people have been demonizing it for most of the AD years i think but it’s quite pleasant really. are there any proven negative effects?
Religion
I’d like to go a bit deeper.
I don’t think people invented socially controlling practices because they found religion, I think they found religion to frame the invention of socially controlling practices.
Masturbation is a gratifying act that relives pressure to settle into a rigid domestic arrangement that serves to make more workers and soldiers, and create dependents that need fed, and whose well-being would be threatened if a parent became defiant and provoked the ire of elites.
Masturbation is good for the individual at the expense of the nation and its rulers. So it’s inevitable that priests would decry it as an affront against god, as that’s historically been their purpose.
I’d like to go a bit deeper.
go on…
( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Defeat the ruling class… jerk off
this is exactly the truth
Citation needed.
Which part? I think this is all subjective opinion.
Their statement started off with “I don’t think” which generally means it’s an opinion that may or may not have evidence. As long as they don’t present it as truth and fact, it doesn’t really need a citation.
That an opinion lacks evidence does not alleviate the requirement that its factual allegations be supported by evidence. “I don’t think the surface of the earth is curved” may be an opinion, but it’s a provably wrong assertion, and adding a disclamitory phrase to it doesn’t excuse the statement from evaluation.
this is a message board not a dissertation, nobody has to do shit
Yeah, my bad. I forgot how cool it is to just spout whatever bullshit you want. Hurray for ignorance.
No wonder humanity is doomed.
Similar to the claim that god exists 🤔
Then you should simply call that person a dumb ass and move on in that scenario. And their statement was loaded with qualifiers that indicates to the audience to not take their claim seriously. This isn’t debate club or a Congressional hearing. It’s a niche internet forum.
Pretty sad when religion claims to abhor evil, happens to be the source of a lot of it. Right? I can’t name a single thing religion ever did for me other than make me miserable.
IMO, and without actual data to back it up, I reckon religion (and religious difference) is responsible for the most suffering throughout the history of humankind.
I feel like even without religion we’d find ways to make each other miserable ‘cause we’re just an awesome species like that.
Yeah, no dispute here, mate. We’re pretty shocking like that. But I think religion stands out as an example of the worst, most inventive way we’ve come up with to subjugate and hurt people.
As a species, we’ve convinced ourselves that religion should be protected rather than inspected. We let lots of bad things happen in the name of religion. It’s bullshit.
Amen to that!
I don’t think it’s the source. I think it’s a tool of social control that enables the powerful to create a bare minimum willingness to be ruled. For a long time the doctrine of Christianity was the Divine Right of Kings. Now it’s the Prosperity Gospel. The books did not change but the people with all the money and power ensured the church leaders who served their interest had most of the money and thus followers.
If we didn’t have religion, some other social construct would arise, and I’d argue, has arisen to fulfill it’s role. Modern economic theory justifies the current power order in an unfalsifiable way that reminds me of religion.
Religion could be a liberatory force in society. In fact it has been. The liberation theology movement in South America and numerous heretical movements in the late medieval period are both examples of progressive Christian social movements.
Thank you. I think anyone who spends a lot of time reading about history comes to these conclusions.
Christianity and capitalism. If it doesn’t make you feel guilty the Christians don’t like it and if you can provide it to yourself for free the capitalists don’t like it.
You kidding? Porn is a 4 billion dollar industry.
You can jerk off without porn. Think of all the advertising and subscriptions on porn sites. Those have nothing to do with masturbation and everything to do with capitalism.
My weiner would disagree
Sorry you’re addicted to porn, G. Get help if you need it.
So, like, for the bulk of history, the people demonizing it are religious assholes.
They demonized sex out of wedlock, demonized wanking off; and any other kind of sexual release, while simultaneously deciding who you can marry (and therefore have kids with,).
It’s one of their core methods of social control, ensuring wealth is only passed on to children of wealthy and “faithful” families.
I posted a comment impulsively, then saw that you already gave the same answer better.
They also practiced polygamy, so that rich and influential men would have multiple wives and poor men would have none. Imagine the rage when you were a Shepherd tending someone else’s flocks, knowing that you will never have a wife or family.
It makes sense to have occasional wars with neighboring tribes so that excess males can be removed from the system.
Masturbation is totally normal and healthy, and you’re spot on that it shouldn’t be demonized or shamed. In men, it might even reduce the risk of prostate cancer.
At the same time, it’s important to have a balanced and psychologically flexible relationship with masturbation and sexuality. As psychologist Steven Hayes, a leading expert on psychological flexibility, explains: getting too fixated on any one activity or coping mechanism, even a healthy one, can lead to psychological inflexibility if it is used to avoid experiencing your life fully (For a thorough explanation of how this works, feel free to check out A Liberated Mind by Steven Hayes). Psychological inflexibility here means getting stuck in rigid behavior patterns to the point that it messes with living a full and meaningful life.
