'''Part 2 The Morality of Masturbating'''
Towards a Christian View of Sexual Self-Stimulation
Compassionate, Informed, Biblical Insights
It is recommended that you start at Part 1
Masturbation: A Threat To One’s Marriage?
What if God lovingly entrusted you with the precious gift of sex, intending for it to draw you closer to your marriage partner, and you kept distorting God’s delicate gift until it became something that has the very opposite effect, making you feel like withdrawing from your partner and squandering your sexual powers on yourself?
Auto-eroticism carries the grave danger of producing cravings for types of sexual stimulation that no marriage partner could ever give. Self stimulation – even the mere memory of it – thus has the potential to weaken the marriage bond, undermining (would it be accurate to say perverting?) the very reason why God gave us sexual pleasure.
Just as nicotine patches can at best lower, but not stop, a smoker’s craving for cigarettes, so having the best lover in the world, is unlikely to stop a masturbator from sometimes craving sensations that only masturbation can create. What human, for example, could produce in a partner the exact sensations of a vibrator? And even if it were possible for a partner to mimic the sensations a masturbator experiences, that type of sex is most unlikely to be anywhere nearly as pleasurable for the giver as for the receiver. Not only will this make it less of a shared experience, the giver will find it impossible to be as motivated as a masturbator would be to continue this type of sex for sessions as long and as frequent as the masturbator has come to expect. And no partner can receive the constant, instant feedback available to the masturbator in order to know the exact moment-by-moment adjustments needed to maximize the receiver’s pleasure. So, for several practical reasons, a masturbator will probably develop a taste for, or even an addiction to, feelings no partner can reproduce.
“I had no other choice but to learn how to put my sex drive to sleep or I’d be in sin,” lamented a wife who e-mailed me. Tragically, it turned out that her dilemma had nothing to do with her husband’s low sex drive. She discovered that he had been addicted to pornography and masturbation for all nineteen years of their marriage. Can you understand why she was unimpressed by her husband’s proud boast of never having had an affair? Cold comfort indeed. No matter how extreme this degree of marital neglect might be, it dramatically highlights how inadequate marriage to a willing sexual partner can be in breaking an addiction to masturbation.
A menopausal woman contacted me, so alarmed over the impact of having innocently used a vibrator just a couple of times that she is keen to share her experience with you. Lulled into thinking she was engaging in a medical treatment, the “medical” advice had her needlessly resorting to repeated mechanical sexual stimulation instead of applying a harmless lubricant, as commonly used before intercourse by vast numbers of women.
She writes:
I never in a million years thought that using a vibrator would escalate me into a world of addictive behavior. It was just one week ago that I read an article about menopause. It promoted the idea that using a vibrator to keep yourself well lubricated would help avoid dryness and itchiness.
It rocketed me into a cycle of morning and evening masturbation behind my husband’s back. I felt terrible, guilty, and ashamed but at the same time I couldn’t stop thinking of new sex toys I was planning to buy. It was ridiculous. My entire day was filled with constant craving for mechanical stimulation without the warmth and love of the man God has given me. Needless to say it was only one week ago and I have since closed the book on this practice. Thankfully, I stopped before it enslaved me. One week of that self-indulgence was enough. I believe I had opened a door to self-destruction that could have ruined my life. Thank God he warned me early and I was smart enough to listen to him. I am writing an article for some magazines to help warn other woman who are as innocent as I was in believing that such a technique could be helpful during menopause. All it did was cause me an additional problem.
I know it will be difficult to ignore the craving that I am sure will pop into my head at the most unexpected times, but I will continue to pray and with God’s help I can put this behind me. He has always been there for me for all the other challenges in my life. I am so glad that I only engaged in this activity for one week and not for months or years. I think God told me before it got out of hand and I heeded his gentle warnings. He is my strength and I couldn’t go on without him. Thanks for sharing your web site with others because I am sure there are a lot more woman like me that will need to reach out to someone for information or support.
This woman’s experience raises even more concerns for average people when you consider that her near-addiction had nothing to do with sexual deprivation. She is happily married and enjoys what she calls a “great” sexual relationship with her husband. Emotionally, solitary sex will end in a haunting emptiness that will hound its victim like a nagging fear. Nevertheless, sex with oneself is likely to produce raw sexual feelings more intense than sex with anyone else.
