Recently a young man showed up on my site's forum asking questions about masturbation. The same day, I read that a region of Spain is publicly promoting masturbation to kids with a "Pleasure is in your own hands" campaign. Not long ago, Britain's National Health Service came up with a similar campaign sloganned, "an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away." Although well intentioned, are such efforts sound?
The fact is, orgasmic pleasure isn't in our hands. It's largely in our brains—the result of neurochemical bursts. Without them, orgasm would be no more memorable than burping. This has important implications for arriving at the ideal masturbation advice. In a past post, I related what men have been sharing about how decreasing masturbation frequency can unexpectedly boost confidence, social skills, and even loving feelings. In this post, I'll consider why heavy, shame-free masturbation is potentially as much of a ticking bomb as shame-laden masturbation.
Due to the way it affects our brains, masturbation entails two risks that are easily overlooked.
1. Escalation Pitfall
Although masturbation is natural, it is also natural for the search for orgasm to escalate fairly easily. This is especially true if the stimulation associated with it is very frequent or intense. Examples of uncommon intensity might be masturbation accompanied by threats or the belief that one is "going to hell," or masturbation to today's extreme Internet porn. In contrast, normal intensity would be a child discovering masturbation around puberty without an artificial emotional charge. (This is not to say that masturbation can never become compulsive via guiltless self-discovery.)
Orgasm can produce not just a drug-like high, but also a neurochemical recovery period as the brain returns to homeostasis. The more powerful the blast of neurochemical excitement during orgasm, the lower the lows as the brain recovers. In some of us recovery may take the form of more intense cravings due to a numbed pleasure response in the brain, (mild or severe) lethargy, depression, anxiety or, in the sexually repressed, remorse (due to projection of distress onto a harsh deity). The result is often a desire to self-medicate with more masturbation. Many don't perceive the escalation tendency until they are free from orgasm for a period and then return to it.
Today, "the more you do it the more you want it" is generally mistaken for healthy libido. Yet it's probably more akin to comfort eating. Labeling it as healthy simply because it's natural averts investigation of its consequences. We warn parents and kids of the risks of compulsive junk food consumption or compulsive video gaming—but we're unwilling to suggest moderation in masturbation, even though the same primitive brain mechanism fuels all compulsions.
It's simpler to tell kids to eat their veggies than explain that masturbation can relieve sexual tension in the immediate term—yet make subsequent sexual frustration worse. Perhaps more family discussions should revolve around the brain's delicate reward circuitry and how it can bleep misleading "yes" signals. Remember those rats that were wired so they could press a lever to stimulate the reward circuitry (much as an orgasm does)? They hit the lever until they dropped.
Freud pupil, Rudolf von Urban (Sex Perfection and Marriage) advises that if kids are made aware the "escalation snag" (and never shamed about sexuality), they will work out the challenge of finding the ideal amount of masturbation for themselves. After all, we humans possess more gears than "fifth" and "neutral" when it comes to sexual activity. Kids can flex their self-discipline muscles to come up with a masturbation interval that doesn't escalate, or let wet dreams run their course, or get more vigorous exercise, or find a sweetheart. (Holding hands, adoring someone, and hanging out together are very soothing for pair-bonder brains like ours, even when intercourse isn't an option.)
However, without information about how sexual frustration can escalate when one tries to exhaust it each time it arises, kids can be thrown onto a treadmill without controls. If they do slip into compulsion, they have no idea why it happened, how to restore balance, or what recovery will be like. In fact, they may not even know their behavior is compulsive, if frantic, frequent masturbation is the norm among their friends. If you are eating Twinkies and chips every meal because your friends are too, you might not think to ask why your cravings for sugar and fat are so intense.
This is not a minor point. Heavy porn users who choose to cut back often experience intensely uncomfortable withdrawal symptoms. They don't understand that such symptoms are normal. They also don't know that it takes substantial time for the brain to reboot (restore equilibrium).
Surprisingly, even if they were not raised in sexually repressive homes and feel no shame about masturbating, some conclude that withdrawal symptoms like anxiety, emptiness, irritability, brain fog, headaches, intense cravings, and so forth are somehow the wages of sexual repression, rather than a predictable result of its opposite. Ignorance makes cutting back seem like a dangerous course, so escalation seems the only option.
2. Unwanted Learning
An orgasmic blast is a powerful learning experience because our genes want us to remember everything connected with making babies or even practicing. Today, a kid on the web can vicariously participate in dozens of highly stimulating sex acts in one afternoon without even taxing his own, (previously) more limited, imagination. In contrast, our hunter-gatherer brain evolved when exciting sex with a novel partner was a rare genetic bonanza.
The more dopamine released in connection with stimulation the more value the brain assigns to the event(s), and the more deeply the brain wires the experience. Obviously, watching sex with goats doesn't necessarily merit being recorded as a valuable experience, but try telling your limbic brain that!
This same learning/wiring process can produce repercussions more tragic than goat flashbacks. For example, "forbidden" and "sinful" (that is, risky) sex jolt the brain with both dopamine ("gotta get it!") and adrenaline (fear). This is how sexual repression can infuse otherwise normal sexual activity with a memorable drug-like aura. To gain a sense of just how good "risky" can feel, see Why bathroom sex is hot, in which a man laments being out of the closet because he longs for that altered state.
