We sometimes read the Scarleteen site, which has a category page for masturbation here
As always, when we link to another site or article, it doesn’t mean we are endorsing everything that is in that article or everything that is on that site. There is likely to be at least some content on that site that we won’t agree with, particularly given the overall theme of that site. But the actual reason for posting about these sites is to try to bring some balance in our discussions about masturbation.
Perhaps this page sums up masturbation quite well. It talks about some comparison of what masturbation is, compared to other similar things that go on in your body that are also to do with pleasure or touch. For example that your clothes feel good on your skin. We know that sheets feel good on our bare skin in our beds at night, and that in itself is important as just one of many examples. If the bed is warm it feels good, and so on.
We believe at this site that masturbation is really just something that is more or less a natural bodily function when someone practices it alone in private. The main issues are that it involves sexual bodily parts and therefore there are some implications, at least from a Christian perspective, when another person is involved. Christians believe that physical acts involving touching or viewing another person’s body can have an added spiritual component associated with them. This can occur whether the other person is physically present, in the form of media (physical or electronic), or in one’s thoughts, dreams or memories etc.
What we have sought to emphasise on this site is that we don’t believe there is an inherent spiritual component involved with masturbation when someone carries it out in private. There are risks for a person becoming addicted to masturbation, or invoking the sin of lust. However, neither of these are inherent to masturbation. A person who masturbates can choose not to lust and can control the frequency in which they practice it, and if those conditions are met. we believe it is not harmful to a person’s spiritual life or Christian faith.
We believe that, in fact, a Christian person can use masturbation to help resolve sexual struggles that they experience. Some examples are as follows:
- Masturbation is very helpful for single people who don’t have an outlet for dealing with sexual pressures they face that cause them to be aroused.
- For example, men’s bodies have a constant production of semen, which must be eventually expelled from the body. When this happens involuntarily it is called a wet dream. But a man can choose to masturbate to release the semen from his body (although some people dispute that there is any bodily pressure caused by semen production).
- It’s also known nowadays that women have wet dreams, although exactly how this happens isn’t so clear. A woman can also become more aroused at certain times of her monthly cycle as her hormone levels change.
- Masturbation can be an activity that is in fact part of the way in which a person’s sexuality and body develop during adolescence. Adolescents who masturbate gain knowledge of how their body responds to genital stimulation and become comfortable with it, which can be very helpful when they enter a relationship and marry. One of the most common issues we hear about in the evangelical church is that men and women are being taught not to think about sex or touch themselves when they are single, and then when they marry they somehow have to turn on their sexual desire and be capable of letting themselves be touched by their spouse. It can take years to overcome this conditioning, and in some cases require therapy, because of the negativity that is associated with self touching in singleness in some parts of the church.
- Perhaps the most important aspect of masturbation from our Christian perspective is what we have referred to extensively on this blog as “sexual devotion”. For us, what matters most about masturbation is that if we believe masturbation is not itself sinful (just remember that it is not mentioned in such a context anywhere in the Bible at all) and if it is really a God given natural bodily function that is not a whole lot different from the way our other senses and appetites work in our bodies, then we can believe that it is possible to be blessed by masturbating. This is pretty much what we of this blog have created a key part of our ministry around, which is our own personal experiences of changing from feeling condemned and guilty for masturbating, to coming to a realisation that it is really just something that is built into our bodies and is therefore a worshipful act just like everything else we do that isn’t sinful.
- Sexual devotion, then, is spending time in God’s presence dedicating our sexuality to His service. Masturbation can be a part of this because it can be a way of taming, training or disciplining the expression of our sexual desires to be expressed solely in this way.
- We believe that sexual devotion in this way is effective for Christian men and women to release sexual tensions in their lives in a productive and healthy way when they are single, or from time to time in their marriage (with the knowledge of their spouse) and also as a lifelong activity when they need to refocus and re-dedicate their sexuality to Godly purposes. In fact in this day and age with the increasing range of pressures that men and women of God come under, it is practically essential for husbands and wives to regularly have some time on their own to practice sexual devotion to ensure that they are dealing with these pressures in a productive way.
- We believe sexual devotion also blesses a marriage by enabling the husband (especially) to have a sexual outlet that is productive both in a physical sense and for spiritual refreshing, that removes the pressure from his wife as a sole sexual outlet.
- We believe sexual devotion is also helpful in a marriage for relieving sexual tensions between the husband and wife, by allowing each of them in a time of sexual devotion to release those tensions to God. This assumes the tensions arise from the inherent differences between the male and female approach to sexuality and are not easily resolved in other ways. For comment about some of these differences have a read of our “Sexuality for Singles” series.
- Masturbation is also a practice that a husband and wife can undertake together as a different way of having sex together, either by masturbating together or either one of them using masturbation as part of their foreplay. The traditional teaching has been to emphasis a very extreme view that the husband should only touch the wife’s body and the wife only the husband’s body, i.e. that neither of them should touch their own body. But in actuality, for either husband or wife, watching their spouse arouse him/herself can actually make a very constructive contribution to the shared sexual experience, and the key advantage for one or both touching themselves is having the direct feedback to their brain. We believe that the totality of husband and wife sharing their bodies with each other during sex is more important than specifics about who touches who.
- Masturbating together can help a husband and wife in situations where full penetrative sex is difficult, for example the wife is pregnant or is recovering from pregnancy, maybe the husband has some sort of physical injury in his back or legs that makes it difficult for him to move, wife is having her period, one or both partners is significantly overweight, or other physical challenges.
So we hope writing about this stuff helps to create a more productive environment for Christians to discuss masturbation in a more meaningful way and overcome some of the negatives about it. We are big fans of egalitarianism as a theology that values and equalises the roles of women in the church, as opposed to complementarianism, which denigrates and minimises women. The key issue is that complementarian theology has invented the purity teaching for adolescents, and there isn’t yet much of a counter to these teachings in the egalitarian world. It is our greatest hope in our ministry that in time, egalitarianism will evolve beyond pure theological ministry considerations and cover a whole lot more of the broader issues of sexuality in marriage and singleness.