So while I’m totally with you that masturbation is healthy and that bullshit social taboos against it should be rejected, it’s also good to be mindful about your motivation behind doing it. Are you doing it because you’re escaping pain? Or are you doing it because it aligns with your values and makes your life meaningful? If you rely on masturbation too much and don’t have ways of accepting your emotions and connecting with the world, it could potentially tip into unhelpful psychological rigidity and a frustrating life. The key is to be able to experience masturbation while still staying flexible enough to show up fully for the rest of your life too.
What if I’m masturbating because my body demands I masturbate when I look at porn, even though I’d rather just look at porn without masturbating?
Thanks for the response. What you’re describing - feeling a bodily urge to masturbate when viewing porn, even if you’d prefer not to - is very common. We’re kinda designed so that our bodies respond to sexual stimuli. Many people can relate to that internal tug-of-war between an impulse and a conflicting desire.
From a psychological flexibility perspective, the key is to approach those urges with mindful acceptance rather than struggle against them. Fighting with or trying to suppress an urge often just makes it grow stronger, like a beach ball you keep trying to push underwater - it keeps popping back up with greater force (1). Instead, psychological flexibility invites us to open up and make room for the urge, observing it with curiosity and letting it be fully present in our awareness.
This doesn’t mean you have to act on the urge. In fact, by giving it space to exist without resistance, you gain the ability to unhook from it and consciously choose how to respond in line with your values (2). You might say to yourself “I’m having the thought that I need to masturbate right now” and feel the sensations of that urge in your body, while still maintaining the freedom to decide if acting on it is truly what you want.
Imagine for a moment that a dear friend or loved one came to you struggling with this same dilemma. How would you respond to them? Most likely with compassion, understanding, and encouragement to be kind to themselves as they navigate this very human challenge. We could all benefit from extending that same caring response to ourselves.
At the end of the day, you’re the expert on your own life and what matters most to you. By practicing acceptance of your inner experiences, unhooking from unhelpful thoughts and urges, and clarifying what you truly value, you can develop psychological flexibility to pursue a rich and meaningful life - whatever that looks like for you. That means that there’s no one “right” way to relate to masturbation and porn. The invitation is to approach it mindfully and make choices that align with the kind of person you want to be.
(1) You can check out the “rebound effect” or “ironic process theory.” It’s been studied extensively in the context of thought suppression. The seminal paper on the topic is Wegner, D. M., Schneider, D. J., Carter, S. R., & White, T. L. (1987). Paradoxical effects of thought suppression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53(1), 5–13. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.53.1.5
(2) This meta-analysis reviewed laboratory-based studies testing the components of the psychological flexibility model, and how psychological flexibility techniques increase behavioral flexibility. Levin, M. E., Hildebrandt, M. J., Lillis, J., & Hayes, S. C. (2012). The impact of treatment components suggested by the psychological flexibility model: A meta-analysis of laboratory-based component studies. Behavior Therapy, 43(4), 741-756. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.beth.2012.05.003
Mindfulness sounds like a lot of work when I’m already planning to get genital nullification surgery
EDIT: Lemmy users love to downvote trans people’s lived experiences because they’re transphobic
Yes, but I feel mindfulness can solve many problems. I’m not sure how many of your problems will be solved with surgery, but you might need to mix in a bit of mindfulness for good measure.
I’m mindful about lots of things, but I’m not mindful about my genitals, because they give me dysphoria. I’ll be mindful about my lack of genitals when I don’t have genitals.
You can’t mindfulness your way out of being trans. It doesn’t work, I tried.
Very well. I know it’s not a fix for everything. I just found it helped me growing up and when I remember to be mindful as an adult. When I forget and get too caught up in my own head is when I need it the most.
I wish you luck on your process and hope the best for you.
Asks question about psychology and masturbation. Gets well thought out response with source material and excellent advice. Responds to said comment in a rude way.
EveRYoNe is sO tRanSpHobiC!!
Lol. No. Your response was shitty and had nothing to do with the topic or the incredibly well thought out and empathetic response that you received. That’s why you’re being downvoted. Your gender does not give you permission to treat others poorly and you’re acting no better than actual transphobes.
I wasn’t being rude, I just gently informed the other person that they were giving bad advice, without getting angry or aggressive or belittling them in any way. You’re only reading my normal, pleasant interactions with other people as rude because you want an excuse to hate a trans person.
I just gently informed the other person that they were giving bad advice,
Do you really think they were giving bad advice? They presented something really well thought-out and with flippin citations! And I can say that Hayes is absolutely a credible expert in the field who has done amazing work in mental health and addiction.
