Question is whether the various beliefs about the negative health effects of masturbation were specific to masturbation, or applied to too much ejaculation generally?
The latter suggestion meaning that there was an implicit assumption that someone who only ejaculated in the course of sexual relations would be limited in how much he might ejaculate and thus stay safely below the danger zone, while someone who masturbated was likely to exceed this.
The alternative is that there was something about masturbation specifically: if so, what might have been the assumed physiological basis for this distinction?
The Bible mentions something about ‘the spilling of seed’ (no cite), which I believe refers to masturbation specifically. It’s this waste of semen that is not used for procreation that I think is the ‘problem’.
BTW, there have never been negative health effects from masturbation, unless someone does it so much it keeps them from having a normal relationship.
I was watching an episode of “Ghost Chasers” (or whatever it’s called - the one with “Big Guns” Zac Bagans in it) a few years ago (I don’t generally watch it anymore). The guys were going to stay the night in a former asylum, I believe. Or perhaps it was a former prison. Anyway, at one point the person giving them the tour of the place brought out a logbook which showed the official cause of death of one of the inmates/patients was “masturbation.” :dubious:
The “Sin of Onan”. His brother had died childless. Therefore, by Jewish law, he had to impregnate his brother’s widow. Onan didn’t want to have to support another child, so during the act, he withdrew and “spilled his seed” onto the ground. Somehow, this “Sin” became extended to masturbation.
I know a woman whose mother told her that semen was stored in the brain and if a man didn’t get it out he would suffer headaches. The mother was born in Appalachia in the 1920s.
“Ghost Adventures”! Yeah, that’s the name of that show! Perhaps we’re not thinking of the same episode, though. I distinctly remember the logbook mentioning “masturbation” as the cause of death and Zac Bagans being somewhat taken aback.
Right; there is no specific reference to masturbation anywhere in the Bible. The extension of Onan’s sin of failing to produce offspring for his dead brother to masturbation is from the minds of imaginative preachers, not the Bible itself.
It’s kind of circular, but in times past, when the act was highly stigmatized, people who did it often had feelings of guilt and shame, which could lead to depression and other forms of mental illness.
Obviously, the masturbation isn’t the “real” cause, only linked to it. The real cause is excessive societal judgement on people’s acts. The same could be true of smoking cigarettes in a strongly anti-smoking community.
In Traditional Chinese Medicine, there are several kinds of energy in the body. One, called Jing, is very very difficult to rebuild, especially for mature or elderly men. It’s considered the energy of your Ancestors, and you lose a little bit with each day of life. When you run out of Jing, you die. Men lose Jing with each ejaculation (and women lose Jing with each pregnancy and breastfeeding) so men are discouraged from “excessive” masturbation and excessive sex which leads to ejaculation, and even from having wet dreams.
Yes, I recall reading about the folk belief (in China?) that a man only had so much semen, and when it was all “used”, he was impotent / dead. I don’t recall this being a common belief in the western world.
As the other thread mentions, the wrinkle with Onan was that his child with his brother’s widow would be considered his brother’s therefore entitled to his brother’s share of their father’s inhertance. So he would be creating and supporting another child which would also cut his own children’s inheritance in half. I believe the moral of the story is more about doing your duty, even when it doesn’t help your children. Since there’s nothing else out there, people who were condemning masturbation picked on the closest thing in the bible - “wasting seed upon the ground”.
The general concern about men’s health seems to have picked on it as something that weakens the person. (“It’s not that I don’t like women, Manfred, I just don’t allow them to steal my essence of life.” - Dr. Strangelove) The quacks of the 1800’s seem to have picked on this - Dr. Kellog and his wonderful breakfast cereals were a substitute for red meat that brought on “unhealthy” tendencies. Freud ascribed all sorts of problems to obsessing about sex. perhaps it was a convenient catch-all to explain the mood problems of adolescents.
I guess the real answer to the OP’s question is that once a man was an adult and therefore presumably was married, the need or opportunity to spill seed were much less and there was the option of putting it where it could “properly” go. I assume a lot of people knew about the option of withdrawal for birth control (Onan did) but it does not appear to have been a prominent topic of discussion.
I’ve always been amused by just how miserable and un/attractive most of the anti-masturbation advocates are! The women are so frigid that I shiver at the sight of them on television or online! My theory is that most of those women are so unattractive that they can’t get laid even if they paid for it! Maybe they think if they stop men from masturbating, they’ll be so desperate and horny that they’ll fuck anything…even those hags!
Sharon Osbourne made a comment about Elizabeth Hasselbeck that would apply to most uptight, anti-sex, anti-masturbation women- “You know what she needs? She needs a good schtupping from a football team!” Or as my incredibly blunt (and honest) aunt would say, “'She needs a good boring out!”
If teenage males (or males in the 20-70 age bracket) didn’t masturbate, they would go insane, explode or possibly both! It’s ridiculous that many of them suffer with agonizing guilt because of the ridiculous, outdated beliefs that religion has deceived them into believing. It really takes the fun out of it when you feel the need to ‘repent’ or go to confession the moment you finish…
Thanks. I should have looked it up instead of going from memory.
One item I recall reading said that masturbation was in fact an evolutionary advantage; mother nature wants to ensure that sperm is fresh and vital when it is called on to be useful, so the men that get rid of the old stuff will have an edge in the reproduction race.
