# Why are most religions anti-masturbation? **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [November 7, 2011, 5:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181 "2011-11-07T17:49:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![pantheon](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/6bbea6/32.png) [@pantheon](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/pantheon)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/21 "2011-11-07T20:07:27Z")
> [@kayaker](#): > > Dude, you just scared the crap outa me.:eek: Mothman Voice…“Chaaaapssstick” WOOHOO! I’m alluding like a motherfucker! ---
**Author:** ![Agent\_Foxtrot](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/9fc29f/32.png) [@Agent\_Foxtrot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Agent_Foxtrot)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 8:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/22 "2011-11-07T20:08:01Z")
> [@hogarth](#): > > Not Safe For Work!! Sorry! I should have put a warning! I’ve reported the post to have it added. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 8:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/23 "2011-11-07T20:10:46Z")
Availability of sperm is almost never the rate limiting factor on procreation. Sperm is cheap and plentiful anywhere where there are non-decrepit human males. I am failing to see much evidence yet in this thread that any religions apart from the Abrahamic ones are anti-masturbation. ---
**Author:** ![constanze](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/f9ae1b/32.png) [@constanze](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/constanze)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 8:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/24 "2011-11-07T20:49:30Z")
> [@John\_DiFool](#): > > I wonder if this an urban legend of sorts-I find it hard to believe that people never noticed or remarked upon any matrilineal resemblances in someone’s children. Well, the old Greeks - Aristoteles - thought that the seed was the important part, and the woman was just like a flower pot or earth, into which the seed was planted. A vessel, but not important. That egg and sperm both contribute equally (down to chromsomes coming 50% from each parent) wasn’t discovered until much later. Partly misogyny, where men simply couldn’t imagine that women could be just as valuable, partly reference from agriculture: dropping a seed into earth grows grain, so the seed is important, partly lack of scientific method, partly lack of appropriate research tools. ---
**Author:** ![Rigamarole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@Rigamarole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rigamarole)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 9:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/25 "2011-11-07T21:04:45Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > Availability of sperm is almost never the rate limiting factor on procreation. Sperm is cheap and plentiful anywhere where there are non-decrepit human males. Doesn’t matter. When your breeding strategy is “Go forth and multiply”, any waste of baby batter is still waste. ---
**Author:** ![Rigamarole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@Rigamarole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rigamarole)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 9:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/26 "2011-11-07T21:13:37Z")
Missed the edit window, but it’s basically the same line of reasoning for forbidding homosexuality - in the ancient world, if you aren’t making babies then you are just wasting time and effort. Living in the relatively stable first world of 2011, it’s really difficult to wrap our minds around just how treacherous and difficult to survive it was for most of our ancestors. Staggering child mortality rates, wars (even more frequent with higher casualty rates than today’s wars), plagues, famine, drought, no medicine, harsh environmental conditions… you really could not overemphasize the importance of frequent and persistent attempts at reproduction if our species was to survive. All of the social customs around sex were crafted as part of a strategy to promote that mindset. ---
**Author:** ![Rigamarole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@Rigamarole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rigamarole)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 9:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/27 "2011-11-07T21:32:26Z")
Sorry for the triple post, but to reinforce my point even further I wanted to add that there is a [Talmudic term for waste of semen](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judaism_and_sexuality#Masturbation_and_.22Sperm_in_Vain.22): זרע לבטלה (pronounced: Zera Levatala), which translates as “Sperm in Vain” or “Semen in Vain”. The idea that emitting sperm without any chance of impregnating someone is a waste, and therefore sin. Applies to masturbation, homosexuality, and even having sex with pregnant/infertile/elderly women who cannot bear children. It really was all about reproduction and survival. It’s no more complicated than that. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/28 "2011-11-07T21:53:35Z")
> [@Rigamarole](#): > > . . . . > > It really was all about reproduction and survival. It’s no more complicated than that. Or all that is nothing but rationalization. The fact is that a young man who masturbates can still be ready to have procreative sex again in a matter of a few minutes. Older men take a little longer, but not hugely more so. In almost all likely circumstances there will be lots more fertile men about ready and willing to provide sperm than there will be fertile women ready to receive it. (For a start, all those already pregnant are already out of the running.) If they actually thought it was relevant to the tribe’s chances of survival they were making an elementary error, and one that they had no reason not be aware of. ---