You just don’t like the answer. Because you believe the answer is too hard for you.
And it’s an easy excuse to say you’re being persecuted for your identity, but really it is your attitude being criticized. Honestly it’s frustratingly transphobic of you to try and lump in maladaptive sexual responses with transness too. Do you see what kind of damage it can potentially do to portray a hypersexual trait as something essentially trans???
It’s good advice in general, but it’s bad advice for me, as I already explained multiple times. And I’m asexual, not hypersexual. I tell you I’m getting genital nullification surgery and you still go and erase my very obvious queerness.
This is what is called gaslighting and it’s deplorable.
No, gaslighting is when someone tries to make you question your sanity. Someone disagreeing with you isn’t called gaslighting, it’s called a disagreement. Obviously I’m going to disagree with you when you make up nonsense about my own actions. And if I had been as obnoxious and incorrect as you are, then I would have accused you of gaslighting when you told me my own actions were different than they really are.
Mindfulness sounds like a lot of work when I’m already planning to get genital nullification surgery
Being present with yourself and learning to sit with your thoughts (mere transient, ephemeral nothingness) is probably not going to be more work than undergoing literal surgery.
And it’s pretty insulting to gender diversity for you to attribute to transphobia our revulsion at seeing your level of emotional intolerance.
I’m mindful as shit about plenty of other stuff, just not my genitals. Being mindful about my genitals is bad because I have dysphoria. But I don’t expect a transphobe like you to understand my medical needs when you’ve already made a reductive judgement about my entire psychology based on a single statement in a specific context. You’re eager to judge, not to understand.
and you are eager to bemoan and cry persecution and not very eager to be understood. i cant believe you never mentioned being ace but only being trans. and yet it is our fault for not knowing this about you?
Thank you… most of the responses in this thread are really immature, arrogant, entitled, and pretty fucking cynical.
I work with people with severe depression and also the occasional sex/porn addict. Sexuality can lead us to some healthy lifestyles and can function as a healthy coping skill but it’s also one that’s easy to overdo. There are folks out there who try to treat their depression by masturbating all day long. They’re desperate for any hit of pleasure, and they have quite literally milked that cow dry.
This post reminds me of the Reddit marijuana communities, that rubber-banded so far beyond reasonable moderated consumption of a helpful medicine, but refused to see how maladaptive their ritual had become. No one in this thread is questioning the original premise. “But it’s so good!” That’s the immature, arrogant part. And the entitled part is the attitude that any criticism of my precious coping tool is a threat to my hollow happiness, and the cynicism is that the only reason to criticize it is because of a corrupt society! Jesus fucking christ this thread broke my brain, you all broke my brain, we all suck.
I’ve ended up having sex with my marijuana and smoking my semen… And I can’t help but ask myself, where did it all go wrong?
Psychological inflexibility here means getting stuck in rigid behavior patterns to the point that it messes with living a full and meaningful life.
Rigid behavioral patterns like having to work 40 hours a week, shop, feed yourself, clean, do laundry, go to the doctor, pay bills and so on, over and over and over again for the rest of your life?
Bro you can’t just list basically every human ADL and say it’s a “rigid behavior”. That’s basically like saying “Oh, you claim to like variety? Then how come you spend every day ALIVE?” thats idiotic, arrogant, cynical
Well excuse the fuck out of me for not having enough free time to actually enjoy my life.
you cant compartmentalize things like that. there aren’t “chores” vs “fun” and everything you have to do is pain and the fun is just the chemical rushes. you gotta learn to enjoy the little things, enjoy yourself while you’re doing your job or your chores, have some gratitude that you still live and breathe. you probably are gonna wanna get screened for depression
I can’t pick and choose what I do or do not enjoy doing. There’s nothing engaging about cleaning or doing laundry. When I first got out on my own there was at least some challenge in figuring out the most efficient way of doing things but that’s all been mastered long ago. My job mostly consists of going down a list of projects and emailing people to find out why they haven’t finished things that should have been done weeks ago. Then when I leave I get to sit in traffic for half an hour. Maybe stop at one of the over crowded, understaffed grocery stores to overpay for food. Get home, work out for an hour, shower, cook food, clean up, do whatever else needs doing. There’s nothing to enjoy about any of that. It’s all tedious as hell. I might have an hour or two after everything else is done to unwind before bed and even then I usually have too much on my mind to really get immersed in anything.
I get how you can feel like that is a fault of the world, but don’t you see any agency in changing any of this? Or you just leave it at “Well I don’t like it so that’s that”
Of the things I listed:
Job - I’m always on the look out for better options, so far nothing has come up that pays more and I’m already not making enough to do the things I want to do.
