It worked so well they had their first-ever simultaneous orgasm.
The last variable in how people masturbate depends on how much time and effort they invest in learning their own bodies’ responses and how good they get at giving themselves pleasure. In the pursuit of more intensely arousing masturbation, males have been known to penetrate an impressive range of bizarre objects. My personal favorite was in the novel Portnoy’s Complaint where the eponymous protagonist masturbated in a hunk of raw meat slated to be cooked for dinner that night. Gross, perhaps, but honest. Virtually anything which can be penetrated has been penetrated by men in search of satisfaction.
Women are also known to be curiously incautious in their choices of inanimate partners. I once advised some lawyers who were trying to analyze the legality of images appearing on their site. We all gained an education in the possibilities for creative excess some people bring to solo sex. I will never forget the lady who made an art of inserting wooden chair legs into her vagina. I was seriously concerned about splinters.
Insertions are a fairly common act during masturbation as an adjunct to pleasure. In addition to the most common practice (using a specialized sex toy in the vagina or the anus), people find unusual applications for other things. Some people enjoy inserting catheters and other narrow items into the urethra. Emergency room doctors have removed everything from bottles and light bulbs to baked potatoes from colons. As radical or unusual as these masturbatory games may seem to some people, in fact, doctors and helping professionals are well aware that they occur throughout the mainstream population.
As a sex therapist, I have learned that just when you think you’ve heard it all, you discover that of course you haven’t. There are always new angles, new variations and new fantasies that make one person’s masturbation different from the next. For me, frankly, that is the joy of being a sex therapist in the first place. The diversity of human sexuality is a beautiful and spiritual spectacle to behold.
Why Do People Masturbate?
As will become increasingly, almost tediously, evident as you read this book, the honest simple answer to every question regarding “Why do people do X sex act?” is the remarkably dull response, “Because it feels right to them.” It feels right and it feels very good too.
I realize most of you are thinking you didn’t need me to tell you masturbation feels good but it is on the notion of “right” versus “wrong” that people go astray. People who believe that sex in general is dirty are always the first to say that an act like masturbation is “wrong.” They’ll use expressions like “it’s not healthy” or “it’s a selfish pleasure” or send other messages that something so biologically natural is physically, morally or spiritually degrading. And, since masturbation is the first sexual act most humans know, we usually learn very early in life that we shouldn’t do it. In truth, nothing could be more right or more natural. Our minds crave the chemicals that sex produces; our biology benefits by the catharsis of orgasm. Our bodies don’t care what makes us climax as long as we do. Moreover, manually stimulating your genitals is by far the single safest kind of sex available to humans.
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