Moreover, masturbation and mental or visual adultery feed off each other, such that combining masturbation with either fantasy or pornography multiplies the pleasure many times over. Adding to this is the fact that reality rarely matches fantasy, nor equals the never-aging, airbrushed fakes of flesh magazines or computer images. In terms of sheer animal pleasure, the mix of masturbation with unreality therefore intensifies the likelihood of producing a greater sexual high than intimacy with a real person, no matter how skilled and attractive that person is. This could foul one’s marriage (or future marriage if one is single) so deeply that it could prove even more disastrous than the damage caused by physical adultery. I wonder how many marriages are haunted by the ghost of solo-sex. How many people are forced to compete in bed with the elusive highs of their partners’ previous love affair with a vibrator?
Many marrieds consider themselves heterosexual and yet for sheer sensual enjoyment prefer solo-sex over heterosexual relations. Still others are, as it were, bisexual in their preferences – divided in their loyalty to heterosexual relations and to sex with themselves or with a machine. And although they are tempted to blame their partners for their divided loyalties, the biggest cause is usually premarital sex with themselves.
Even if you were to end up fortunate enough to prefer your partner over masturbation as your main source of sexual pleasure, and even if you never used a vibrator, masturbation is still likely to produce sensations that your partner cannot exactly duplicate, and so relating to your partner cannot be expected to satisfy some of the desires your past indulgence has cultivated. It’s like eating meat for years and then changing to eating nothing but fish. Even if you enjoy fish and it can always satisfy your hunger, the availability of fish does not mean you will never again crave meat, once you have developed a taste for it.
Especially when it gets a grip on us, any high – be it chemical or sexual – affects us so profoundly that even decades after breaking the habit, a person is likely to suffer the occasional flash of craving for their former source of pleasure. The tragedy is that if you have masturbated, you have not just had previous sexual experience, you have been sexually spoilt. You have been sexually pleasured – probably more times than you can count – by the one person who for each split second knows exactly how and where you most want to be stimulated. Since each moment is unique, and no one on this planet has access to the precise, instant feedback that you have when you masturbate, no one outside your brain can have this degree of skill in maximizing your pleasure. So when you marry, you do so with the memory of having received sexual pleasure from someone who, at least in some highly significant respects, your partner can never equal. And since that person who gave you such exquisite sexual pleasure is yourself, your partner has to contend with something far worse than if you had once had a uniquely skilled lover. After you marry, your partner would not let you sleep in the same bed with your former lover every night.
When, however, you yourself are the person you are tempted to turn to for sexual thrills, your partner has no choice but let you sleep with his/her sexual rival. Twenty four hours a day, you are with the rival to your partner’s sexual advances, and at almost any instant that you have the urge to do so, you can be alone with yourself – alone with the person who once gave you unique sexual pleasure. No other threat to your partner’s claim to exclusive sexual rights to your body is nearly as physically close to you as often, especially when no one else is around. This is not only more than you would be with a potential adulterer, the opportunities for sexual intimacy are far greater than with your own partner. And what makes the temptation even more alarming is that if you are like most masturbators, you have already surrendered to your own seductive wiles countless times before.
Masturbation can grow into an addiction that is devastatingly difficult to break. Many singles commence their slippery slide under the delusion that at the sight of a marriage license their ingrained habit will magically vanish in a puff of smoke. That’s like taking hard drugs to dull the pain of being single, expecting that when you find someone special the drug addiction you have cultivated will miraculously disappear. Even though being in love has medically proven drug-like qualities, it will not eliminate a habitual craving for illicit drugs fostered by years of indulgence. Likewise, even though marital relations has certain similarities to masturbation, many people have discovered to their despair that not even having a superb sexual partner can remove their compulsion to engage in solitary sex. They frequently end up either distressing their marriage partner by their behavior becoming known, or tormenting themselves by treating their habit as a dirty secret to be kept from the person they were meant to be transparently open and intimate with.