Cleaning - Already said I have gamified it to get some enjoyment out of it in the past but I don’t see any more room for improvement there.
Traffic - I can leave work early to beat rush hour sometimes but that that only helps a little.
Grocery store - I’ve tried going to different ones but it’s more or less the same issues at all of the ones I’ve tried. I’ve figured out which days are usually less busy but it still sucks.
Working out - I vary my routines to not get too boring but it’s still more or less the same stuff over and over again. It was fun when I was making gains but now my physique is where I want it to be so it’s just maintenance.
Cooking- can try making new stuff but that just takes longer and comes with the risk of waste if I mess it up or don’t like it. Also sharing a kitchen with housemates that tend to pack all the freezer space with garbage they buy from costco.
Free time - I guess I could stay up later but then I’ll feel like shit all day the next day.
I’m open to suggestions but you’re acting like I don’t think about this shit constantly.
I mean that’s definitely just a checkout aisle self-help book, though. Psychology, along with nutritional science and some other softer, more survey-based fields, has been suffering a pretty massive replication crisis, where something like 50% of papers are totally incapable of being replicated, depending on the journal and subject.
So I dunno, I’d generally be pretty skeptical of anything a book like that says about how you have to live your life or what you should be doing or how you should be doing it. Even if it’s something like “mindfulness”, right, generally thought to be a therapeutic practice, which we’re extracting from zen buddhism or whatever, just like carl jung travels around and extracts a bunch of “archetypes” from other cultures and then supposes that they’re universal when really it’s all just kinda some schizo bullshit canon he’s coming up with on the fly.
I uhh, I don’t like the scientific paint that is painted onto psychology and psychotherapy, is I guess what I’m saying. The attempt at formalization. What is just as good for one person, to be mindful, is probably something that someone else should rather not think about at all. Maybe even as a functional adaptation, a functional delusion that they can go on believing, and still end up having a fulfilling and uplifting life for everyone around them.
I mean that’s definitely just a checkout aisle self-help book, though.
Hayes is not a checkout aisle self-help book lol he pioneered multiple major branches of CBT. that’s like calling the Rolling Stones elevator music
I’d generally be pretty skeptical of anything a book like that says about how you have to live your life or what you should be doing or how you should be doing it
I admire the skepticism but you haven’t read it and clearly haven’t taken time to fully understand it. he isn’t making prescriptive claims. he’s speaking on behavioral science. “A happens, then B tends to happen. C happens, then D tends to happen. do what you will with this info.”
I don’t like the scientific paint that is painted onto psychology and psychotherapy, is I guess what I’m saying.
i understand the apprehension about psychological research but it is fundamentally a subjective science - psychology is what makes subjectivity possible, after all! and we humans clearly need treatment. if everyone listened to the ideas you planted in here, then what would we do? not try any treatments at all? not test our treatments? not seek evidence that our treatments are working and improve them? not share our findings?
the issue fundamentally is that you need to learn more about reading and interpreting scientific literature. you’re presenting a pseudo-intellectual skepticism which is admittedly a healthy protective mechanism from many things online, but is not going to be a useful attitude for all kinds of growth
im sorry im being a dick but this thread has funked up my barometer for crazy and i probably misinterpreted your level of it, be well
Hayes is not a checkout aisle self-help book lol he pioneered multiple major branches of CBT
I mean, both can be true, right. It’s not uncommon for pretty popular scientists to get into kind of the grift economy after a little while. Jordan peterson has how many citations to his scientific papers or whatever? But then he still rolls around and spews a bunch of bullshit that’s sort of framed under the guise of his psychological background, and you can still tell is pretty easily influenced by his jungian type bullshit. I dunno, been a while since I actually looked into him, but it shook my ability to trust psychology more as a field, after that one.
I admire the skepticism but you haven’t read it and clearly haven’t taken time to fully understand it. he isn’t making prescriptive claims. he’s speaking on behavioral science. “A happens, then B tends to happen. C happens, then D tends to happen. do what you will with this info.”
No yeah for sure I haven’t read it, don’t claim to have read it, I’m just extremely skeptical of that kind of book, which presents science to the public at large, because most of the experiences I’ve had with that sort of thing have been damaging psuedoscientific bullshit that I slowly have to talk my friends out of. Which becomes much harder when they think they know things on a topic because they’ve read like one book about it. I don’t even try to talk them into a different stance, I just try to talk them out of the kind of, oversimplified takes which they tend to get from these types of books. Steven pinker type books, “Guns, Germs, and Steel” type books, “The Bell Curve” type books, “How to Win Friends and Influence People”, “Poor Dad, Rich Dad”, shit like that. Admittedly not all of those are science guys, and some of that shit’s kind of old, but, you see what I’m getting at, it all blends together for the public. Pop psychology, that’s probably the term for that specific type of book, and uhh, yeah, that book gave me that kind of vibe.
