This post is in part a continuation of the last post (talking about Christian women with a high sex drive) and in part talking about Christian men’s sex drive. It is really our intention here to tidy up a few loose ends in this series and probably bring it to a close as we feel it has panned out to a natural end.
We have almost taken it for granted in our societies that men have a high sex drive which is entirely normal and nothing to be ashamed of. Masturbation is generally seen in society as a legitimate male activity, although traditionally frowned upon in conservative churches. Like many other aspects of female sexuality, masturbation traditionally was discouraged, until the 1960s, and has become much more accepted for women. But as with masturbation in general, there is still a challenge in the way it is addressed in the Christian community, for both men and women. Most of the messages about masturbation inside the church are uniformly negative and we feel we are almost alone in promoting the message that we are creating on this blog site.
Our ministry got started many years ago dealing with sexual abuse issues, which affect women a lot more than men, and have moved towards now dealing with the wider range of issues for sexuality in general, for both men and women of the Christian faith, which has brought greater balance to our work. This means we now spend more time looking at men’s issues, and we believe the sensitivities around masturbation and sex drive in general are the most significant of these. As we have written, we believe all Christians should be encouraged to adopt a healthy attitude to masturbation and that it should be considered normal to be practiced from the beginning of puberty for the purposes of sexual development and maturation. In our last post on sex drive we used the term about a “normal” level of sex drive but we now feel the correct term to use is “medium” level because it is then difficult to talk about “high” sex drive or “low” sex drive without making these seem, by definition, abnormal.
We feel that a medium level of sex drive is the desire for orgasm between 3 to 7 times per week. The important issue in this post is to be able to talk about high sex drive because whilst there is only a percentage of women in this category and that percentage is probably less than 50, the percentage of men there is much greater, like maybe 80 to 90%. We feel a high sex drive is those who desire sexual orgasm more than 7 times a week. We believe that for young single Christian men in particular, especially adolescents, 14 times per week or even a little more can still be healthy provided they keep the use of masturbation within the guidelines listed elsewhere on this blog. Married men will generally find it more productive to focus on consensual sex with their wife, but still may find masturbation useful on occasion, just as women do for the reasons we have talked about in other posts in this series and in general elsewhere on this blog. The best masturbation for spouses is when they can masturbate together and share the experience, or incorporate masturbation into full/penetrative intercourse, but either spouse may use solo masturbation for the 3-D purposes outlined elsewhere.
Some people at this point may be recoiling at the suggestion a young single male might be encouraged to masturbate two or three times a day by a Christian ministry because they have the concern that too much masturbation could be harmful. It is certainly reasonable to address the possibility that like any human activity, masturbation can become addictive, but this simply requires the same consideration as other activities. Addictive masturbation is like any other physical activity addiction that anyone can experience and doesn’t preclude the use of masturbation within a healthy range of frequencies. We have sought to encourage the consideration of a healthy frequency of masturbation that is within several times a day because we know that many Christian men actually do struggle with a high sex drive and this is one of the reasons that men engage in “locker room” talk even in church circles (Christian men just use more polite and respectful language, in general, but still talk about sex a lot, in our experience).
When the typical sex drive for most males is in the high range, we feel the best approach for a ministry such as ours to take is to encourage Christian men to have a healthy attitude to masturbation, just as we do for women. That means a godly guy shouldn’t feel innately guilty if he believes that he needs two or three orgasms per day at any reasonable time of his choosing. The most spiritually beautiful things we have come to understand in our ministry with individual people is discovering that those who are able to “let themselves go” during orgasm, that is, they are able to get past negative feelings about masturbation and sexual activity in general and just focus on how masturbation is affirming their own sexuality, are those who gain the greatest sense of spiritual depth and blessing from the orgasm.
We aren’t professing at this stage to have a full understanding of the spiritual blessing that orgasm can produce for Christian men or women, particularly in relation to masturbation but also in a general sense, but we expect that with more study of this subject we will discover both guys and gals testifying that orgasm at any time whether in a solo or marital context brings with it a deep sense of intimacy with God, the solo experiences being those which provide the individual believer with the opportunity to focus much more on their own relationship with God than they get to do when having sex with their spouse. This is what has driven us to come up with the 3-Ds, which are essentially a statement of the key benefits for Christians to be received from solo masturbation which all relate directly to the pursuit of a committed Christian faith in the life of a godly believer and therefore relate in very key ways to a believer’s personal relationship with God.
We’ve said in previous posts that one of our key desires from this ministry is to see masturbation become an open subject of discussion in the Church at large when at present it is generally hidden away. This will come about naturally when the Church is willing to accept that masturbation can be a healthy activity for committed Christian believers in the evangelical community. We believe strongly that this will help both Christian men and women to be more accepting of their own use of masturbation and get free of unjustifiable guilt and shame (condemnation). For now, all we can do is to pray and counsel individuals to gain this insight themselves, but we are writing these blogs in the sincere hope that they will reach others, and everything we write is born out of our ministry experience.
The biggest single issue we feel every Christian who masturbates will struggle with the most, is the assumption that a high sex drive is somehow abnormal and potentially perverted, whereas we want to emphasise in this anonymous, one-way conversation that even a high level of sexual desire and frequency of masturbation as talked about above can still be healthy as long as it falls outside the red flags of what is clearly addictive behaviour in general, many definitions of which can be found on other sites. Every Christian man or woman who is reading this and who believes they fall into the high sex drive category as suggested above, needs to gain the understanding for themselves that there is nothing inherently bad about their sex drive in itself and that their personal struggle or challenge with their sex drive, or any other aspects of their sexuality, is something they need to bring to God directly in their prayer life. This is because we all need to be able to understand the fullness of God’s intent for our sexuality and that, for any Christian who walks daily in a close relationship with God, He intends our sexuality, like many other aspects of our physical and spiritual bodies, to bring much blessing to our lives and to others around us.
The church at large and especially evangelicals have become rather “good” (in their own eyes) at creating a great deal of unnecessary false guilt and condemnation over certain aspects of sexuality and pushing it under the carpet, when we believe it is very clear that sexuality is something to be celebrated as something that God created to be innately good. Look at the natural world around us, because in nature, even in the plant world or the insect world, sex and sexuality are all around us and are not hidden from view. The only real stipulation is that knowledge and discussion of sexuality should be kept from pre-pubescent children until they reach adolescence.
Well that’s been quite a long post but we felt we have been wanting to write this post for a long time, and at the same time bring this series to a close (for now anyway).