Dear Readers, Some of you are appalled that there is such a taboo thing as International Masturbation Month, and a dedicated day on May 7, but others of you are applauding “it’s about damn time.”
From my book, Cyber Frogs And Princes, A Sex Manual Of On-Line Dating After 50, soon to be available through Amazon, 🤞 here’s a bit about this fun topic.
WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
ABOUT: MASTURBATION
"Having sex is like
playing Bridge. If you don't have a
good partner, you'd better have a good hand." -Woody Allen
Cumulative research touts masturbation's many health benefits as reduction of stress, tension, pain, depression, and anxiety; improved self-esteem; increased sexual desire and orgasms; less vaginal dryness; and improved sleep. Whether self-pleasure reduces prostate cancer or diabetes continues to be debated. I always thought that it was a bit of a locker-room exaggeration, but the more I met guys in card game chat-rooms, on-line dating sites, or in person, I believed Hugh Hefner's alleged quote that men think about sex every six seconds. Even married or partnered couples masturbate with reasons given in the research such as knowing your own body helps you guide your partner to hotter lovemaking, or the opposing theory that one masturbates as an addition or substitution for unsatisfied partnered sex. Medical News Today's January 2020 article summarized the research that approximately 63 percent of men and 32 percent of women between the ages of 57-64 masturbate. Come on ladies, let's bump up those stats.
Luckily, we've come a long way busting those masturbation myths that men will grow hair on their palms, go blind, go straight to hell, go insane, and that women will become addicted to their vibrators. I'm still examining this last legend. It's been written that the batshit anti-Master Bater, Minister Sylvester Graham advocated in the 1830s that eating his Graham Crackers would prevent unhealthy sexual desires and self-abuse (masturbation). Later in that century, an anti-pleasure campaigner, Dr. John Kellogg, published books indirectly advocating the consumption of his bland cornflakes to discourage masturbation (as well as other barbaric alternatives such as sewing boy's foreskins with silver wire or burning women's clitorises with carbolic acid).
To counteract this craziness, we also have our well-known and well-loved champions such as Mark Twain who gave an 1879 lecture to a Parisian men's club criticizing the anti-masturbation culture of those times. Over 100 years later, in 1994, the United States Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, spoke at a United Nations conference on AIDS that masturbation was natural and should be taught as part of the sex education curriculum for students. President Clinton thought that she had gone a step too far and had her resign (some irony here, Bill?). A year later, the San Francisco retailer Good Vibrations declared National Masturbation Day to honor Dr. Elders that has expanded to include the entire month of May as International Masturbation Month. Bravo. -SQ
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