If I’m really being skeptical, than, not evaluating anything else, because I just got up and still haven’t finished my coffee, the first study at the end of your post has two experiments. The first has a sample size of 34, the second has a sample size of 44. I dunno if I would say that you can really extrapolate anything from such an incredibly small sample size, to be honest. Especially one that’s like, taken from standard college campus volunteers. I know there are lots of scientific studies that rely on sample sizes which are pretty small, and I would throw that criticism at those studies, too. Shit happens in nutrition and exercise science too, I know for sure, which is why you see shitty fad diets circulate so much. I dunno, maybe I’ll read the rest of the paper, but that’s just like my general, me throwing shit at psychology as a field, right? But, maybe more, like, maybe more to, I think, some sort of point, if I have it, right:
and we humans clearly need treatment.
Like what do you mean by this? Because you’re looking at this through “treatments”, right, and I dunno if that’s the correct lens with which to view most people’s problems that they have in life. I mean it’s not a fuckin, incredibly new take, right, but like, you have a society where you’re expected to work 9-5, probably more, hours, five days a week, probably go in on a rental with your significant other, or increasingly, with your significant others, for like, 60 something years of your life? It’s not a shocker when we’re experiencing increasing amounts of depression at large, then, to me. That people have problems with that. I mean like, does changing society at large, qualify as a kind of patient treatment? I suppose my problem, if I’m really trying to have one, is just kind of that like, there’s not really any amount of psychological help which makes it better that your fingers are getting crushed in industrial machinery. Psychological help, in that case, just looks like copium. I don’t think psychology can help a lot of those problems, I think the best it can do is put a band-aid over a crippling tumor, which is nothing.
If you were to ask me what we were to do with the mentality I have, I’d probably want to incredibly balloon sample sizes and drastically increase the amount of evidence that we’re collecting, compared to just like, some guy’s written observations on like 50 people in some random experiment. Probably though, this is impossible, because school funding does not look to be going up anytime soon and google isn’t gonna share their massive amounts of data they’re collecting on people, and even if we had a glut of data to go through then we’d probably still be having to come up with and apply some sort of framework to it. At which point we just end up with a bunch of hacky bullshit, where you just take the noise and draw something in it and then say that this was somehow a natural occurrence, so you’d also need more rigorous standards for what conclusions we’re actually able to draw from the noise.
Then, even if you were able to do that, you’d still have no real way of distinguishing, say, one set of noise from another set of noise, to compare the two and draw a conclusion, because we’re just playing with like, one set of data, in a vacuum, compared to another set of data drawn from a vacuum, and there’s too many variables which might effect one outcome compared to another. So you’d probably need to be gathering pretty rigorous data over the course of many years before you’d be able to draw a real conclusion. Even then, the data might not be good enough, I dunno if you’d have enough information.
I’d maybe lean more into neuroscience to try and cut out some of the external noise, some of the factors that might fuck your shit up, but then that’s also not quite a good method because it doesn’t really cut out the external noise so much as ignore it, and you can still end up finding FMRI signals in a dead fish.
So, I dunno, probably I’d just use science for maths and astronomy and physics, stuff like that, and then otherwise I’d dismiss it, in looking for philosophies and methods with which to live my life or shape my being around. Or, you know, try to take it as it comes, and not really accept claims at face value. I’ve tried mindfulness, and I’ve found it wanting, because it just caused me to dissociate whenever I encountered an outcome I didn’t really like, and then instead of responding to things naturally, and flying by instinct, it causes me to kind of be like, the guy who smokes weed and then becomes hyper-aware of everything they’re doing but then their actual behavior devolves into nonsense.
Then, when I got farther than that, and I started to observe that behavior in the abstract, then it just sort of struck me as like, none of this realistically gives you a particular value judgement, right. It’s fine enough to just say, like, ah, well, think about it more, evaluate your life more, think about the long term consequences a little more. But, that train of thought doesn’t necessarily mean I’m going to be making the correct judgements, and even over a lifetime, it might very well be that I could try everything and still come to the wrong conclusions, wrong judgements, or the right conclusions and right judgements, or whatever. I could be a hyper-conscious CEO evaluating my own life totally inaccurately and still be getting by fine and dandy, and I could be a homeless guy with accurate takes but still have a shit life. It’s basically nonsense, to just be like, oh, well, think about it a little bit harder, just be a little bit more conscious, because that isn’t nailed down to anything in particular.
