|
Article Excerpt
The Bible presents no clear theological ethic on masturbation, leaving many young unmarried Christians with confusion and guilt around their sexuality. Moreover, with only a sin-based vocabulary for discussing masturbation, those with compulsive masturbation patterns are apt to avoid disclosing problems because of shame and thus risk escalating in compulsivity. We present a discursive educational approach for talking to college-aged Christian men about masturbation. Utilizing theological, psychological and sociological perspectives, this approach equips college-aged Christian men with the knowledge and critical thinking ability to work out an informed personal position on masturbation. We consider these perspectives followed by preventive and therapeutic implications for young men dealing with the early stages of sexual compulsivity.
**********
Among some Protestant and Catholic young people, the issue of masturbation evokes considerable discomfort and even distress because of the stigma that is attached to this behavior. Informed in part by the Church's historic position on non-marital sexuality, this stigma is exacerbated by the modern Christian emphasis on sexual purity, of which an unfortunate byproduct is the experience of misplaced guilt over a behavior that is arguably developmentally normative. Much of our work as therapists is dedicated to sexuality education and the prevention and treatment of sexual addiction among Christian men. Of the many aspects of human sexuality that we address in our work, masturbation ranks as the most misunderstood for the lack of open, rational dialogue about this topic within the Christian community. Among Christians in general, masturbation generates a unique discomfort and ambivalence--more so than even homosexuality--precisely because masturbation, unlike homosexuality, is quite prevalent in the general population (we will discuss prevalence and temporal frequency estimates of masturbation later in this article). Under the assumption that false guilt about masturbation is inextricably bound up with misinformation and a general lack of clarity, this article aims to bring informed biblical interpretation, sociological realities, and psychological facts to bear on the topic of masturbation. Our objective is to present a way of helping young Christian men to resist emotional arguments based on false facts and the misuse of Scripture, and to approach masturbation with a critical and discursive mindset to arrive at a well-reasoned personal viewpoint on the matter.
Sexual health and information about masturbation
Within evangelical frameworks of sexual ethics--those articulated by Grenz (1997) and Jones (1999), for example--there has never been a well-defined theological ethic of masturbation, in contrast to the ethics of pre-marital sex, marriage, and divorce that are worked out from foundational Christian anthropological assertions about gender, sexuality, and their relationship to the imago Dei. Good attempts have certainly been made by Sanford (1994) and Smedes (1994), among others, but these are good attempts precisely because they do justice to the moral ambiguity around the issue of masturbation. Masturbation falls thus within the proverbial grey area of evangelical sexual ethics. Therein lies the source of the vexation among countless numbers of young unmarried Christians: Even though masturbation is a morally ambiguous issue that seems to be theologically peripheral to the main body of Christian sexual ethics, it is developmentally a very salient issue for these individuals who are trying to understand the place of sexuality in their lives, and perhaps to reconcile their sexuality with a value system that eschews pre-marital sex.
Broadly speaking, the purposes of sexuality education are twofold: the promotion of healthy and responsible sexual choices through the dissemination of accurate information, and the prevention of undesirable outcomes stemming from ignorance. Accurate sexuality education is ultimately empowering. Specific to masturbation, Christian youth and singles are in need of accurate information to empower them to overcome the false guilt and unnecessary anxiety that they may experience over this behavior. Furthermore, for men who are in the early stages of a sexual addiction, education can help to reduce compulsivity by defusing shame and allowing the therapeutic disclosure of potentially problematic patterns of behavior (Kwee, Dominguez, & Ferrell, 2007). Specifically, theologically-informed education about masturbation can benefit unmarried Christian men who are confused by the lack of direct instruction in the Bible concerning this behavior. The purpose of theological information about masturbation is not to provide morally prescriptive instruction, but to help confused young men to thoughtfully engage Scripture and work out an informed personal position on masturbation that they can reconcile with their faith and values. We believe that this is in and of itself therapeutic.
The psychoeducation curriculum that we use is a module within a therapeutic protocol that one of us co-developed called Single Minded (Kwee & LePage, 2006), a structured early intervention program for evangelical men identified as early stage sex addicts. These are college-aged men who do not engage in partnered sex, but whose masturbation and pornography use may be classified as compulsive because they engage in these behaviors for mood regulation and self-soothing, consistent with etiological models of sex addiction proposed by Goodman (1993) and Schwartz and Southern (1999). The Single Minded program reached students from four Chicago-area Christian colleges, and the educational unit on sexuality has been employed as well in discussion groups outside of counseling. (1)
Masturbation as a developmentally normative behavior
Thematically speaking, we find that the questions that Christian young people ask about masturbation can be reduced to two essential queries. Christian youth want to know whether masturbation is "right or wrong" (i.e., what is the "correct" moral stance to take based on what the Bible says?), and whether masturbation is "normal" (i.e., what can we say about the psychological dimensions of masturbation?). For now we address the latter question and defer discussing the morality of masturbation to a later section in this article.
The most reliable population-based surveys indicate that masturbation is neither particularly rare nor particularly universal as a practice. To the conflicted Christian young person, what might we say, then, about masturbation in a psychological sense? Typically, we will respond to the question in terms of what is behaviorally or developmentally normative, and make an appeal to research findings to show that despite the scruples Christians may have about masturbation, studies suggest that masturbation occurs at a fairly high frequency for unmarried young people. Our response is informed by findings from reliable large scale sexuality studies as well as smaller studies that pertain to the demographic group that we work with (college men). In the most comprehensive representative sexuality survey conducted to date, Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, and Michaels (1994) estimated that approximately 63% of their probability sample (consisting of over 3,000 individuals) reported masturbating in the past year. Of unmarried, non-cohabitating people, 68% reported masturbating once or more in the past year. Because this subgroup contains individuals who are concurrently sexually active, it is reasonable to conjecture that the reported prevalence is understated for unmarried people who are not sexually active.
Smaller scale surveys suggest that masturbation is common among male college students. In one study of undergraduates' pre-coital sexual behavior, 85% of the male sample reported ever masturbating (i.e., at least once); the actual percentage rating the frequency of masturbation as either moderate ("occasionally") or high ("frequently" or "very frequently") was 71% (Schwartz, 1999). Pinkerton, Bogart, Cecil, and Abramson (2002) reported that 98% of men in their college sample reported having ever masturbated, and that the frequency of masturbation averaged 12 times per month for college males. These estimates suggest that masturbation is behaviorally normative among unmarried college-aged men, and that completely apart from moral considerations, it is a behavior that religious college men must contend with because it is part of a typical developmental trajectory.
Discussing information about the prevalence and frequency of masturbation is therapeutically beneficial in that it can have a normalizing effect for Christian young men who struggle with misplaced guilt feelings. We developed this approach in response to an observation that male clients at a Christian college counseling center had a tendency to attribute unwanted sexual thoughts...
|
