Playing With Yourself

On the question of "that boyish bad thing" masturbation

“‘Everything is permissible,’ but not everything is beneficial. ‘Everything is permissible,’ but not everything builds up.” 1 Corinthians 10:23 CSB

“Blessed are those who don’t feel guilty for doing something they have decided is right.” Romans 14:22 NLT

Ben heard the knock on his bedroom door and opened it to see his father, the man who never came up to his room. And his dad looked angry. “You need to stop masturbating. We can’t keep wasting water washing all these sheets,” he said. The blood drained from Ben’s face and he lost all ability to talk. He had no idea anyone knew, especially his father. But his father did not see his reaction. Not one for conversation, he had already left.

It’s true. Ben had been masturbating. He’d discovered it quite by curious surprise. While trying to fall asleep one night, he soothed himself by rubbing his sheets. And because it felt good he kept going and…Eureka! Like some explorer of old, he struck gold. Only later from a book did he learn what it was called.

I have heard a version of this story many, many times—men who in the innocent sensual exploration of their bodies as boys or teenagers discovered orgasm and masturbation quite by surprise. For many of them, it’s actually an unnerving or scary experience. One mother shared with me that her son ran to her terrified one night afraid he had injured himself. What a gift that he felt safe enough to talk with her. I remember asking my older brother if I was okay. He reassured me the plumbing was working as normal. I too am grateful I had a safe place to go.

What every single one of these men who were once boys needs to know is that this discovery is normal. Sensual exploration of our bodies is one million percent innocent. But it rarely feels that way

Sensual what?

Children are natural-born explorers. Nothing could be truer about them. It is how they discover and learn about the world around them—from mud puddles to electric sockets and everything in between. And the primary scientific tools they use are their senses. So they mush their hands in a puddle to feel the joy of squishy mud. They put that stick or toy or dead fly in their mouth to learn tastes. They bang pots together to discover the limits of their eardrums (and ours!). Our senses are given to us to know the world. We think of knowledge as academic and textbook. We forget that we all learned the world first by touching, tasting, smelling, seeing, and hearing our way around.

Call it sensual exploration.

It’s how children discover their own bodies too. We put our toes in our mouths. We screamed loud to know our voice. We pulled our ears and picked our noses. And via curious exploration, most of us probably found our own genitals too. Especially for us boys, they are so out there waiting to be befriended. “What are these round balls for under my penis?” Totally normal question I’ve heard as a dad. “Why does my penis get hard?” Great curious question. “It feels tickly to touch it.” Sounds like an explorers field notes. Touching your own genitalia as a kid arises from pure, innocent curiosity. And because we all have about 8-10k nerve endings there, it may even feel good and soothing

Though the average age of discovery is 13-15, it is not uncommon for children in their sensual exploration to discover masturbation earlier. This is not sexually motivated. Children are sensual, but they are not sexual (meaning they are not sexually awakened yet). Sexual awakening happens when we hit puberty and our hormones turn our sexual circuitry on. Sexuality then coexists with our sensuality in the body. Before that, we may have tons of curiosity about sex but not a sexually awakened felt experience of hormones, per se. We often equate sexuality and sensuality but they are very different.

Our sensual exploration actually begins in the world of the womb. Researchers have observed babies in utero that learn to suck their thumbs. What starts as random arm flailing slowly organizes around early comfort from the sucking reflex. Separate ultrasound studies on male and female babies in the womb also observed what researchers called masturbation-like “gratification behavior.” No joke. Again, this is not sexual. It’s simply soothing or comforting behavior, similar to thumb sucking. It just feels good.

The point I want to make here is that masturbation most often begins as innocent sensual curiosity and soothing.

Not just child’s play

When the topic of masturbation gets brought up, most of the men I work with respond with the flinch trained in them from childhood—the boyish bad thing I’m not supposed to do. They flash right back to the boy buried under mountains of shame who felt bad, sinful, perverted for touching himself.