People react somewhat unpredictably to the discovery that their partners cannot stop masturbating. Some couples tolerate adulterous sex and, presumably, even more people tolerate the knowledge that their partners do not regard them as their sole source of sexual satisfaction but regularly withdraw from marital love into a world of solo sex. Others feel cheated out of some of the passion that they have always believed should be directed exclusively to one’s marriage partner. Still others feel devastatingly inadequate to know that their most determined efforts at marital relations are insufficient to satisfy the longings that masturbation has chiseled into their partner’s soul. One woman told me, ‘A wife finding her husband with another woman is easier to accept – after all the other woman may be younger or prettier. But for a man to prefer sex with himself than with his wife really twists the knife of rejection in her back.’ A man wanted marital relations, but his busy wife delayed a few minutes. When she entered the bedroom she found him masturbating on a sheet of newspaper. She felt shattered to think she could be replaced by yesterday’s newspaper. Decades later the memory is still etched into her mind.
I have helped married women break their own addiction to solo sex, but they found the habit so painfully difficult to break that for years they had thought it impossible to be free. Now that she is free, one woman is thrilled for me to tell her story. For decades she had kept her habit as a guilty secret from her husband, despite having great sex with him and having one of the best possible marriages. The bondage was so great that breaking the habit was one of the most liberating experiences of her life. However, upon gaining her freedom she saw her past indulges in an entirely different light, even though she had been a Christian for decades before this. She wrote to me:
The longer I remain in the light, the more clearly I see the darkness I was in all these years. It is breaking my heart. I’ve wasted it so and I can never get those years back. I have cheated my husband and worse yet my God. I’ve thrown away virtually my entire life on this horrid selfish habit.
How accurate her perceptions are, I’ll let you decide. She nevertheless had pleaded with me to tell others so that they might be spared what she has suffered.
Another woman wrote to me unconcerned about her own masturbation but greatly offended by her husband looking at porn. She felt it meant he preferred other woman over her. This so deeply affected her, she confided, that she could no longer achieve orgasm, even when she had solo sex.
When helping people with marital difficulties I try to assist them to see things from their partner’s perspective and also to see their own contribution to the problem. So I said, ‘I don’t defend your husband’s actions but doesn’t he have as much right to feel rejected by you as you feel rejected by him? Hasn’t he every right to worry that you prefer another woman (yourself) to him?’
‘He doesn’t even know I masturbate,’ she replied.
‘At least he’s being open with you and not doing things behind your back,’ I said. ‘But he was!’ She replied, ‘I found out about it because he was sneaking out of our bed about Two or Three in the morning. It felt like a betrayal to me.’
Then it hit her. This dear woman, who had been addicted to masturbation from the age of three, suddenly saw herself as just as guilty of betrayal and sexual unfaithfulness as the man she was sorely tempted to despise. Having seen her hypocrisy she is now breaking free of her addiction and is keen for me to share her story. A while later she again wrote, saying:
I must tell you, that although I am still tempted [to engage in it], (and probably will be for the rest of my life) giving up solo sex was the best thing for my marriage. I thought I was supplementing [what my husband gave me] (because I have a high sex drive and he has a low one), but what I was doing was robbing my marriage of the special gift God gives to married couples. She said when she has marital relations it is “so much more intense for me” than before giving up solitary sex. Abandoning solitary sex also coincided with improving her communication with her husband, however, so it is a little difficult to separate the role of each in her enhanced sex life.
Another woman – we’ll call her Debbie – has kindly agreed to share her story. Debbie was furious when she discovered that her husband had been unfaithful to her. She was determined not only to divorce him but to make him pay for his adultery. Since childhood, Debbie had been addicted to masturbation. She went from doing it several times a day during her teens to breaking the addiction cycle many times but, often after months of victory, she would return to it. She even sometimes viewed porn on the computer while masturbating.
Despite the wishful thinking of many singles, marriage did not miraculously end her addiction. She writes: Several years into marriage I heard the little voice that said, “There is something wrong with masturbation. There is a price. Now you can’t easily be pleased by your husband, who wants so badly to please you. You have programmed yourself to be able only to respond to your own stimulation.” I tried to ignore that voice of truth and to convince myself that my behavior was harmless.
It was not until she was staring divorce in the face that things become clear. She writes: Now I shamefully know that the little voice was 100% true. My choices did affect my marriage and our sexual intimacy. I feel like I stole something precious and God-given from our marriage and now I will never know what it could have been. She even wondered how much her habitual solo sex had detracted from their marital relations and so contributed to her husband seeking sex elsewhere.
After discovering her husband’s adultery, Debbie had felt even more pressure to comfort herself through masturbation. Driven to deaden her pain by maximizing her fleeting pleasure, she slipped into intensifying her orgasm by generating images of her husband having sex with the other woman. Just like her unfaithful husband, she was getting sexual pleasure out of his adultery! But for weeks she was too focused on herself to see it in that light.
