Bob considers himself to be a compulsive masturbator. His daily routine once he gets out of bed is to immediately go to confession. He lives in terror that one of these days he will get run over by a streetcar or suffer a heart-attack in between getting up and getting to church. He sincerely fears that if this should happen, God will send him to hell.
Bob is not the name of a particular person. He’s an extreme case, but I encountered him more than once in the course of my life as a Catholic. I also encountered a great many men and women whose difficulties were not so life-consuming but who still suffered in their personal, spiritual and relational lives because they believed that masturbation was a mortal sin and that their inability to avoid it wounds the Body of Christ.
Materia Levis
Masturbation is an interesting test case because of all the sexual acts which are condemned by the Catholic church, it is the most demonstrably harmless. Substantive arguments can be made for moderating desires that could cause harm to another person, spread disease, or lead to the conception of a child. There is a genuine gravitas to sex simply because of its relational and procreative capacities.
But wanking has none of this gravitas. There is nothing inherent in the act that makes it weighty, or indeed that provides it with a significant moral dimension of any kind. There’s no clear sense in which it violates any of the most basic principles of the natural law (principles which, for the record, I basically consider to be sound and universal with minor modifications.)
1. Wanking does not threaten individual life. Unless something truly bizarre happens, you cannot die or become ill by spanking your monkey.
2. It doesn’t threaten the continuity of the species. While there is some evidence that compulsive and routine use of pornography is correlated with poor interpersonal and relationship skills, which can lead to intimacy problems, it’s extremely unclear whether this relationship is causal (i.e. does porn lead to problems with intimacy, or do people with intimacy problems gravitate towards greater use of pornography?) However, in spite of the fact that almost all males and most females masturbate fairly regularly, most people seem to manage to maintain relationships and even have children.
3. This is the sticky one, because the claim that the church has to fall back on is that masturbation somehow wounds the nature of sexuality and therefore offends against the building of a common life and against God. Because the issues here are a little more complex, we’ll give this a longer treatment.
Adultery in the Heart
There is perhaps an argument to be made that masturbation wounds our common life in-so-far as it involves the use of other people as objects of imaginary appropriation — the “you have already committed adultery with her in your heart” argument presented by Christ.
When masturbation involves imagining another person performing acts that that person would not actually perform in real life, it can cause a change in how someone behaves towards the object of their fantasies. Some women, especially, are sensitive to these changes and feel used or violated by people who do this.
It’s also just disrespectful: there’s a reason why we object strongly to having people take nude or semi-nude photographs without our permission. Even if they never publicize the picture, they’ve established that they have a sense of entitlement to our bodies, to use our image for their own purposes regardless of our consent or knowledge. Taking a mental snapshot and using the imagination to photoshop someone out of their clothes and into your arms is disrespectful in the same way, it’s just harder to detect.
However, masturbation doesn’t have to involve the appropriation of unwilling bodies. It can be consensual (as in phone sex or sexting). It can involve purely imaginary persons (fictional characters, artistic representations). It can involve picturing archetypal imagery without any overt human representation of any kind (Georgia O’Keefe’s erotic flower paintings…) And if you really want to be scrupulous and establish that you’re a badass master of your own internal thoughts and passions, you can train yourself to blank your mind and think of nothing at all (yes, there are people who have adopted this solution in order to be able to jerk off without lust.)
None of these things violate the dignity of others or wound social life. A blanket condemnation of masturbation must, therefore, rest on the claim that it somehow wounds our relationship to truth and to God.
Doth God Abhor a Wanker?
The best argument in favour of this is JPII’s Theology of the Body. TOB situates sex as a kind of trinitarian icon: two become one and out of their loving union a third proceeds. Sex, according to this account, reveals something of the inner life of God — and when it is used simply for personal pleasure or for the satisfaction of animal instincts this is a sort of desecration. Something like drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
The difficulty with this account is that it attempts to turn all sex into sacrament. We don’t do this with any of the other normal, quotidian activities that represent the nature of God in liturgical settings. We acknowledge one baptism, but that doesn’t mean we condemn bubble baths. We find the full meaning of food and nourishment in the Eucharist — but we don’t therefore conclude that it’s an affront to God if you scarf a bag of Doritos while watching the game.
In these other cases we recognize that the sacralization of ordinary human activities elevates them and leads us towards God via the everyday. But we still recognize that human beings are bodily creatures and that it’s legitimate for us to meet our creaturely needs in mundane ways.
Similar problem arise with natural law arguments. Yes, it’s certainly true that sex is necessary for the perpetuation of the species and that it is, by nature, ordered to that end. But in other cases we don’t have a problem with non-harmful uses of our faculties for frivolous purposes.
Chewing gum involves stimulating the taste buds while providing no nutritive value. But nobody suggests that it’s an “unnatural” use of our superficial digestive parts for debased pleasure and that it is morally repugnant.
Nor, for that matter, does anybody have a problem with humans using our most elevated faculty, our reason, to do random irrelevant things. By nature the rational faculty is ordered towards truth and wisdom. But it’s not therefore disordered to use it to solve cheesy logic puzzles or read pulp sci-fi. The recreational use of our rational faculty is not merely permitted; it’s widely recognized that this sort of intellectual leisure is necessary to our psychological and mental well-being.
