MASTURBATION AND ANXIETY
While in recent decades there have been more and more statements that masturbation is physically harmless and the morality-through-fear school of thought has diminished, there are still many males who worry or have worried over the harm their masturbation may do. Since such anxiety is ordinarily concomitant with the masturbation (generally ceasing when masturbation ceases), we have calculated for each group the total number of man-years during which masturbation occurred and the percentage of those years during which there was anxiety concerning possible ill effects of such masturbation. In this calculation we have not differentiated between mild anxiety, such as might arise from the idea that masturbation would weaken one, and extreme anxiety, such as might stem from a belief that masturbation causes insanity.30
The groups that worried most were the incest offenders vs. adults and the peepers; the exhibitionists rank second, and the aggressors vs. children and aggressors vs. minors tie for third place. At the other end of the scale, those with least anxiety include the incest offenders vs. minors, the heterosexual offenders vs. adults, and the prison group and homosexual offenders vs. adults.
It is clear that general type of offense does not correlate with amount of masturbatory anxiety: note that the first and last ranks are occupied by incest offenders. Age is also no uniform factor; sharing first rank are our oldest group and one of the youngest. While this last does not disprove our impressions that more intense anxiety is commoner among younger males, it does show that some measure of worry persists in the young who theoretically should be more informed about the harmlessness of masturbation. More surprising is the fact that there is no clear relationship between frequency of masturbation and anxiety. One might logically have assumed that high frequency would generate fear about the consequences or, conversely, that high frequency indicates lack of anxiety. In any case, these and similar ideas based upon frequency alone prove useless. Lastly, there is no clear relationship between anxiety and the proportion of total sexual outlet derived from masturbation. About all that can be said is that a small proportion of total outlet seems associated with a small amount of anxiety.
However, if proportion of total outlet and frequency are considered
together, a meaningful correlation with anxiety becomes evident. This calculation is muddied by the fact that our frequency figures are expressed in terms of five-year age-periods, whereas our anxiety figures are simply total computations. It would have been better to have had age-specific incidence figures for anxiety, but this was not discovered until very late in the analyses, and the increased precision was not felt to be worth the large task of going back to the raw data and punching new cards. Nevertheless, certain generalizations may be legitimately made from the available data, and these are more clearly substantiated by the figures relating to early postpubescent life. The incest offenders vs. minors constitute an inexplicable exception to the generalizations. We can suggest that:
For groups whose members derive two thirds to three quarters of their outlet from masturbation, the amount of worry appears surprisingly constant (and moderate) despite variation in the frequency of masturbation.
Groups whose members derive three quarters or more of their outlet from masturbation and whose masturbatory frequencies are less than 1.5 per week are the most prone to worry. One may not assume that the high proportion of total outlet indicates difficulty in sociosexual development since the aggressors vs. children and minors were heterosexually quite active even in this puberty-15 age-period.
The moderate to small amount of worry experienced by the homosexual offenders is associated with the highest masturbation frequencies (total median frequency of 1.5 per week or more), which suggests that habituation dulls the edge of anxiety.
In any case it is quite clear that worry over masturbation is a complex phenomenon. Its duration and intensity undoubtedly depend not only upon what one has heard concerning the consequences, but also upon whether or not one regards masturbation as a proof of heterosexual ineptitude and/or a sin. The inability of young males to stop masturbating or even seriously to reduce the frequency for any long period of time may in itself be a source of considerable anxiety—the feeling of being in the grip of some habit beyond one’s control is disquieting to most people, and especially to males in our culture who are supposed to assiduously cultivate “will power.”
It is both curious and unfortunate how worry concerning masturbation persists in our society. One can, of course, point out that some of the worry represents a survival of past belief, and that the recent statements denying its harmful effects are often so qualified (e.g., “harmless unless excessive”) as to defeat themselves. Nevertheless, a substantial proportion of the males we interviewed had worried despite their knowledge that masturbation is well-nigh universal and despite the fact that not one of them reported being physically harmed by it. It is amazing how few persons asked themselves why a loss of semen in masturbation should be harmful while a loss of semen in coitus should have no ill-effect; no one grasped the concept that if masturbation were harmful, marriage would by the same token be suicidal.
*284\161\2*