Upon at last realizing the extent of her hypocrisy, this dear woman was horrified and deeply repented. When craving ones’ own pleasure or comfort, rather than the Lord’s honor and one’s marriage partner’s fulfillment, fantasies can take unexpected twists, with us hardly realizing what a slippery slope we are on. Debbie had fallen into just one of the countless scary possibilities. Never would she have guessed that her self-pleasuring would have corrupted her to the point of finding her sexual thrills in her husband cheating on her. As many people have discovered to their horror, sex is so powerful (divinely designed to glue two people together for life) that the consequences of misusing it can be frighteningly different to our intentions. If we resort to masturbation as some form of self-medication to comfort ourselves, the distressing event we are seeking comfort from will typically come to mind while we are pleasuring ourselves. As a result, sexual ecstasy ends up dangerously intertwined with a distressing event, thus perverting our sexuality.
If masturbation is harmless, so is playing with nuclear bombs.
The heart of much humbler Debbie turned from self-righteous fury to compassion for her husband. Suddenly her eyes opened to see in him a fellow sinner who, like her, needs the freedom of repentance and forgiveness found only in Jesus. The Lord has shined a light in an area of my life that needed cleansing and I have felt such freedom and joy ever since the Holy Spirit convicted me and gently exposed me to the full truth of the matter and moved me to repentance.
Even if you think of yourself as a virgin when you marry, the fact remains that if you have masturbated, your marriage partner will not be the only person with whom you have experienced sexual pleasure. You will never be able to change this sad fact. The most you could do is decide to never again masturbate. That way the memory, though indelible, will in time not be so fresh in your mind, and the temptation to keep turning to someone other than your partner – yourself – will slowly begin to fade. The less you have masturbated and the longer ago it was, the less a threat it will be to sexual exclusivity in marriage.
We know that psychological research confirms that whatever one thinks about or looks at when experiencing intense sexual feelings, will powerfully program one’s sexual response. For an extreme example, consider this e-mail sent to a counselor and published on the web:
I am a Christian girl currently in my late teens and I hope that you will be able to help as I'm really desperate. I've been masturbating since I was a child (I’m not even sure how it began) and while knowing that it is wrong and a sin against God, I'm so hooked to this habit, that I’m unable to stop doing it. It is so bad that my fantasies always go in the direction of being abused.
(Emphasis mine.) Do you think if this continues she is headed for a beautifully fulfilling marriage? She will most likely sub-consciously seek out an abuser as a husband – someone who will end up tormenting her and probably corrupting their children. Or if she found herself married to a wonderful man who longed to treat her with tender, loving respect, the discrepancy between him and the fantasies with which she had previously climaxed would probably leave her feeling sexually unfulfilled. Or consider someone who regularly masturbates in front of a mirror. Could this habit have the potential to make same sex genitals such a turn on that homosexuality becomes a temptation? A young woman discovered she could masturbate by thrusting. While doing so, she regularly found herself imagining she was a man having intercourse. Should that become an ingrained habit, I would worry about the long-term impact on her sexual identity.
The millions who masturbate using flesh magazines or computer images are ruining their sexual response; creating a need for an endless array of computer-enhanced, ever-youthful “beauties.” Their illicit thrill-seeking is foolishly diminishing their ability to enjoy a real woman. They are sentencing themselves to finding sex with just one life-partner unsatisfying; training themselves to be sexually unfaithful.
In addition to such serious considerations, I must warn the sexually frustrated that although Do-It-Yourself sex gives the illusion of providing sexual relief, it actually inflames sexual desires. It is like a drug that before long drives its victims to desperately seek yet another high to offset the unnatural downer that follows the artificial high. Although external pressures might cause people to wrongly imagine that illicit drugs provide relief, addicts soon find themselves in the predicament where their craving for drugs is caused not merely by the pressures but by the drugs themselves. Likewise, sexual pressures might influence people to hope that solitary sex brings relief but soon they find themselves spiraling around a whirlpool in which their cravings for masturbation are caused by masturbation itself. It is actually easier to control one’s natural sex drive than it is control one’s addiction to masturbation.