But it’s not only the boy in us that struggles against this shame Masturbation can become a part of mature exploration and our ongoing sexual journey as adults. Research says a majority of adults (78% worldwide) practice masturbation in their lifetime. Certainly not everyone struggles with shame over it. But for many, questions about it remain into adulthood: Is this a good or bad thing to do? Can it be integrated into a healthy sexual journey? And where does the behavior cross into sin?

Most of us come by our shame honestly. For centuries, culture has scripted masturbation as a dangerous and sinful act. An 18^th century medical pamphlet once warned without evidence that masturbation could lead to blindness and the weakening of other faculties. Several 19^th century doctors tried to convince the world it would make you insane. These myths spread like wild fire and expanded to include other malformtiies, even death.

The church has done little better for many years, almost wholesale seeing masturbation as grievous sin. Fascinatingly, among the very early church fathers, historians can find only a single reference to masturbation. Some take this to mean they saw the act as trivial.

But somewhere that changed and changed drastically. Thomas Aquinas implied there are ways masturbation is worse than rape. Augustine considered even nocturnal emissions accompanied with lustful dreams as sinful. We’ve carried our fear of the body, especially sex, right through to our recent wave of purity culture. It condemned so much of our bodies design for arousal and pleasure, seeing it as lustful and dangerous. For some this fear was so strict in their purity driven homes, penis and vagina were considered swear words.

Still, though cultural shame can osmose into our felt experience, most of our sexual shame comes from moments in our story where we felt caught or exposed by our curiosity to the people that mattered to us—like Ben at the door frozen in front of his father.

Andrew remembers one particular bath time as a young boy when his curiosity lead him to play with his penis. His mother noticed and gasped, chiding him to stop. “That’s wrong to do.” But being a little boy, his curiosity got the better of him and he continued. His mother’s anger boiled now. “I said stop. I’ll spank you if you don’t quit.” Her angry face confused him and haunted him. The message was clear. Touching his penis was bad. Was his mother evil for this? No. I imagine her son’s free and innocent play provoked something of her own sexual shame. But rather than getting curious about it, she simply lashed out in contempt. And shame got passed to the next generation.

So is it good or bad?

It’s so easy to want a black and white answer about masturbation. But that answer does not exist and I wouldn’t trust anyone who gives it to you. Search the Bible for a verse to tell you the answer and you won’t find it. I think God did this on purpose. We want the good boy rule book and God wants to grow us up into mature men.

Some look to Genesis 38:9 when Onan “spilled his seed” in the act of sex with his new wife, the widow of his brother. This is a complex story. But lo and behold, it’s not simply the behavior itself of spilling his seed; it’s the fact that he was charged to provide children to his brother’s widow. And he selfishly refused. It’s his heart behind his behavior that matters most to the story.

Jesus certainly had strong words in the sermon on the mount for lust (Matthew 5:27-30), clarifying that the sin of adultery happens even in the heart. I’ve always found his solution enigmatic. He follows up the description of adultery with the charge to gouge out one’s eye if it causes you to sin. And then goes on to mention cutting of your hand as well. It’s pure speculation on my part, but I’ve wondered if he might be addressing lust driven masturbation. The mention of the hand just seems so out of place otherwise.

But notice that in both stories, the behavior always has a context, a story, and it’s the story that seems to be the point of discernment. The story scripts the sin, not simply the isolated behavior.

The one clear thing (well, two actually)

I think one thing is clear. The actual act of touching yourself—of physically exploring your body, including genitals, and feeling pleasure and soothing as a result—is not fundamentally wrong. Sensual exploration of your body is normal and even healthy curiosity. I see no reason to condemn the actual physical act of masturbation as something inherently wrong or sinful or harmful. We fail to remember that bodies are the very artwork of God and wired for pleasure. And we do well to bless this design, even be curious about it.

