masturbation an immature adolescent activity is completely to ignore the facts of human sexuality.

Autoerotism becomes abnormal or deviant only when an individual who has the choice of several other outlets, such as heterosexual relations in addition to masturbation, finds that he or she can only experience masturbatory satisfaction. Such individuals exist but appear to be quite rare ‹Virtually all other individuals who masturbate, at whatever age, are in the normal sexual range.

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2. The objection that turbation is asocial. The idea that masturbation is a lonely, unsocial habit that wilt lead men and women to avoid the company of others because they satisfy themselves sexually is thoroughly ridiculous. It makes as much sense as the notion that going to a movie is socially healthier than viewing television at home or that in. dividuals who read at home are lonely souls while poor all socially healthy persons read in libraries.

A girl or fellow who is unsocial and who fears facing others may well masturbate instead of trying to achieve heterosexual relations; but rare indeed is the individual who becomes unsocial because of masturbation. About guilt over masturbation, yes; but not over masturbation itself.

The one mode of sex behavior which most encourages loneliness and isolation would appear to be complete sexual abstinence, including abstinence from masturbation. If moralists wish to minimize human loneliness and unsociability, let them try to do something about that.

3. The objection that masturbation does not lead to full emotional gratification. The idea that masturbation is relatively condemnable because it is an act which is incapable of giving 48

individuals full emotional gratification is a notion that is, at best, partly true. In the first place, many people, particularly those with good fantasizing

powers, do obtain what to them is a good measure of emotional gratification from masturbating. Secondly, no sex act-includ-

ing

heterosexual coitus-can, nor for that matter necessarily should, give full emotional gratification at all times to all persons.

The concept that every sex act, in order to be considered a "good" and "beneficial" one, must be intensely emotionally satisfying, or that sex without love is wickedness, is scientific, basically notion.

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puritanical

The Kinsey report on women shows that, unlike men, women do not necessarily need intense psychological or emotional accompaniments participations.

to their 80X

What they mainly need, to achieve fully satisfying orgasms, is not romantic and emotional stimuli-which may actually detract them from sex concentration-but consistent, correctly applied friction and pressure to the most sensitive parts of their genitals.

It may well be, therefore, that much of the romanticism and emotionalism which women are supposed to need for sex satisfaction is largely the invention of the psychologically differently acclimated male, and that romantic love is often a saboteur, rather than an encourager, of female orgasm.

In any event, the idea that masturbation is not emotionally gratifying and that it therefore cannot be too satisfactory a 80x procedure is, at is, at best, only partially true, and tends to be greatly exaggerated by antisexual writers.

4. The objection that mastur bation is sexually frustrating. Although masturbation, for most persons, is not as sexually

mattachine REVIEW

satisfying as, say, coitus, it is by no means always frustrating.

When it is frustrating or emotionally unsatisfying, it has often been made so because individuals in our culture are raised to believe that it should be 80.

A man or woman who has been reared with violently antiattitudes masturbational will naturally find autoerotism relatively unsatisfactory. One who has been raised with pro-masturbational attitudes will nor mally find it quite sexually satisfying—though not, usually, as much 80 as various other forms of interhuman contact.

5. The objection that mastur· bation leads to impotence or frigidity. Although it has frequently been held that autoerotism leads to impotence or premature ejaculation in males, there is no objective data to support this belief.

And the notion that female masturbation conditions women so that they cannot enjoy coital satisfaction is completely contradicted by the Kinsey researchers, who find that among the females studied who never masturbated to orgasm before marriage, 31 to 37 per cent failed to reach coital orgasm during the early years of their marriage, while among those who had masturbated before marriage, only 13 to 16 per cent were coitally unresponsive in the early years of marriage. My own clinical studies, over period of many years, also conclusively show that many women are definitely helped to achieve satisfactory marital relations if they first in engage amount of masturbatory activ. ity.

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6. The objection that masturbation may lead to sexual excess. The idea that masturbation is likely to be taken to excess is another myth of neopuritanical origin. As has been noted for many years in the sexological literature, and as

Kinsey has recently confirmed, erotic response, in both males and females, depends upon a remarkably foolproof mechanism. When an individual reaches the limits of his or her physiol. ogic endurance, he or she no longer responds erotically. The male becomes totally incapacitated at this point, in that he is incapable of having further erections; and the female is able to have intercourse, but is neither benefited nor harmed by it.

Under the circumstances, only

most abnormal individual, such as a psychotic, would masturbate when he or she had no desire, and might consequently do so to "excess." The idea of a normal individual's actually engaging in "excessive" masturbation is ludicrous.

Altogether, then, the weaselworded attitudes on masturbation which still fill most of our sex manuals, attitudes which state or imply that autoerotism, while not completely harmful, is still not "good" or "desirable," have no scientific foundation and constitute a modern carryover of old antisexual moraliz ings.

The fact is that the vast majority of American males and females engage in a considerable amount of masturbation for some period during their lives; and that, particularly in view of our other restrictions on sexual activity, they would be most abnormal if they did not.

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It is difficult to conceive of a more beneficial, harmless, tension-releasing human act than masturbation that is sponwithout taneously performed (puritanically inculcated and actually groundless) fears and anxieties.

Let us, please, now that Kinsey and his associates have stoutly reaffirmed this fact, see that our sex manuals and sex education texts unequivocally

say it in plain English.