**Author:** ![Rigamarole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@Rigamarole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rigamarole)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 10:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/29 "2011-11-07T22:14:36Z")
> [@njtt](#): > > The fact is that a young man who masturbates can still be ready to have procreative sex again in a matter of a few minutes. Older men take a little longer, but not hugely more so. In almost all likely circumstances there will be lots more fertile men about ready and willing to provide sperm than there will be fertile women ready to receive it. (For a start, all those already pregnant are already out of the running.) Still doesn’t matter. You’re missing the big picture here - it’s not about a single act of masturbation, or even many acts individually. It’s about a _mindset_ that permeates an entire culture. People had shit to _do_ back then just to barely hang on to their lives, every single day. They had soil to till, crops to harvest, houses to build with their bare hands in the freezing cold. And they were dropping like fucking _flies_ while all of this was going on. All of that work takes energy; it takes time. And then on top of that, you needed to keep the women pregnant as much as possible if humanity was going to have any hope at all of surviving long-term. So if some man is spending is time whacking off, he’s not doing the rest of the stuff he needs to be doing to survive, including the **very very important** act of reproduction. And it can take many attempts before even a fertile woman is successfully impregnated, so they really needed all the semen they could get. Now sure, he could in all likelihood get away with a wank here and there and still take care of his other duties and get his wife pregnant when he needs to (which, remember, is constantly). And also in all likelihood, most observant followers did (and do) sin a little from time to time by spilling their seed. But if that kind of activity was considered acceptable on a large scale, we would have been **seriously doomed** as a species. Hence, cultivating the mindset of making people feel guilty for doing it. Oh, and also remember that the men were constantly killing each other, so there weren’t always as many fertile men around as you might think. So my point here is that there were clearly pragmatic reasons for the prohibition in light of the context whence it originated. The fact that those reasons no longer apply today is another discussion. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 10:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/30 "2011-11-07T22:33:08Z")
Didn’t Sigmund Fred believe that masturbation was injurios (psychologically)? Dr. John Kellogg (of “Road to Wellville” fame) definately believed that whacking off was bad for you.☹ ---
**Author:** ![lew\_cody](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/e274bd/32.png) [@lew\_cody](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/lew_cody)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 10:50pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/31 "2011-11-07T22:50:26Z")
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church (listed under “Offenses Against Chastity”): > [@](#): > > By _masturbation_ is to be understood the deliberate stimulation of the genital organs in order to derive sexual pleasure. “Both the Magisterium of the Church, in the course of a constant tradition, and the moral sense of the faithful have been in no doubt and have firmly maintained that masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered action.” [footnote 138] “The deliberate use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of marriage is essentially contrary to its purpose.” For here sexual pleasure is sought outside of “the sexual relationship which is demanded by the moral order and in which the total meaning of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of true love is achieved.” [footnote 139] > > To form an equitable judgment about the subjects’ moral responsibility and to guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective immaturity, force of acquired habit, conditions of anxiety or other psychological or social factors that lessen, if not even reduce to a minimum, moral culpability. 138: CDF, Persona humana 9. 139: CDF, Persona humana 9. In other words, the RCC’s stance is that masturbation is not only inappropriate non-marital sex, but actually “disordered”, possibly because of the lust that it usually involves. I’ve actually heard a couple of professors say to their classes that the RCC condemned male masturbation because it wasted sperm, but was neutral about female masturbation–the above pretty much gives the lie to that idea. (Note: my quoting of the above is not to be construed as personal agreement with it.) Buddhism is more varied according to different schools and generally less dogmatic. While masturbation is forbidden for most monks and nuns, it doesn’t seem to be clearly disallowed for laypeople. Nevertheless, excessive masturbation could be interpreted by some Buddhists as an unhealthy attachment and an obstacle to achieving Enlightenment. ---
**Author:** ![Alka\_Seltzer](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c89c15/32.png) [@Alka\_Seltzer](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Alka_Seltzer)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 11:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/32 "2011-11-07T23:19:06Z")
Well, it makes a terrible mess of the pews. ---
