SWM 158 – Solo Masturbation – When You Remove the Other Person From Sex
Today we’re continuing with our Sex as Worship series, and in this post, we’re going to be talking about masturbation [https://www.uncoveringintimacy.com/tag/masturbation/], which is a highly contested argument in Christianity. Is it okay, is it sinful, it is helpful or harmful?
And before I say anything else, I want to share that I didn’t always believe the viewpoint I’m going to share. Also, I don’t really want to talk about it. It’s still an embarrassing topic, and I know I’m going to get a lot of flak for it. People will unsubscribe. Sometimes I get messages saying they hope to see me in hell.
But, I don’t think I can skip it. This is a topic I see damaging so many marriages, so how do I leave it alone?
Also, this is my second rewrite. I tried to make the first one more clinical, and after recording it – frankly, I hated it. I was bored from recording it. So, I rewrote it. Let me know what you think.
So here we go, take number two.
I grew up in a church culture where masturbation [https://www.uncoveringintimacy.com/tag/masturbation/] was not discussed. It wasn’t encouraged, but also wasn’t warned against. There were jokes here and there, hints and side comments, but more or less the message was that it was private and not to be discussed.
And as a young teenager – I honestly don’t remember how young, I developed a habit of masturbation [https://www.uncoveringintimacy.com/tag/masturbation/], and it followed me into adulthood and marriage. Later, as BBS became popular (pre-internet) and then the internet, I added porn to that habit.
But masturbation had already become more than a sexual habit. It became a coping mechanism.
I used it to self-soothe, to manage sexual frustration, and, later, I used it to avoid dealing with things in my marriage like differing sex drives, or when conflict got in the way of intimacy.
I remember the first time the idea that masturbation might be sinful was really challenged for me. It wasn’t until I was already married. I was helping lead a youth group, and one of the other leaders decided the boys should read Every Man’s Battle [https://amzn.to/4t3i5yL] together. That was the first time I encountered the claim that masturbation itself, not just porn or lust, might be sinful.
I don’t remember the arguments they used, I don’t remember any verses they shared, and I haven’t read the book since. That was decades ago.
What I remember is my reaction.
I thought it was ridiculous. I had a decade or more at this point of reasons, rationalizations and more for why it was okay that I’d built up myself, and I thought that my reasons were solid. Looking back, I think I was really just defending my addiction. I didn’t want it taken away from me, because I didn’t know how to cope without it.
At that point, our marriage was clinically sexless – we barely had sex, and we couldn’t talk about it without getting into a fight. We had bad communication skills, no real intimacy at all in the marriage, and no hope of it really getting better. Masturbation felt like survival.
So when the idea was shared that my survival mechanism was sinful, I rejected it almost immediately. I leaned on my rationalizations, and I felt perfectly at peace with that decision. I told myself that if God wanted me to stop, He would have put it in the Bible, or He would fix my marriage.
