Continuing our current subseries about the importance of the gift of masturbation for adolescents, today we are going to take a special focus on the value of masturbation for adolescents and others who are recovering from pornography addictions. This is a specialised topic, but we feel we have actual real life experience of working with it, that means we are wanting to write this post because porn is such a huge issue for our teenage guys and gals these days, and it is growing, where even church pastors are admitting in high percentages that they watch porn. At the same time, high profile pastors and ministry leaders are being exposed for infidelity and sexual immorality, with four at least this year, including the head of a major educational institution and a key leader in a large international church.
We believe that conventional methods of porn addiction recovery are similar to other forms of addiction recovery and would involve addressing personal issues, receiving counselling / therapy and abstaining from activities that could lead one down a wrong path. We do not know how effective these methods are. Every method has its pluses and minuses. We are not proclaiming that the suggestions in this article are more effective or better than any other methods, just that we believe they can be effective.
We believe that ultimately, masturbation can be a key component of healthy male or female sexuality because of our convictions outlined elsewhere in this blog that masturbation is an effective tool for 3-D purposes, one of which is sexual development. So we believe that masturbation helps to develop healthy sexuality. That includes when people are recovering from unhealthy sexuality. The simple fact about sexual addiction is that as long as people are told masturbation is sinful and bad, masturbation as a component of a sexual addiction has unhealthy power over them, which translates into the physical pleasure of masturbation having the power. But if we look at it from the perspective that our bodies are designed to produce this physical pleasure and that we own that pleasure, then we can more readily come to the understanding that masturbation isn’t really the issue because it isn’t distinguishable from other forms of pleasure in our lives. That is to say, it is good when partaken in moderation. Masturbation is good because it sends us good messages about our sexuality, it relieves sexual tensions and pressures, and Christians can partake of it in moderation, without becoming addicted, and without involving sinful activities such as porn or lust.
If a Christian who is masturbating as part of an addiction to pornography can move from that situation into masturbating without being addicted then they have got the benefits of masturbation without the negatives. If they come to the understanding that masturbation can be part of a lifestyle that is both physically and spiritually healthy, and specifically from the Christian spiritual perspective for someone whose faith is totally committed to living a lifestyle that is holy, righteous and just, from a “conservative” evangelical perspective, not a liberal one. We aren’t liberal, as you can see from our statement of faith on the front page of this site. We don’t in any way ascend to liberal Christian theologies, especially those on sexuality. We simply feel there is something that has been missed in relation specifically to masturbation about which there are, in fact, no biblical unctions whatsoever. A lot of other sexual behaviours are mentioned in the Bible and certain ones are condemned but masturbation is not among them. We have this conviction that a Christian can live a life of sexual purity in every way who uses masturbation to help them live that life without sin or fault, for example free of lust and pornography. In fact, we are strongly convinced / convicted that masturbation is the essential tool / gift that all singles in particular, most of the time, and also married people, at least some of the time, need to be able to make use of in order to effectively manage sex drives and physical pressures that their sexuality creates for them daily. This may mean masturbation is needed in their lives on a range of possible frequencies up to and including daily.
For married couples in particular, the core expectation of mutual accountability/ submission means they have agreed together on each other’s use masturbation, when it is OK for each other to masturbate, and any conversations or discussions they need to have with each other about using it. This is very relevant because masturbation is often misused as a substitute for real sexual intimacy in a marriage. Spouses can create an atmosphere in which they support and encourage each other’s use of masturbation by enabling and encouraging themselves to spend time masturbating together and also giving each other private time for masturbation if it is needed when they are both at home. The core subject of masturbation in families is covered in the next part of this article series as part of a conversation on this blog about enabling adolescent children or older single adult family members to masturbate in a healthy way. This in turn requires an openness about discussing sexual development with adolescent and older family members that at least starts with the parents being open and creating a family culture that encourages openness whilst at the same time respecting physical and emotional privacy of each member.
To return to the important subject of this post, the key physical reward of masturbation is pleasure. When anyone is using masturbation to achieve good and healthy things in their life, that pleasure is achieving a constructive end to their personal development, such as helping to grow their own sexuality. If they are using masturbation in an unhealthy way, such as a component of a porn addiction, to fill in some gap in their life that should not be masked with pleasure, they need to address the root causes of the unhealthy situation, because masturbation like any other pleasure producing activity in a person’s life can result in an addictive situation. When people get sucked into a porn addiction, the question is what unhealthy behaviour or gap in their lives has made them vulnerable to an addiction. This is super relevant to adolescents who are interested in sexual things because they are learning about their sexuality and they discover that looking at pictures of naked people having sex arouses them. In masturbating and reaching orgasm, they have chosen to focus their mind on the use of porn to create the degree of arousal necessary to achieve that ends. However, a Christian can reach the knowledge that masturbation itself isn’t sinful and therefore it can be used as part of an act of worship. Having this knowledge that they can masturbate and reach orgasm and therefore achieve the same physical pleasure as using porn without the downsides of the addiction allows them to focus their mind on God instead and therefore successfully resist the desire for pornographic material or stimuli during masturbation.
Recovery from porn addiction is a process, like any other addiction recovery. A Christian who has been used to masturbating on demand and possibly a large number of times per day still has to retrain their mind to more productive thoughts and also to the knowledge that they have to work to a limited frequency of masturbation – see comments in earlier posts about sex drive levels. The great majority of males fit into the high sex drive category of at least a daily frequency of masturbation, and likely a small percentage of females as well. So someone who is recovering from a porn addiction has to retrain their mind and body to work with healthy behaviours and limits, but taking the porn out of the picture is definitely a good start to achieving this as it allows natural levels of sexual drive or desire for that particular person to be re-established. We are also guessing that the types of people most likely to become addicted to porn in the first place are those males and females who already are in the high sex drive category and they will probably not find it overly difficult to scale down to a healthy frequency of masturbation when that frequency may still allow them to masturbate at what the previous posts define as the high or extra high level when needed.
The really big thing that we feel changes the landscape so majorly for most porn addicts is the knowledge that the pleasure of masturbation and orgasm in moderation is not itself a sin and that they can break free from the chains of addiction whilst still having the use of this gift to help them deal with the pressures of living in their body and responding in a healthy way to various demands and challenges relating to their sexuality. We’ll look a bit more into that in our next post which is more specifically about how families can help support healthy sexual development for their children and therefore how they can help steer their kids away from the threat of porn addictions and help them to maintain a strong faith and sexual purity throughout adolescence. We’ve had a really strong burden for that this past week and this is part of what is driving us to write these particular posts, because as is so often the case, what we are writing in this blog is actually a part of the ministry we are doing at any particular time.