**Author:** ![Inner\_Stickler](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/inner_stickler/32/318_2.png) [@Inner\_Stickler](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Inner_Stickler)\ **Post date:** [November 7, 2011, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/33 "2011-11-07T23:45:01Z")
> [@John\_DiFool](#): > > I wonder if this an urban legend of sorts-I find it hard to believe that people never noticed or remarked upon any matrilineal resemblances in someone’s children. Apollo: That word mother— we give it to the one who bears the child. However, she’s no parent, just a nurse to that new life embedded in her. The parent is the one who plants the seed, the father. Like a stranger for a stranger, she preserves the growing life, unless god injures it. _The Eumenides_ It wasn’t until the invention of the microscope that the idea of the homunculus was really stamped out entirely. Many cultures believed that each man’s sperm holds infinitesimally small reproductions of humans that when placed in a fertile environs will grow to be a man. Deformed children and girls were thought to be the product of defective uteruses. ---
**Author:** ![OldGuy](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/o/3bc359/32.png) [@OldGuy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/OldGuy)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 1:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/34 "2011-11-08T01:11:27Z")
> [@Rigamarole](#): > > The idea that emitting sperm without any chance of impregnating someone is a waste, and therefore sin. Applies to masturbation, homosexuality, and even having sex with pregnant/infertile/elderly women who cannot bear children. > > It really was all about reproduction and survival. It’s no more complicated than that. So by that reasoning an older still fertile man married to an older infertile woman should have non-marital sex in preference to marital sex? I don’t recall any teachings of that sort. ---
**Author:** ![Rigamarole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@Rigamarole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rigamarole)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 1:23am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/35 "2011-11-08T01:23:01Z")
> [@OldGuy](#): > > So by that reasoning an older still fertile man married to an older infertile woman should have non-marital sex in preference to marital sex? I don’t recall any teachings of that sort. Negative - he shouldn’t be having sex at all according to doctrine. If he’s still able-bodied, then he should be using that energy to work the fields instead. There were other reasons for preaching fidelity. Remember, there was no DNA testing back then so it was rather important for a man to know a child was definitely his, for the sake of providing for it and passing on a family legacy. Although everyone was expected to be faithful, it also explains why female infidelity was generally treated more harshly than male infidelity - nope, it’s not “misogyny”. It’s because men don’t bear children. If a man had sex with more than one woman, although still considered sinful in most religions/cultures, there’s no doubt there about paternity if the woman or women had sex with were faithful to him alone. ETA: misread you for a second and thought you said the man was infertile also - if his wife is infertile and he’s not then he would normally get a new wife. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 2:37am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/36 "2011-11-08T02:37:25Z")
> [@Rigamarole](#): > > Still doesn’t matter. You’re missing the big picture here - it’s not about a single act of masturbation, or even many acts individually. It’s about a _mindset_ that permeates an entire culture. People had shit to _do_ back then just to barely hang on to their lives, every single day. They had soil to till, crops to harvest, houses to build with their bare hands in the freezing cold. And they were dropping like fucking _flies_ while all of this was going on. > > All of that work takes energy; it takes time. And then on top of that, you needed to keep the women pregnant as much as possible if humanity was going to have any hope at all of surviving long-term. So if some man is spending is time whacking off, he’s not doing the rest of the stuff he needs to be doing to survive, including the **very very important** act of reproduction. This picture of primitive life bears no resemblance to how all the evidence of archeology and anthropology shows that people actually did (and do) behave in primitive (and not so primitive) cultures. They did not spend all day desperately grubbing for food, and all night desperately fucking for fear they would die out. Primitive peoples spend much of their time engaging in all sorts of communal and individual rituals, dancing, singing, telling stories and jokes, making elaborate (and not so elaborate) art works, and yes, goofing off. It is nonsense to suggest that they would not be able to spare the time and energy for a wank, or that if they did, this would be considered outrageously wasteful. There is also no reason whatsoever to think that people in primitive cultures (or any cultures) normally spend their time worrying about whether their culture is going to die out. Your picture of primitive culture is a complete figment of your imagination. In any case, your theory is incapable of explaining why the taboo on masturbation is largely confined to the Abrahamic religions. In fact, anthropology generally find that taboos of this sort are highly culture specific, and in the vast majority of cases almost certainly must have arisen for very contingent historical reasons. Why this particular taboo arose amongst the ancient Hebrews is probably now impossible to discover. Our only real evidence is the mythological story of Onan in the _Old Testament_, which is probably about as factual as the story of God creating the world in seven