What is masturbation? Is it harmful?

Rastrobatio is a topic that still causes a lot of problems for people. A lot of people feel so guilty about it that they wouldn't even admit, if that's the right word, that they do masturbate. But we know from studies and from research that over 90% of men masturbate and that well over 50% of women masturbate. And masturbation is widely practiced throughout the animal kingdom. But yet people feel guilty about it. I suppose it's the old Catholic guilt that we have in Ireland that's still hanging in there.

Even though we tend to think we're very liberated nowadays and we have a free and easy attitude to sex. I think this guilt about sexual pleasure and particularly about sexual pleasure which is applied by the person themselves. For themselves seems to cause more difficulties than sexual pleasure with a partner. So a lot of people attribute to masturbation problems that cannot be attributed to masturbation. For example, I would see a lot of men who are suffering from erectile problems, impotence. And they would say, they would volunteer to me that I think this problem is due to masturbation.

When I was younger, I used to masturbate every day. For example they might say, and I think I must have damaged myself. I think women are more circumspect about masturbation than men. Because there is a historical and cultural attitude towards women of repressing women's sexuality much more than repressing men's. So I think it is more difficult for women to come out in a sense about their sexuality and to express it freely than it is for men. But what I want to say is that masturbation, as far as we know, causes no medical problems whatsoever.

Causes no problems with impotence, causes no sexual problems, causes no fertility, causes no problems in other words. And people need to get that into their heads. It is interesting that the Chinese think, and Chinese medical doctors who practice traditional Chinese medicine, that there is such a thing as masturbating too much. But the way that they measure for an individual, the way they measure too much masturbation, is they say, if you are masturbating to a degree that exhausts you for days afterwards, then you are masturbating too much.

But that is the only reference I have ever seen to a medical problem related to masturbation.