For someone craving sex to resort to solitary sex is like a starving man enjoying the aroma of food that he cannot eat. The smell might be pleasurable, but ultimately it only increases the starving person’s torment. Long-term addicts are unlikely to realize that the gnawing ache and burning desire they imagine masturbation eases, are actually worsened by the supposed cure. Despite illusions to the contrary, solo-sex ends up intensifying the single person’s frustration.
A 21 year old man, whose age places him at the very peak of his sex drive, has recently told me how his sexual cravings have dramatically lowered, making celibacy far more tolerable. He has excitedly mentioned it several times over a few weeks, indicating that he has truly calmed his raging libido, until needed in marriage. His secret was to avoid sexual stimulation by shunning films, television, fantasies, and of course, masturbation. He tried this after reading of my own similar success when I was his age.
To make sense of a third story, I must give a little background. Tragically, there are literally millions more male victims of child molestation than is popularly thought and the vast majority suffer in pain-wracked, or deeply disturbed, silence. One such man wrote to me saying he had been “deeply touched” by my insights into the dynamics of sexual abuse and went on to tell his story.
He had been introduced to sexual pleasure by his baby sitter. (Another popular myth is that there are few female molesters.)
He wrote: Like the glory of God that shines into the deepest darkness of our souls and depravity, one day my little brother caught us in the closet. He had the sense to tell my mom. My parents quickly put an end to the girl being around me. I remember very little else, other than being told it was dirty and not to let her or others take advantage of me like that. Nevertheless, the damage had been done and my life would forever be changed. Shortly after the incidents I started masturbating. My newfound pleasure consumed me and I would recall in vivid detail my abuse over and over again, all the time hating myself for it and despising what had happened, yet my flesh held onto it. The struggle with masturbation has lessened now that I’m in my [early] 20s, but it was a fierce battle through much of my life. . . . My life will always be scarred by my past. Drawing upon his long experience of wrestling with this, he wrote:
[There is] no question [that] the less I gave in [to masturbation], the less the desire grew within me – contrary to the many opinions online, both Christian and secular.
I replied, “The great lie of all temptation is that there will be some benefit in giving in. There never is.” Finding concrete benefits in quitting masturbation was a startling discovery for this young man. His long journey to this point began with searching the Internet for Christian sites that would affirm that masturbation is acceptable. I sought his permission to share his experience and this led to us partnering the crafting of a webpage for the vast number of men trying to come to terms with having been sexually interfered with when young. A link appears at the end of this web series. The Lord commands us to flee youthful lusts (2 Timothy 2:22), which is quite the opposite of pandering our sexual yearnings and inflaming them by self-pleasuring. People suffering from sexual frustration are unlikely to enjoy anything close to the full benefits of a subdued libido until several months after quitting sexual self-gratification.
Spiritual implications Jesus said: Deny yourself; “hate” yourself relative to your love for God.
Paul said: Crucify the flesh; be lovers of God, not lovers of pleasure; the single woman who lives for pleasure is dead even while she lives; don’t let anything enslave you; I beat my body and make it my slave so that I myself will not be disqualified; no one should seek his own good, but the good of others; learn to control your own body in a way that is holy and honorable, not in passionate lust like those who do not know God; whether you eat or drink or whatever you do, do it all for the glory of God.
John said: We should lay down our lives for our brothers. Peter said: Since Christ suffered in his body, arm yourselves also with the same attitude, because he who has suffered in his body is done with sin.
(Scriptures)
Is sexual self-indulgence likely to engender such an attitude to life? One might expect any ingrained habit of self-gratification – be it sexual or otherwise – would most likely produce a mindset of self-indulgence that spills over to other areas of life. It hardly seems conducive to developing the self-sacrificing, Christlike frame of mind that the Bible portrays as characterizing the normal Christian life.
Could playing with yourself make you blind? Blind to the immorality of lust? Blind, perhaps, to the fact that the world does not revolve around ourselves? Blind to the centrality in the message of Jesus that we must deny ourselves and die to self? Could Do-It-Yourself sex be an attempt to convince ourselves we are moral, when deep down we are angrily telling God, “If you won’t give me a legitimate way to have sex, I’ll have my fill anyhow”? Is our dirty secret not merely that we masturbate but that we are in rebellion against God?
