May was masturbation month. As Charlie Glickman puts it :
We could talk about the physical, psychological and emotional benefits to this, but the bottom line is, it feels good and doesn’t hurt anyone. It’s so incredibly common and yet it’s vilified.”
As many researchers have shown over the last century, masturbation is healthy habit on many levels. But the social stigma associated to masturbation spoils most of the psychological benefits of masturbation by encouraging guilt and a feeling of inappropriateness. Hence, we need an entire month to educate people on masturbation to put an end to the public demonizing of this common practice that ends up uselessly hurting and crippling many lives.
Freeing yourself of the unwarranted stigmatization of masturbation won’t cause you to masturbate more (unless you were trying to restrict yourself because of this), it will simply allow you to masturbate serenely. Because whatever the many health reasons we can evoke to justify masturbation, we all masturbate because it feels good. Not feeling guilty will make your masturbation even better.
Even if this month is ending, you can easily see and hear around you that the job isn’t yet done. It will take time to change a perception that is so deeply entrenched in our cultures. What can you do, on an individual level ? Simply learn to identify, in your small everyday actions or words, those words or actions which put masturbation under an unfavourable light. Then avoid these actions or words as much as you can. Indeed, even if they appear as innocuous jokes or references, you have to realize that they are part of the negative message that end up making people uneasy about their inclination for masturbation. Thereby perpetuating the very myth this month — and I hope you too — attempts to shatter.
You can see this month’s daily Be a man/Masturbate posters here.
I have a less negative view of the current condition—I happen to think things are rapidly improving—but this is a good statement that should be read as “masturbation month” comes to an end. (Try to ignore the grammatical errors.)