days. That said, although it is not particularly comon, there _are_ some cultures that regard semen as a terribly precious resource, not to be wasted. For the [Etoro people](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etoro_people) of the highlands of New Guinea, the upshot of this belief is that when boys come of age they are ritually (and, I believe, quite brutally) sodomized by the adult men of the tribe, and also made to fellate them, in order that the power of semen is preserved for the males, passed from one generation to the next. Heterosexual relations with women are kept to a bare minimum necessary for reproduction (i.e., not very much) because to waste precious semen on a woman is seen as threat to male power. (I dare say they do not approve of masturbation either, at least for males.) Despite this, and despite being a pretty small culture confined to a fairly small area (because of the very mountainous and forested geography of New Guinea, most of the many, very diverse cultures found there are small like this, often confined to a single isolated valley), they have not yet died out. I think you will agree that this culture’s practices do not very closely resemble those taught by the Abrahamic religions, and they do not in the least resemble your fantasies about universal attitudes towards semen in primitive cultures. Of course, the people of the culture who live in the next valley, over the mountain, probably regard this belief system and its system of forced pederastic homosexuality as quite as bizarre and appalling as we surely do, but you can be confident that they will have some beliefs and habits that will be equally bizarre to us (if perhaps less appalling). Trying to explain specific taboos in terms of conditions that are imagined (usually, as in your case, wrongly) to obtain in all primitive or early cultures, is almost always a huge mistake. Unfortunately this also means that the OP’s question is probably unanswerable. In cultures where there _is_ a taboo about masturbation, such as those of the Abramanic religions, the reasons why it originally arose are almost inevitably going to be lost in the mists of of prehistory and (at best) myth. ---
**Author:** ![Rigamarole](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/77aa72/32.png) [@Rigamarole](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rigamarole)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 2:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/37 "2011-11-08T02:42:27Z")
**njtt** - you’re talking about primitive tribal hunter-gatherers. Those aren’t the types of people who developed the major world religions. Agricultural societies are quite different and require vastly more work input than a hunter-gatherer society does. Apples and oranges. ---
**Author:** ![Kobal2](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kobal2/32/20_2.png) [@Kobal2](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Kobal2)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 2:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/38 "2011-11-08T02:58:29Z")
> [@Anne\_Neville](#): > > It, like every other activity, has opportunity costs. If you’re masturbating right now, you’re not having sex that could result in a child. You’re not doing anything to advance the cause of your religion in the world. A lot of religions frown on activities they consider a waste of time. If you think wasting time on non-productive activities is bad, then activities that are enjoyable but non-productive are something to be discouraged. There’s also the fact that the swimmers you’re triple-coating your favourite gym sock with are “wasted”. If we consider that the seed becomes a little man all on its own, and little men have souls (or whatever you want to call it - spirit, essence of life, whatever), then you might have committed a heavy transgression of the natural order, symbolically speaking. Destroying the source of life itself, that sort of thing. And what are religions, if not taking symbols waaaay too seriously ? Besides, I hear you go blind if you do it too much. ---
**Author:** ![njtt](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/ecd19e/32.png) [@njtt](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/njtt)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 3:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/39 "2011-11-08T03:04:10Z")
> [@Rigamarole](#): > > **njtt** - you’re talking about primitive tribal hunter-gatherers. Those aren’t the types of people who developed the major world religions. Agricultural societies are quite different and require vastly more work input than a hunter-gatherer society does. Apples and oranges. You are just pulling shit out of your ass. The Etoro people who I discussed actually live by hunting and _gardening_ (i.e., small scale agriculture), not _gathering_. But, in any case, all known primitive (and non-primitive) peoples, agriculturalist and otherwise, spend much of their time on ritual, socialization, and relaxation. They are not in a constant struggle to produce. Still less are they in a constant struggle to reproduce. Have you ever seen Stonehenge? That was built by preliterate agriculturalists. If they had the time and energy to build things like that, they had the time and energy to wank. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [November 8, 2011, 4:56am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181/40 "2011-11-08T04:56:12Z")
> [@Agent\_Foxtrot](#): > > Buddhism: [Not forbidden as long as you are not harming another.](http://www.buddhanet.net/winton_s.html) Depends on the school. There are Buddhist schools where it’s forbidden. Also, that link doesn’t work. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181.md?page=1) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/why-are-most-religions-anti-masturbation/602181.md?page=3)