This ministry is a constant learning experience for us, the experience comes from insights working with ordinary everyday people and inspiration from the Holy Spirit into how to address their issues. Hence there is a gradual development of our knowledge about how to address sexuality questions for people, specifically in this case adolescent males. Last time we wrote about our beliefs that masturbation should essentially be normalised for males, including Christians. This is because it is clear that males develop very strong sex drives from the outset of adolescence, which must be managed in a healthy and productive way, and masturbation offers the means to achieve that. We can speculate about how things have changed for human sexuality since the Garden of Eden, where perhaps the fact that the man and the woman were naked and unashamed meant that they had a daily sex life with little need for the man to practice restraint. What has come into human sexuality since that time is that whilst the design of male and female bodies and sexuality hasn’t changed much, social circumstances have. In Western societies particularly, both males and females are now expected to go through a period of adolescent development during which it is highly preferable that they remain single, and it is in adulthood that it is considered best for them to seek out a husband or wife, and the time of courtship can be quite long in some cases. A Christian guy or gal might be fortunate if they are able to marry after 7 or 8 years of waiting from the onset of puberty, but in many cases it would be 15 or 20 years, sometimes even longer than this.
If society believes that the benefits of adolescent singleness outweigh the obvious challenges to males and females in managing their developing sex drives, then it follows that they must be equipped with the means to achieve this. Masturbation provides this, but it needs to be at a healthy level, which means avoiding addiction or sexual perversion. Regrettably, many of today’s teenagers use masturbation in conjunction with pornography, which is creating a major public health crisis due to the undesirable sexually deviant behaviour encouraged by the widespread availability of sickening perversions contained in many pornographic websites. This includes material that is considered illegal in many countries and which can lead to criminal prosecution. Pornography is strongly associated with the development of sexual addiction in people, and as with any addictive behaviour, there are negative impacts on brain function caused by the pleasure overload and these can lead to other undesirable outcomes in everyday life. We can recognise the harmful impacts of pornography for Christians, as mentioned in a previous post, in the heavy spiritual burden imposed from sexual idolatry, which will have a deleterious effect on a person’s faith life, as well as the contradiction of traditional Christian sexual morality that much pornographic material conveys.
The goal of our ministry is to help Christians to break free from pornographic addiction, or for those who haven’t stepped over that particular line but have been subjected to pressure from it, to stand strong. We achieve this in part by affirming a healthy level of masturbation that adolescents and adults can use as needed in their daily lives to help them manage sexual pressures and drives. We recognise that these pressures and drives are particularly strong for males, out of whom perhaps 99% will regularly (perhaps daily) masturbate at some point in their lifetime. Females also experience these drives, but the percentage who masturbate to the extent they would approach a daily frequency is, we believe, much lower than for males. Previous posts on sex drive levels list low, medium, high and extra high levels and we believe Christian males and females should fit within the range of levels listed to ensure that masturbation remains healthy for them. The “normalisation of masturbation” concept referred to in a previous post addressing primarily male needs is driven by the knowledge that masturbation is almost completely ubiquitous for adolescent males and is very difficult for them to abstain from, thus our belief is the church needs to change its messaging on masturbation which has previously been based on very conservative sexual beliefs such as complementarianism and purity culture that send very negative messages about masturbation and other aspects of adolescent and adult sexuality for Christians.
As our ministry has evolved lately, we see it imperative to acknowledge and encourage in church youth ministries, for adolescent guys, that masturbation can be practiced in a healthy way and to encourage this. We believe there is likely to be a high percentage of adolescent guys masturbating in any church setting, but that the teachings of the church on this subject are often sufficiently negative to leave them in a state of shame and guilt about their needs for sexual pleasure in their bodies, when we believe it is clear that masturbation at a minimum meets 3-D needs, and also provides desirable physical pleasure. We believe most adolescent Christian guys will fall into the high to extra high sex drive levels. Even when masturbation is generally accepted and encouraged in church circles, it is still likely that males whose drives push them into the extra-high bracket will have negative views compared with the majority and they need extra support which can be provided by personal counsel as required. The same general issues apply to females. The main issue for an adolescent Christian female, or perhaps any female, is that masturbation can be viewed as abnormal for a woman, being considered to be more a part of male than female sexuality. Females approaching the higher end of the sex drive range will also tend to have a more negative view of masturbation.