed and let my mind wander. I retracted my foreskin, as my father had instructed, to wash my penis and prevent infection. This time the feeling I had was unlike any other — somewhere between an unscratchable itch and a pleasant tickle. I continued to do this, and the odd sensation became stronger, and more pleasurable.

Hello fellow masturbators. My name is Jason, and I live in the Bible Belt of the South. I first started masturbating when I was 13 and didn't understand what was happening. Sex isn't something my family mentions, much less rubbing your own penis. I'd had a good day at school, so after I took my shower that night, I lay down on the bed and started rubbing a pillow across my penis. I had been having erections for some time, but nothing like I was about to feel. I suddenly ejaculated and thought I had done something horrible and that I was about to die.

This is a shameless account of the masturbatory experiences of a man who has masturbated regularly since he was 14 and who now, as he approaches 60, considers masturbation to be one of the most enjoyable sexual experiences of all and an art in its own right.

You mention little about it in your web site, but certainly, men who aren't able to enjoy their masturbation are likely to confuse it with intercourse and subject women to the experience of being masturbation simulators rather than real persons with whom to interact. This is a common infliction of men, especially those who were educated Catholic, which taught that masturbation is sinful. How the church has distorted what should be the natural pleasure of every man is so bizarre, even more bizarre than what they have taught women about the sinfulness of sex.

As an older man who grew up Catholic, I now realize that the church did a major disservice to me, and continues to do the same to young Catholic men (and women) as well as to priests (and nuns). That disservice was to teach me that any expression of my sexuality was a sin unless it was by intercourse with my wife (which no young Catholic male has). Of course I "sinned"!

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.

I am a Catholic priest with over 40 years' experience of a religious vow of celibacy. 30 years ago one of my priest formators was preaching that "masturbation is just as natural as blowing your nose." But I could never quite get my mind around that, having swallowed the official teaching that masturbation was a mortal sin. But just recently a non-catholic friend said to me: "Masturbation is a necessary expression of your masculine sexuality," and something clicked. I thought about it for a bit and could see how masturbating helped me to really live in my body and to own my sexuality.

I was raised in a Catholic house -- but that didn't stop me from discovering this wonder of nature!

As a boy of 6 I stayed on my uncle's farm for the summer. His 2 daughters were older than me by 6 and 7 years. Being farm girls they knew about sex and loved to take me to the attic where spare featherbeds were kept. There we all got naked and on those big, fluffy mattresses they taught me the basics of sex. I remember my little penis getting hard, and how it felt good when they would ride it (without penetration). But they rode it so long it got sore and I insisted on playing a different game.