I respect your skepticism and I can see why you would mistrust the field broadly based on those figures in it. I just don’t think we need to throw out the whole field because of bad actors. Someone like Jordan Peterson is widely discredited in the field.
Treatment IS important. There are REAL problems with roots in our own psychology. It is not purely psychological, but always biopsychosocial. Disregarding the psychological is not the way to treat biopsychosocial issues. In fact, it is one of the only ones we have any real agency or control over. And the more we develop psychology, the more just our understanding becomes. Think about 50 years ago when almost everything was just called “schizophrenia” and we treated people by shocking the shit out of them. That’s where we’d still be if we didn’t do this kind of work.
When someone comes to me writing in pain from traumatic flashbacks, or wildly out of control of their lives due to mood swings, or losing grasp on what is real or not, or paralyzed with anxiety from the rat race you’re talking about, or they just plain cannot enjoy anything anymore and want to kill themselves… it is a low priority for me to discuss systemic issues with them. We can acknowledge them as a tool for alleviating shame and guilt surrounding mental disorders, and we can brainstorm ways to work around them, but expecting a suicidal client to begin marching in the streets? That is not going to be a sustainable means of making their immediate lives better. It is often more of a distraction than anything. Systemic justice and advocacy work is the kind of thing you do for no singular client in particular, and usually done in addition to the individual work.
But mental health treatment is how we help people find peace right here and now. It is how we empower people to find agency in their own lives, and help make them strong enough people to go out and support others in the longer term. It’s the people who do not treat their mental health that end up devoting themselves to bizarre causes. I mean, think about how many Q anon supporters have addictive or psychotic tendencies.
If you acknowledge that there are real mental disorders (with both internal and external etiology), and you acknowledge that treating the individual can be a positive step towards addressing systemic issues, then the question becomes what kind of treatment should we use? That’s where the scientific method comes in too. Yes there will always be problems and questions, but we do what we can with what we have.
I have seen people make real progress and really turn their lives around. That includes the masturbaters too lol, who do come through from time to time. I don’t care if there are swindlers out there - as long as there are real people who are really helping others. Helping people figure out what is truly important to them can help them find strength to endure the shit they cannot change. Helping people build tolerance for and even appreciation for pain can help them make decisions that give their lives greater meaning. It helps people free themselves from the grasp of addiction and start giving back to others. It helps people find reasons to live. It is doing an immediate, person-to-person good. I don’t know what kind of world you dream of, but I hope it is one with room for that kind of justice.
Thank you for your thoughts on all this!
Jerking it is fine, but just like any coping mechanism, you can abuse it and get addicted to it, then it becomes a problem.
If you’re doomscrolling porn, for example, then maybe it is having a negative effect on you.
Boobscrolling. Poonscrolling? Goonscrolling!
Goonscrolling is a crazy word for it, and is now what i will be using from now on lmao
Coomscrolling
Goonscrolling
Ejaculation lower the risk of prostate cancer, so masturbation should probably be medically advised to all men.
4-7 times a week is a good number according this study
Oh… there’s an upper limit? Is 4 times a day not healthy then?
At least 4-7 times a week. I have not read anything about an upper limit so go for it.
Im going to live for ever!
My guess would be the benefit plateaus at that point.
There is the factor of diminishing returns.
There’s an overflow and it helps others
Username checks out
deleted by creator
7 times a week ??? honey thats an addiction…
I beat my addiction 7 times a week!
your weak i beat my addiction 14 times a week
Amateurs. I beat mine 14 weeks per day.
Pfft! 21 weeks per meat! 🍖
Could I help you beat your addiction? It helps me beat my addiction afterwards.
How do ya figure?
Because you enjoy it. If you’re fixing your issues, it must be through pain and suffering. If it doesn’t involve pain and suffering, then it isn’t fixing your issues. The “Protestant work ethic” doesn’t come right out and say that, but it’s the implication.
See also: denial of LSD and psilocybin for mental health purposes.
For the seminal analysis of this topics, there’s Max Weber’s book “The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism”. But it is really dry reading, so I would suggest finding some YouTube essay video that summarizes it.
Seminal. Heehee
What if I want a hot girl to cause me pain and suffering?
Death by snu snu!
Then it’s the other way around obviously for more pain and suffering.
You can get a prescription for paid sex in the Netherlands if certain conditions apply, and other EU countries are exploring the option.
I don’t know how hot she’d be though.
(Sing along with me)
Every sperm is sacred
Every sperm is good
Every sperm is wanted
In your neighborhood
Remind me to never walk barefoot in your neighborhood.
You shouldn’t do that anyway.
If you bring a black light at night, it looks like the surface of the moon in direct sunlight
This mofo walks barefoot on the streets.