And even into adulthood, it can be sensual exploration. A version of this called sensate focus therapy is prescribed for couples, especially when past sexual abuse or trauma has made sex feel dangerous. It invites the partners to give and receive slow, safe sensual touch of each other’s bodies. This can calm the body, slow down the “fast drive to orgasm” version of sex, and return the pleasure of sensuality and being in the moment together.

Self-sensate focused therapy is also prescribed for treating premature ejaculation in men. It’s an attempt to disentangle anxiety from being wired to sex and pleasure. Some men were once boys that felt the need to rush masturbation to get quick anxiety relief or avoid being caught. Or as a isolating game of one, it left them dissociated and not connected to their bodies. I have also heard sensate focused exploration recommended to women for anorgasmia. One purity-culture-surviving couple told me for the first eight years of their marriage, they did not even know the wife could orgasm. Because fear and shame infused so many talks on modesty, she had never become familiar with her own body or pleasure centers. Sensate focused therapy actually let her discover her body and the heart of a God who made sex for women too, not just men like the church had implied.

So does that make mean masturbation is all good and fine?

If only it were that simple. But there is more to the story.

We left Ben standing at his bedroom door. What froze him was not only that his father knew he masturbated, but that he knew he did it often. After that first night when Ben discovered masturbation, he slept better. All those terrible fits of anxiety that jumped him nearly ever night since starting junior eased just enough to fall asleep. It became his night time anti-anxiety. But what he really wanted most was for his parents to notice his anxiety and talk to him about it. He froze at his door not simply with shame, but the desire and hope that his father had come to actually talk.

Like everything in our sexual lives, masturbation always has a story to it. It can be the story of innocence. But it can also be the story of unmet needs that get acted out in reactive ways. In other words, the simple act itself is not inherently wrong. But what is animating it? What is driving or motivating it? This is the second clear thing: I believe the value and impact of the entire act rests solely on the story that scripts it. And that desire, that script, that story can determine if masturbation is a sign of a deeper issue. The act itself must be weighed and discerned by its story.

One study linked excessive childhood masturbation to two different things beyond normal exploration. This is by no means exhaustive nor proof of causation. First, it found that for some children the behavior increased when there was a change in the amount of affection, attention, or connection being given to a child. This could be during weening or when another sibling is born. Or something abrupt happens in the child’s life and the level of connection to parents changes. Masturbation became the substitute for physical affection and comfort and connection.

That’s Ben’s story. It is not sin. But it is also not an adequate substitute for parental love. He needed help and care and support. He needed relationship. He needed his father to stay at that door and talk. The story mattered.

This study also linked excessive masturbation to being sexualized through sexual abuse. Our sexuality was not meant to be awakened until puberty. God scripted our bodies to release hormones to click on our sexuality. This was mean to be joyful and exciting and welcomed with innocence and curiosity and conversation and awe and most of all love.

When someone sexualizes a child early, they awaken the body to sexual pleasure in the terror of harm and the curse of shame. Trauma brings enormous confusion and pain. Our bodies and our hearts can feel at odds and split. And worse it pushes our bodies into an early sexual awakening, not in love or innocence, but pain and shame and confusion. Research has shown for example that on average girls who’ve been sexually abused begin menstruation and even breast development earlier. Masturbation can also be a sign of traumatic sexualization (via direct molestation or indirect sexualization). This is not a smoking gun for abuse. But our bodies can awaken to the sexual arousal cycle before we come of age and even know what is going on. And the trauma in the body can lead us to reenact this abuse sexually, especially the body/heart split between arousal and shame. We act out when we cannot speak out.

Can you see how much the story around masturbation matters most?

Both of these realities break my heart—a child trying to cope with the withdrawal of comfort and touch and affection using masturbation to self soothe. And a child, in the wake of sexual trauma, trying to cope with an awakened body and shattered heart and stolen innocence. And for neither of these stories do I see the masturbation as sinful. It’s a furious attempt at self soothing. Its survival.

