In our previous postings to date, we have focused on what constitutes a healthy use of masturbation by guys and in particular, their thoughts during a session. We’ve previously articulated a view that when masturbating, a guy should focus on the physical aspects of what is going on in his body through the act of masturbation, rather than on specific sexual outcomes. However, we must acknowledge that the primary sexual outcome to be achieved from singleness for both Christian men and women is as preparation for marriage. This includes adolescence as will as any adult period of singleness.
What is important for a single Christian guy or gal is to understand how they develop sexually during single periods of their life and especially how they prepare for marriage. We have written a bit about how a Christian woman can do this but we’ve written next to nothing about how a Christian man can. That is essentially because first of all we need to be able to address the key elephant in the room for all guys (but especially in this context Christians), which is the basic biological fact of visually centered arousal. To sum that up, every guy is primarily sexually aroused in a visual manner, meaning that he is constantly drawn to physical sexual features of people around him, and constantly has sexual thoughts about people. How he deals with this is quite different depending on his marital status.
Single guys have a lot more license sexually than those who are in a marriage; they can socialise with a range of different people, much more than they can if they are married. In the latter case it’s normal for them to focus primarily on their wife, and to impose special rules and restrictions on interactions with women who aren’t their wife. The most important aspect for a Christian husband is that he makes a conscious and strong effort to control the degree of visual interactions that he participates in outside of his marriage, and likewise his sexual thought life, ensuring that these activities are redirected to marital contexts as much as possible. However, for a single guy, particularly during adolescence, he will be able to have these things relatively freely with a range of people, and provided sexual sin or lust is kept out of the picture, this can be quite healthy.
Sexual development for a single Christian guy that is healthy must necessarily focus on physical/sexual knowledge of femininity. A certain amount of this can be addressed by good sex education whether at home or at school, but a lot will be developed within overall socialisation. For a guy to develop a healthy sexual identity, awareness and confidence in interacting with women is very important. And as a part of it, getting to have knowledge of the physical aspects of female bodies is relevant. Guys have strong sex drives, and whilst we promote sexual discipline as a key part of a Christian guy’s personal faith commitment to be practiced daily, we have to acknowledge that the key to dealing with sex drives isn’t putting a lid on them and telling people to completely suppress them. Rather, it is healthy for Christian guys to direct their sex drives in a healthy disciplined way that contributes positively to their overall development. What that means is that a committed Christian guy who is strong in his faith and in his commitment to sexual purity is allowed to become visually aroused in a non-lustful way through social interaction with women and to have non-lustful sexual thoughts about women’s physical bodies as a matter of course. Such things are very healthy and normal for Christian guys as long as any kind of sexual sin is taken out of the picture.
As we have previously discussed, we see masturbation as a healthy way for Christian guys to release sexual tensions that their strong sex drives tend to create for them, as well as for overall sexual development. In the context of what we have written above, the question is what a guy should focus his mind on during a time of masturbation. In order for masturbation sessions to contribute in a good way to a guy’s overall sexual development, we believe it is healthy for him to focus to some extent on the physical knowledge he has gained of women he has met. It is healthy for him to focus on to some extent on thinking about the appearance of a woman’s naked body or how he would interact sexually with her if they were married. The caveat is that these focuses during a time of masturbation must occur solely from memory recall and/or imagination and not from referring to any photograph or video image of any particular woman during the masturbation session. This automatically rules out the use of any form of pornography during a masturbation time, and care is also necessarily to control any tendency towards general lustfulness during these times. Nevertheless, we believe it is important to allow these thought processes to occur as a healthy sexually disciplined component of masturbation because a single Christian guy must programme his mind and his sex drive to respond in a healthy way only to women and be focused solely on them for sexual fulfillment. Then when he reaches marriage, if he chooses to masturbate during the marriage, he changes to focus on just one woman – his wife – as the sole source of visual arousal and sexual thoughts during these sessions.
This is a new area of understanding for us, which has arisen recently because of developing our awareness that sex drives and sexuality can be directed in wrong ways in Christian people’s lives. We no longer believe that Christian guys can be realistically expected to keep a lid on visual arousal and sexual thoughts in their day to day lives, particularly in the highly sexualised societies we currently live in. This is mostly a guy thing but may have some limited application to females although we aren’t currently planning to write a similar part for females.