Not everyone grows up in places where that is looked down upon.
ewwwwwww tho
I don’t even walk barefoot in my house. I used to, but then I got a bunch of cats.
Outside though?! Absolutely not! I have different PANTS I wear when I go outside.
That last line made me change to Ray Parker Jr style funk.
“Bustin’ makes me feel good!”
Puritanism bullshit.
nooo the muffins 😭😭😭
how could you encrypt them 🥲
So only I can eat them. Mwahahaha!
noooo 😭
literally good for you
I actually asked my family doctor at one point about the health effects of masturbation. She said that as a guy, if you are not otherwise sexually active, it’s good for the prostate to keep the plumbing working down there.
Religion, capitalism. Powerful groups want more people to have more children.
Luckily I’m in a progressive enough country that even in school we were taught that masturbation is a thing and not necessarily bad.
As for negative effects - if you do it TOO much, particularly with a very strong grip, then don’t be surprised if, when having actual intercourse, you’re just not feeling much and might be unable to reach orgasm. You might even be uninterested in your partner sexually. A few days without masturbation will fix it though, doesn’t seem to be permanent. Day 2 without doing it and I couldn’t keep my eyes (or hands) off my wife’s body.
Sex was very infrequent for me and my wife in the last few months of her pregnancy, so that’s how I know. Soon as we started doing it on a somewhat regular basis again, I opted to quit jerking it because I wanted to enjoy the real thing more, even if it’s not every single day. No long-term negative effects that I’ve noticed.
Capitalism is powered by fapping, the fuck are you talking about?
A lot of the power users in this thread have clearly never heard of “sex sells”.
Title
Also non-zero chance some of these guys might have an association with Mindgeek. Just a hunch, given how easy reddit like sites are to manipulate.
It’s powered by there being enough of us wage slaves, which requires us to procreate, which is why red states in the US ban sex education, abortion, etc.
Of course, other capitalists have realized they can show ads on porn
Stop smoking what you’re smoking.
A lot of religion has been to push a heterosexual couple together for the means of procreation. Masturbation has been seen as a way for people to lessen their urge to procreate in the appropriate canonical manner.
These days mutual masterbation is better for your relationship than having kids. It’s not the kids fault, society has made having kids a nightmare.
And of course the reason it is demonized is that any powerfull organization/society needs peoples shoulder to stand on. So, the more people, the more power. And they don’t really care if it was by rape due to sexual frustration, they just need more people to take advantage of.
Because easy dopamine hits are also easy to gain unhealthy addictions to. Because it’s literally right there, easily accessible, at all times.
Couple this with how incredibly unhealthy the social relationships portrayed in most pornography are, and you’re gearing up for a lot of young men addicted to wanking and having unrealistic expectations of sex. The porn young women read isn’t necessarily much better, in the regard of healthy social sexual relationships.
Now, I’m not one of those weird “you shouldn’t jerk it at all” folks because that’s just extremism in the other direction.
Temperance and moderation are key in all things.
Porn “addiction” is a misnomer because it doesn’t have much in common with drug addiction, gambling addiction, etc. Porn “addicts”, when you show them images of porn, do not have brain responses like those of addicts who are shown images of whatever they’re addicted to.
But what is a great predictor for whether or not someone will self report being a porn addict is shame. Gay men in particular are significantly more likely than straight men in general to say they’re addicted to porn. So are straight men with a heavily religious background.
Which isn’t to say that people who report porn addictions aren’t really suffering, it’s just not the same as an actual addiction and is instead the result of living in a culture telling you that your normal sexual desires are wrong.
I actually agree. What’s addicting is the hit of dopamine from sexual release, not the porn itself. I see porn as more like how people who quit smoking often still find something to fiddle with in their hands and mouth. Biting on pencils, straws, etc. because part of their ritual of using the substance involved taking out a cigarette and putting it up to their mouth. The act of viewing porn itself isn’t the addiction, but it’s associated with it.
Like I said, moderation is key, because there’s a wide difference between masturbating a healthy amount and filling various cumjugs with figurines in them. Like if you can go out and live a normal life after jerking it, awesome, fuck yeah, that’s great. If you can’t make it through a workday without going to the bathroom to crank it, maybe you’ve got a fucking problem. I shouldn’t have to deal with some fucking weirdo breathing heavily and shaking the whole stall next to me in the bathroom because they can’t wait until they get home.
The porn is rather a social knock-on effect because people often seek out porn to make the pathway to dopamine release easier. The seeking of the orgasm has almost nothing to do with the societal implications of porn and its impact on relationships. However, the social impact is that people begin to associate unhealthy aspects of porn with a sex life and achieving orgasm in a sex life.