Should we make pleasure our god, we’ll end up enslaved to an endless craving that torments and humiliates us. Make purity your goal, however, and you’ll rejoice forevermore. Keep striving for pleasure and you’ll shrivel up inside; seek purity and you’ll thrive. Pursue pleasure and you’ll crash; pursue purity and you’ll soar.
Back to Basics There is a divine order – a way that God says things must be done, even though alternatives have a strong appeal to humans. For example, entering God’s presence through Christ’s righteousness touches God’s heart so deeply that he pours out supernatural blessings of indescribable dimensions. On the other hand, trying to enter God’s presence through self-righteousness is repulsive to God.
Scripture is clear that there is also a divine order for sex. Our challenge is to discover how masturbation fits into this. If it isn’t part of the divine order, Do-It-Yourself sex must be as repugnant to God as self-made religion. In our desperation to find an answer, it is tempting to try to draw conclusions from basic principles. What follows is so powerfully presented that at first reading it might seem irrefutable. Nevertheless, this line of argument has a weakness and dangers, which will be exposed later in this web series. So, without taking it too seriously, let’s see where this approach leads. We’ll then discuss why I say that the main difference between human logic and sheer guesswork is that the former generates more pride. Consider these glimpses into the past.
- A Swiss physician named Tissot published in 1758 a treatise proclaiming masturbation to be the principal cause of mental illness. Up until the Twentieth Century, his views were a standard reference in most medical textbooks.
- Driven by the theory that a particular diet lowered the urge to masturbate, Dr. John Harvey Kellogg created cornflakes in 1884.
- Between 1856 and 1919 the U.S. Patent Office granted fourteen patents on crude, usually brutal, devices to prevent boys from masturbating.
(Source) Given the similarity between a climax resulting from sex with oneself and one resulting from sex with a partner, it is hard to imagine how solo-sex could ever be thought to present grave health risks. And yet in the Western World until relatively recently, this very belief was widely held, even among intelligent people. It would seem a safe guess that people leapt to the presumption that masturbation must be dangerous because although they knew the act has a strong natural attraction, there was something about it that made them feel decidedly uneasy. Did this feeling arise from misconceptions, or from the Spirit of God? Is it mere coincidence that the era that has veered from the views of previous generations by regarding auto-eroticism as morally neutral is the same one in which its psychologists and intellectuals think of humans as little more than machines and the product of chance? Is masturbation regarded as harmless because of “experts” who have removed God from their thinking? Could it be that the new attitude to Do-It-Yourself sex is brought to you by the same people who favor Do-It-Yourself abortion kits and Do-It-Yourself euthanasia? Are Christians foolishly looking for guidance about masturbation from these “experts,” supposing their assertions are based on careful research, when the views touted by these “experts” and impinging on our minds from a thousand different sources are merely the product of godlessness?
According to Johann Christoph Arnold:
The so-called lines typically drawn between pornography, masturbation, one-night stands, and prostitution are actually an illusion. All of them are means used to attain sexual satisfaction without the “burden” of commitment. All reduce the mystery of sex to a technique for satisfying lust. And all of them are shameful – the secrecy of those who indulge in them betrays that fact more clearly than anything else (Romans 13:12-13).
Masturbation, it would seem, is highly addictive for the simple reason that it is sexual, and sex is divinely designed to hurl a husband and wife into a life-long ‘addiction’ to each other. It is clear from Scripture that God created sex for having children and to superglue® a man and wife together. It is therefore enticing to conclude that any other use of sex is a perversion of God’s plans for sex.
One might also assume that sex was created for expressing marital love and that love focuses on giving, not self-indulgence. If so, to use sex solely to pleasure oneself would seem an abuse of God’s gift, like being regularly given money to save up to buy a special gift for someone but, instead, squandering the money on yourself. And what if it turns out we never have the chance to spend it on the right person? Then we are obligated to return it unspent to the one who entrusted it to us. If, however, that giver is our loving Lord, he will be so thrilled with our faithfulness that our reward will be astounding. Singles who see no hope of ever marrying might ask, why would God give me the ability to enjoy sexual pleasure just to leave it lying dormant? This matter is explored in Singles: Celebrate your Sexuality.
You’ll find a link to it at the end of this web series. By reading it, you’ll discover there is great value in having a sex drive, even if you never in your life experience sexual pleasure. Moreover, our sexual potential is like our reproductive potential. Are we to conclude that people should have children regardless of whether they are married, simply because God gave them that potential? Like the widow honored by Jesus for giving away all that she had, we can bless God by giving him all our potential for sexual pleasure. And since the Lord daily gives us our potential for sexual pleasure, singles have the privilege of daily giving him this precious offering.
