Humans are hardly alone in the enjoyment of solo sex. Innumerable species, including primates and house pets, engage in self-stimulation for fun. We once had a bachelor Bichon Frise with a disturbing passion for sofa pillows. Being a sex therapist, I wanted to be clinically cool about it but I couldn’t help cringing when he humped the pillows like a coked-up hustler getting paid by the stroke. We ultimately broke his habit, though I admit I felt like a party-pooper for ending his happy time.
From my clinical point of view, we are hard-wired to masturbate. We don’t have a choice about the impulse. It comes with the human territory. Considering how much effort has historically been expended on trying to force people to stop masturbating, if we could stop or control it we would have by now. Nor does anyone teach kids how to masturbate; if anything, they are discouraged from it, even punished for it. Yet nothing can stop the human drive to explore self-pleasure.
How Often Do People Masturbate?
As much as people lie, fudge and fib about sex, when it comes to masturbation, they lie even more. Indeed, sometimes they kid themselves and don’t realize (or accept) that they are masturbating. So it is almost impossible to know for sure what people are actually doing in the privacy of their bedrooms.
When I ran a blind poll on my blog a few years ago, 75% of the 235 respondents (male and female) said they masturbated at least once a day. That number isn’t scientific, but based on clinical and anecdotal experience, I think once every day is a reasonable estimate for healthy adults. Commonly, adults do it at night, as a relaxing pre-sleep ritual. (The second most common time to do it is upon waking up — for some people, a morning orgasm gives a lift to the day.) Some people benefit from masturbating two or three times a day, others will never want more than two or three orgasms a week or month. It’s all normal.
That said, the number of times any given individual feels the urge to masturbate is influenced by a range of factors: opportunity, health, psychological state, even DNA may play a role. We already know that some of us are born with more vigorous libidos than others, and that some of us have higher levels of hormones than others. We also have early research demonstrating that sexual behaviors are inherited (for example, genetic testing has shown that premature ejaculation appears to be a paternal trait). But biology is not entirely destiny when it comes to sex. Environment and opportunity play mitigating roles in how often a person masturbates. Most importantly, your attitude about your genitals influences your comfort-level and the pleasure received from touching yourself.
Ed M. was a genuinely likeable, earnest, kind man in his early 30s. The only child of a religious single mother, Ed learned right from wrong early and in very black and white terms. He worshiped his mother as much as he feared her. At age 13, when Ed’s mother caught him masturbating, his world came crashing in. He told me he could feel her disgust and disappointment in the core of his own soul. From then on, he vowed he would never masturbate again. He and his mother prayed for him to develop the strength to resist his urges, although he confided that, on the inside, he really didn’t think he’d been doing anything wrong. He just wanted to “do the right thing” and he believed his mother knew what God expected of him.
Ever since leaving home, his old urges returned, seemingly twice as intensely. His old resolutions faded and he resumed masturbating. However, he never got over the shame and guilt of his youth. He had internalized his mother’s disapproval so deeply that he literally felt he should be punished every time he touched himself. He came to me hoping I would be able to “cure” his need to masturbate. He blamed masturbation for his inability to form successful relationships with women. He was dying to get married, have children, and lead a normal life. He was convinced that his interest in masturbation was an obstacle to all that.
Ed spent a couple of years working with me on what I quickly perceived to be the genuine issue behind his angst: as much as he loved his mother, she had been such a powerful and controlling influence in his life that he was actually afraid of women; afraid of their control and afraid that they would disapprove of him as much as his mother had. His natural impulse to give himself pleasure had become confused with this fear, so that each time he masturbated he saw himself slipping further away from any possibility of marriage; yet, the more he saw himself slipping away, the more he seemed to need to masturbate. Slowly it became clear to him that his masturbation was not the problem. The real problem was his profound guilt and his mixed feelings about allowing himself to feel vulnerable around a woman. The anxiety he felt over his “weakness” merely filled him with so much tension that the only way to relieve his mind was by masturbating which, of course, only made him feel worse, and more stressed out. The vicious cycle had consumed his life.
As Ed’s self-esteem improved in therapy, and as he sorted out his mother’s anti-sex attitudes from his own fairly open-minded attitudes, he developed the confidence to date more. He was amazed and grateful when one woman he began seeing told him that she loved giving hand-jobs, and encouraged him to explore creative sex with her. I can’t say that all of his emotional baggage from life with his mom vanished, but Ed’s contentment and optimism rose spectacularly, thanks to a good sex life with an understanding and caring girlfriend, and he stopped demonizing masturbation.
Considering that they are so often punished for it, sometimes by their mothers, wives or girlfriends, sometimes by clergy, sometimes by culture itself, it’s not surprising that many men struggle with emotional pain over masturbating. The culture accepts that men are highly sexed and jokes about masturbation are now as prevalent as condemnations and shaming about it. But if male masturbation gets the lion’s share of public attention, it’s because there is still an underlying belief in our culture that women aren’t fully sexual and therefore don’t need to masturbate. But we are and we do. Women just don’t seem to belabor their masturbation with the same negativity as men (and especially heterosexual men).
An interesting clinical tidbit to add some perspective: When women seek me out for help with masturbation issues, it’s usually because they want to have more or better orgasms. When men seek me out for advice about masturbation issues, they usually fear they are having too many orgasms.
I don’t believe in “too much” but I definitely believe in “using masturbation as an escape mechanism.” There is a significant difference between the two: a socially functional, healthy person may masturbate repeatedly through the day without problems. On the other hand, you could masturbate only once a day and it could still represent a problem. Sex can never be judged as an isolated event; its healthfulness is contingent on whether it fits into your life in a balanced and sane way.
Karl S., a single professional in his mid-30s, was worried that his interest in masturbation was unhealthy. After taking a full sexual history, I concurred. Karl was using masturbation as an escape from problems that were steadily looming larger, threatening his future both socially and professionally. In high school and college, Karl was a friendly, social guy who played sports with friends and went out regularly. Now he was living in an unfamiliar city and working at a high-stress job that required lots of overtime just to remain competitive. By the time he got home at night, he was worn out. He had developed a routine of logging onto the Internet while heating something for dinner, then eating while he browsed the Web for sexual entertainment. By the time he finished his meal, he was hot and bothered and completely obsessed with his on-line sexplay. When he got to a point where he needed relief, he masturbated and went to bed, only to wake up and repeat the cycle the next day. Because he was new in town and didn’t know anyone but his work colleagues, who were mostly married, on weekends he stayed in, sometimes spending all his free hours on porn and chat sites. He was spending hundreds of dollars a week on his habit, and beginning to accumulate debt paying for all the on-line sex-workers