There are unfortunately deep layers of exploitation, unhealthy power dynamics, and control in porn that can be healthy between consenting adults who have achieved trust but some people really start digesting this porn before they’re mature enough to know how to healthily navigate those issues (especially in a society that sure as fuck isn’t teaching them, because of the aforementioned religious demonization of sex). This leads to further unhealthy experiences with sex, and I don’t think the gay (and LGBTQ+ community as a whole for that matter) community is free from that exploitation or people being exposed to it before they’ve had to education to navigate it healthily either. In fact, as a minority group, I would rather think they’re more likely to be exploited by the same people who hate their very existence… which further ingrains and exacerbates the very problems I’m speaking to, because the exploitation aspect of pornography is normalized. The areas that consume the most LGBT themed porn tend to be the most religiously restricted, and their viewpoint of that porn is almost 100% exploitative. To me it’s a hard sell that that’s not somehow a net negative for the LGBT community and that they’re mostly being exploited in pornograhy and in sex work by the very people who want to demonize their very existence.
The feeling of chasing that high, which scientists can show physical evidence of through brain imaging, isn’t present in people who self report porn addiction. What they’re calling addiction is frequently just enjoying masturbation, which they feel shame about, and that any amount is too much. If what people are self reporting as porn addiction neurologically doesn’t behave as an addiction, then therapies for addiction are not going to be evidence based treatments.
The people you’re talking about with cum jars often don’t even see their behavior as a problem, much less labeling themselves addicts. The overlap of the circles of people who masturbate in public and those that call themselves porn addicts is near zero. Calling all of that porn addiction is basically lumping all problematic sexual behavior together with people who think they’re part of that group because they look at porn and masturbate.
The professionals that treat porn addiction are also for the most part members of religious organizations that promote religious based solutions, which also doesn’t really offer much evidence against the idea that porn “addiction” is religious based shame.
The porn industry itself being exploitative of the workers is a completely different conversation than someone being “addicted” to porn.
I get that anyone who says they have a porn addiction isn’t having a good time. But we can’t ignore that there is a huge industry of religious quackery that is more than happy to take your money and tell you that you’re oh so sick, just as your shame and guilt tell you.
I want you to go back and re-read both of my posts and tell me where I said the words “porn addiction” or alluded to porn being the addiction. I’m trying to work with you here buddy, but you’ve decided that I’m saying something I haven’t said, after I took the time to clearly explain as much.
I literally am not talking about porn addiction nor have I used the words porn addiction, so can you take your crusade elsewhere, please and thank you.
The people you’re talking about with cum jars often don’t even see their behavior as a problem, much less labeling themselves addicts.
Literally what I am talking about and why I didn’t use the term porn addiction.
I’m sorry, I guess I don’t understand why you’re talking about addictions and how that relates to dopamine in your first comment if you’re not talking about porn addiction. I’m not using quotes around porn addiction to directly quote you, I’m using them because I don’t believe porn addiction is a real thing.
how that relates to dopamine in your first comment if you’re not talking about porn addiction
Dude, we’re literally talking about how orgasms release dopamine. What the fuck are you smoking? I’m literally talking about the orgasm itself!
Fucking reading comprehension is dead.
If your problem is specifically me using the word porn when you’re talking about masturbation more generally, with or without porn, does it help to add the context that “porn addiction” is used interchangeably by these groups with “masturbation addiction”? I’m not really sure where this is breaking down.
What it seems you’re describing is how nymphomania manifests in people without a partner. Nymphomania and porn addiction are two different things. Likewise I don’t think nymphomania necessarily has the same underlying causes as say a drug addiction, it might be something like a hormonal issue. Hard to know without doing more research.
I, we all rather, are “addicted” to air, water, food, shelter, safety, rest, etc. - which as you say isn’t the same as a true “addiction” at all. Wanting things that produce a healthy life is not a bad thing, and in fact quite the opposite. To the extent that religion or culture or whatever encourages the opposite (rather than e.g. moderation and consideration, like mindfulness), it is wrong and bad. Even for someone who believes in a God who is good, those false beliefs need to be cast aside, bc they hinder us from living well. I wish I had discovered this earlier in life.:-D
Couple this with how incredibly unhealthy the social relationships portrayed in most pornography are, and you’re gearing up for a lot of young men addicted to wanking and having unrealistic expectations of sex.
I don’t really get this honestly. When people watch The Flash, they know that it’s unrealistic for someone to move at that speed. When people read sci-fi, they know it’s unrealistic to expect every problem to be solved by science in their lifetime. When people watch the show Superstore, they don’t expect it to actually be a realistic representation on how a big box store runs. So I don’t see why porn would be any different. They’re all acting.
Probably to sell more Corn Flakes.