We have seen that thinking about spiritual things whilst masturbating might be spiritually dangerous. And to masturbate – to deliberately arouse sexual feelings – whilst thinking about someone you are not married to, must drag the offender to the depths of sinful lust. However, other than marrieds thinking of their partners, there are just two other possibilities – masturbating whilst thinking sexually about oneself or whilst thinking about nothing in particular. And both options open yet another can of worms.
Wrote D. H. Lawrence:
In masturbation there is nothing but loss. There is no reciprocity. There is merely the spending away of a certain force, and no return. The body remains, in a sense, a corpse, after the act of self-abuse. There is no change, only deadening. There is what we call dead loss. And this is not the case in any act of sexual intercourse between two people. (Source) Although using porn and/or illicit fantasizing is clearly contrary to God’s holy ways, such immorality is at least conditioning one’s sexual response to regard sex as having some sort of focus on another person, even though it is perversely selfish. Certain other types of equally sinful fantasy also reinforce the fact that sex should be shared with, or directed towards, another human. One might therefore wonder whether to masturbate whilst focusing on only oneself or “thinking of England” is even more perverted – an even greater deviation from God’s intention for sexual pleasure – by distorting sexual pleasure into something that is entirely self-focused, or, like a highway leading nowhere, it is devoid of any focus. Are such masturbators cultivating a lust for their own flesh? Could sexually pleasuring yourself be as conceited as falling in love with yourself? If sex is divinely intended to focus on another person, then having sex with yourself must be as weird as praying to yourself.
Does reducing sexual relief to a mechanical act purge the act of sin or does it in some indefinable sense reduce us – people divinely created and redeemed – to machines?
Is it the ultimate in depravity to have sex with a washing machine, or a vacuum cleaner or a vibrator or a pillow or a mattress or your hand?
Since Scripture is emphatic that the most casual of sexual encounters makes you one with a person, and it is degrading to become sexually one with an animal, just how dehumanizing is it to have sex with a machine, or with an object? If 1 Corinthians 6:15-20 (see also 2 Corinthians 6:14-17) declares it is a spiritual perversion to take that which is Christ’s (your body) and make it one with a prostitute, what are the spiritual implications of making a part of Christ one with a sex machine?
If it is an abomination to relate sexually with an animal, what about with an animal’s skin or fur or wool? If it is perverted and degrading to have sex with a beast, what about sex with a plant, or a plant product, such as a cotton sheet? How close to the mark is the Oxford Dictionary (1951) in defining masturbation as self abuse? We rightly view child sexual abuse as an horrific crime. What if solo-sex makes you the child of God who is abused, and in this crime you are not only the victim but the offender?
And how accurate is another old term: secret vice? And what about the more modern term, “solitary sex” or “solo-sex” – having sex with yourself? If sex with someone we are not married to is immoral, and sex with someone of the same gender is a perversion, and sex with an animal as an abomination, what about sex with oneself? Just how inseparably linked should sex and marriage be? If we saw sex the way God does, would sexually exciting yourself be as unthinkable as marrying yourself?
Is masturbation not just sex outside of marriage, but sex outside of any relationship at all? Is this the ultimate in the cheapening of sex? Is it sex turned in on itself, like a starving person consuming his own flesh? If it is deviant to submit to sexual stimulation from someone who is the same gender, is it an even greater deviation from the divine purpose of sex to receive sexual stimulation from someone who is not merely the same gender, but from someone who is the very same person?
Were sexual feelings divinely designed to be intricately connected with the height of human intimacy? If so, is it perverse to deliberately produce those feelings through a mindless, mechanical act, as far removed from human intimacy as one can possibly go?
Dumbfounded Much of the above amazes me. It reads as if written by someone desperate to attack masturbation and yet I am quite unconscious of any such axe to grind. I certainly had no intention of writing this way when I began. Whether these disturbing questions came from God or my own mind, I cannot tell. All I know is that they formed unexpectedly while praying and meditating on the subject.
The issues raised are grave concerns, but they are essentially an attempt at human logic. I must explain why I place little faith in this approach to discerning how the Creator of sex views masturbation.