When it comes to sex, though, a completely different standard is in place.
Bob is not the name of a particular person. He’s an extreme case, but I encountered him more than once in the course of my life as a Catholic. I also encountered a great many men and women whose difficulties were not so life-consuming but who still suffered in their personal, spiritual and relational lives because they believed that masturbation was a mortal sin and that their inability to avoid it wounds the Body of Christ.
Materia Levis
Masturbation is an interesting test case because of all the sexual acts which are condemned by the Catholic church, it is the most demonstrably harmless. Substantive arguments can be made for moderating desires that could cause harm to another person, spread disease, or lead to the conception of a child. There is a genuine gravitas to sex simply because of its relational and procreative capacities.But wanking has none of this gravitas. There is nothing inherent in the act that makes it weighty, or indeed that provides it with a significant moral dimension of any kind. There’s no clear sense in which it violates any of the most basic principles of the natural law (principles which, for the record, I basically consider to be sound and universal with minor modifications.)
1. Wanking does not threaten individual life. Unless something truly bizarre happens, you cannot die or become ill by spanking your monkey.
2. It doesn’t threaten the continuity of the species. While there is some evidence that compulsive and routine use of pornography is correlated with poor interpersonal and relationship skills, which can lead to intimacy problems, it’s extremely unclear whether this relationship is causal (i.e. does porn lead to problems with intimacy, or do people with intimacy problems gravitate towards greater use of pornography?) However, in spite of the fact that almost all males and most females masturbate fairly regularly, most people seem to manage to maintain relationships and even have children.
3. This is the sticky one, because the claim that the church has to fall back on is that masturbation somehow wounds the nature of sexuality and therefore offends against the building of a common life and against God. Because the issues here are a little more complex, we’ll give this a longer treatment.
Adultery in the Heart
There is perhaps an argument to be made that masturbation wounds our common life in-so-far as it involves the use of other people as objects of imaginary appropriation — the “you have already committed adultery with her in your heart” argument presented by Christ.
When masturbation involves imagining another person performing acts that that person would not actually perform in real life, it can cause a change in how someone behaves towards the object of their fantasies. Some women, especially, are sensitive to these changes and feel used or violated by people who do this.
It’s also just disrespectful: there’s a reason why we object strongly to having people take nude or semi-nude photographs without our permission. Even if they never publicize the picture, they’ve established that they have a sense of entitlement to our bodies, to use our image for their own purposes regardless of our consent or knowledge. Taking a mental snapshot and using the imagination to photoshop someone out of their clothes and into your arms is disrespectful in the same way, it’s just harder to detect.
However, masturbation doesn’t have to involve the appropriation of unwilling bodies. It can be consensual (as in phone sex or sexting). It can involve purely imaginary persons (fictional characters, artistic representations). It can involve picturing archetypal imagery without any overt human representation of any kind (Georgia O’Keefe’s erotic flower paintings…) And if you really want to be scrupulous and establish that you’re a badass master of your own internal thoughts and passions, you can train yourself to blank your mind and think of nothing at all (yes, there are people who have adopted this solution in order to be able to jerk off without lust.)
None of these things violate the dignity of others or wound social life. A blanket condemnation of masturbation must, therefore, rest on the claim that it somehow wounds our relationship to truth and to God.
Doth God Abhor a Wanker?
The best argument in favour of this is JPII’s Theology of the Body. TOB situates sex as a kind of trinitarian icon: two become one and out of their loving union a third proceeds. Sex, according to this account, reveals something of the inner life of God — and when it is used simply for personal pleasure or for the satisfaction of animal instincts this is a sort of desecration. Something like drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa.
The difficulty with this account is that it attempts to turn all sex into sacrament. We don’t do this with any of the other normal, quotidian activities that represent the nature of God in liturgical settings. We acknowledge one baptism, but that doesn’t mean we condemn bubble baths. We find the full meaning of food and nourishment in the Eucharist — but we don’t therefore conclude that it’s an affront to God if you scarf a bag of Doritos while watching the game.
In these other cases we recognize that the sacralization of ordinary human activities elevates them and leads us towards God via the everyday. But we still recognize that human beings are bodily creatures and that it’s legitimate for us to meet our creaturely needs in mundane ways.
Similar problem arise with natural law arguments. Yes, it’s certainly true that sex is necessary for the perpetuation of the species and that it is, by nature, ordered to that end. But in other cases we don’t have a problem with non-harmful uses of our faculties for frivolous purposes.
Chewing gum involves stimulating the taste buds while providing no nutritive value. But nobody suggests that it’s an “unnatural” use of our superficial digestive parts for debased pleasure and that it is morally repugnant.
Nor, for that matter, does anybody have a problem with humans using our most elevated faculty, our reason, to do random irrelevant things. By nature the rational faculty is ordered towards truth and wisdom. But it’s not therefore disordered to use it to solve cheesy logic puzzles or read pulp sci-fi. The recreational use of our rational faculty is not merely permitted; it’s widely recognized that this sort of intellectual leisure is necessary to our psychological and mental well-being.
When it comes to sex, though, a completely different standard is in place.
by Melinda Selmys, Patheos | Read more:
Image: Jan Sanders van Hemessen. St Jerome (1543), photographed by Dr. Alexey Yakovlev
