All My Children

Self-Consciousness and Fear of Illness Several factors make an adolescent uncomfortably aware of himself and worried about his physical and mental health: his rapidly changing body draws his attention inwards. So do his turbulent new feelings. A tendency to guiltiness about sex—even in this day of much greater tolerance— often lies behind his vague fears that he may have harmed his body, that he has acquired a venereal or other disease, that he is losing his mind.

Underlying these factors is the uneasy sense of having lost his earlier identity as a child of the family and of not yet having acquired an independent one as an adult.

A teenager because of such worries has a special need of a sympathetic teacher at school or a social worker, or an understanding doctor or clergyman.

Teenager Masturbation

In former times, before anything was known scientifically about the psychology or physiology of sex, it was believed that masturbation was harmful physically and mentally: that physically it would cause weakness and impotence; mentally that it would cause various forms of nervousness and even insanity. These beliefs caused much worry in young people. Now we know that they are not true. But this knowledge hasn’t solved all the fears about masturbation.

Masturbation is the sexual stimulation of oneself, usually while having sexual fantasies. It is most commonly done of course by stimulating the penis or the clitoris with the hand. But some individuals, strongly inhibited in childhood against touching the genital, have learned instead how to rub it against bedding or other objects or to squeeze it between the thighs. There is also vaginal stimulation.

Several overlapping reasons are usually given for the almost universal occurrence of masturbation in adolescence in the industrialised countries. Young people have strong sexual urges for some time before they begin to date and even longer before they have intercourse. There usually has to be a prolonged postponement of marriage until they finish their elaborate educations. The ideal of chastity until marriage or engagement, the fear of permanent commitment to the wrong person and the fear of pregnancy have kept many youths with high aspirations from love affairs before marriage. So, masturbation has usually served as a substitute for intercourse. Actually, masturbation has become much less of a worry for young people in the past twenty-five years as sexuality in various forms has been shorn of much of its mystery and guilt, as improved contraceptive methods have reduced the fear of pregnancy for those not concerned about chastity, and as prosperity has made student marriages possible.

The young people who are still most concerned about masturbation are those who grow up in families with high ideals, part of whose sexual interest and energy is sublimated into aspirations and creativity. The sublimation is what enables them to go on for years in their studies, postponing some of the other immediate gratifications, makes them dream of idealised marriages and makes many of them distinctly hesitant—in their own feelings—about becoming involved in casual sexual affairs. For such people, in whom the direct expression of sexuality is partly blocked for years, the impulse to masturbate, with fantasies, is intense and usually irresistible.

Young people ask whether, for sure, masturbation is physically and mentally harmless and the answer is yes. (There is no truth in the statement sometimes heard that masturbation is harmless only if practised in moderation.) But the knowledge that masturbation is not harmful does not take away the worry and guilt altogether. First, a great majority of human beings are so constituted and conditioned that they feel at least slight guilt about any sexuality except in marriage, however enlightened they have become. Secondly, people with strict standards inevitably feel that a solitary form of sexuality which offers no affection to another person is unattractive, even though it may seem less objectionable than intercourse without real love.

According to the Kinsey Reports, people with relatively little in the way of education and aspirations, who on the average come to intercourse earliest in adolescence because they have the least inhibition against it, are more apt to consider masturbation (and other forms of sexuality that are not intercourse) to be immoral and repugnant. So the attitudes are reversed at the upper and lower ends of the educational scale.

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