We can carry that wounded boy inside us well into adulthood and keep reenacting his abuse and neglect with our masturbation scripts. And here is where things get messier. Your culpability as an adult to perpetuate an abuse script is self harm. I don’t believe masturbation is a healthy ongoing solution for neglect, anxiety, depression, stress, loneliness, or trauma symptoms. It is maladaptive, not really what you need.

And it can often involve hiding and betrayal and self hatred and defensiveness and lying. Because we now have more resources and agency, we are responsible as an adult for how we handle our pain through porn use or compulsive sexual behavior. Masturbation can become a part of sinful self gratification. It’s not the masturbation itself, but the hearts desire to take, to consume, to hold power over and against, to hide from ourselves and our community. That could be porn rituals. That could be a ritual of abuse. The script you keep writing with your masturbation matters.

“He never wants sex anymore,” Tonya said. She had begged her husband to come to counseling to address their near sexless and affection-less marriage “He won’t even touch me most times. I try to initiate with him and he lays like a dead fish. Even holding his hand feels like touching a corpse. But then I caught him looking at porn the other night after refusing me.” Her anger turned to tears. “It’s a knife to the heart. I just thought he didn’t like sex.” Ryan had been using masturbation with porn to refuse and avoid his wife. He deprived her selfishly so as not to risk with her. In this way, masturbation that takes your heart away from your partner is sinful.

But even when sin is in the script, we must move deeper beyond the behavior itself. I do not believe Jesus wants you to literally maim your body to stop. It would not work anyway. The whole point he is making is that adultery is not simply the behavior, but what happens in the heart. Its a failure to treat another human, a woman, with awe instead of objectification.

Ryan had confessed his sin so much to God without changing that he assumed he must just be evil. His work to recover from his sexual betrayal to his wife involved repentance and healing with her, yes, but it also involved giving up the “bad behavior” view of his porn use. He finally opened up and got curious about his ritual pattern since childhood of soothing with porn, a habit that began after his own sexual abuse. He was finally taking responsibility for that boy’s trauma and getting the help he needed to stop hurting himself and his wife.

To treat masturbation as a sinful boyish bad behavior on the surface is to foolishly shut our eyes to the deeper story of our lives and our bodies. It’s to be a fool. You must learn to be curious. All masturbation must be weighed by the story that animates it.

Does it bring harm or good?

Masturbation might be the way a husband handles his sexual desire if his wife is disabled or healing from having delivered a baby or working through past trauma and needing a sex fast. Maybe it's the way a widow grieves her husband sexually. What about a single man or woman who imagines healthy future sex? Or what about a person learning to honor the goodness of their sexual design?

Clear as mud?

I am not here to confuse you. But I do want to make masturbation more complex than we have. Most maturity involves leaving our black and white thinking to enter the gray and complex way life comes at us. That is true about mastrubation also. I’m going to ask you to sit with God, sit with your body, talk with your partner or safe friends, and discern what is best for you in relationship with God. Paul’s words on our freedom in Christ echo to me here. Masturbation may be permissible, but is it beneficial to you and to your relationships? Is it constructive to your life?

With every sexual experience you choose, you are writing a story for your sexual arousal template (which I mentioned here and here in my last posts). Your arousal is a really precious and sacred party of you. Parts of your sexual script were written without your consent. But where you have agency, you get to shape the script of your arousal. What story are you writing? To dignify yourself and your relationships, you absolutely must know.

Dan Allender once said, “If you can masturbate to the glory of God, go for it.” I hope that lets you take a breath. Paul minced no words on our freedom in God also when he says, “Blessed is the man who does not condemn himself for what he approves.” If you are settled and well in your body about masturbation, then let it be to the glory of God and the design of your body for touch, sensuality, and pleasure. And if you want to free your sexuality from a masturbation ritual of harm, may God be near. And let God be praised.

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