MASTURBATION: DETERRENCE
BY EDWARD BRONGERSMA
“Masturbation: Deterrence”, is part of “The Outlets”, the final section of “Boys and their Sexuality”, the third chapter of Loving Boys, the encyclopaedic study of Greek love by the eminent Dutch lawyer, Edward Brongersma, of which the first volume (including this) was published by Global Academic Publishers in New York in 1986.
From puberty, masturbation is for boys (not for girls!) the first conscious sexual habit.[1] 55% learn the art from comrades, 36% discover it by themselves.[2]
Not all parents, however, accept this with the same equanimity as parents in the “primitive” nations above mentioned. There are records all through history of masturbation being confronted by threats. Already in the Knights, one of the surviving comedies of Greek playwright Aristophanes (444-385 BC) we can read that if people rub their penises their skin will drop off.[3]

The Greeks and Romans believed that sexual activity would damage the voice of singers and the strength of athletes: such individuals, therefore, were compelled to abstinence.[4] They found a simple way of preventing masturbation: after drawing forward the foreskin as far as possible, it was laterally pierced with a white-hot awl, a silver wire laced through the holes, bent into a ring and soldered.[5] Even fathers did this where they wanted to preserve until puberty the chastity of their little sons. Martialis[6] wrote about a randy boy who, with his swelling penis just liberated of its fibula by the blacksmith, willingly follows a man who has promised to suck him off. Christian as well as Indian monks have employed the same device to ensure their own sexual abstinence; at times they have even displayed their virtue with rings as large as 15 centimetres and weighing 125 grams.[7]
Some young slaves were kept only for sexual purposes. The same operation was performed upon them, but in place of a fixed ring, a kind of clasp was inserted with a lock which could only be opened by the master (or mistress!). In this way young males were made sexually safe companions for wives and daughters without castrating them, and their sexual passions could be accumulated until such time as their owners wished to make use of them.[8]
Martialis, the Roman poet quoted above, disapproved of masturbation for another reason: “Do you really think, Porticus, it doesn’t matter but too, that you never fuck but let your left hand be your wife? Believe me, that is an enormous crime – you cannot realize how serious it is. Horace fucked only one time, and in doing so begot three heroes; Mars, too, fucked just once and Ilya gave birth to twins. What would have become of us if both had satisfied their lusts with their own hands? Know well what nature teaches: what you waste with your fingers, Porticus, is a human being!”[9]
Jewish tradition, too, denounced the habit, and there is even a text in the Talmud demanding the death penalty for anyone who so satisfies himself.[10] (This Talmudic author, had he had his way, would thus have exterminated his own people!)
However the Greek physician Galenus (ca. 130-200) taught “that masturbation was sometimes necessary and healthy, because unreleased sperm could become poisonous.”[11] His opinion was shared by a number of his colleagues during the ensuing middle ages[12] and Moslem theologians regarded masturbation as a Christian vice.[13] Although some Muslim authors condemned the habit, most of them condoned it: “It is your own juice; you may spill it” – “Our forefathers taught it to their sons to keep them from fornication.”[14] For many centuries we can detect no concern in European culture[15] about this habit so assiduously practiced by male youth in all times and all nations. “The Church had always regarded this activity as sinful in adults but had been tolerant of it in children.”[16] Even those who thought it improper were inclined to see in it something understandable that could best be prevented by the natural substitution of intercourse. And against intercourse there was, as we saw in the first chapter, no serious objection at all.
All of this changed suddenly in the second half of the 18th Century. Tissot, a physician and medical adviser to the papal court,[17] published in 1758 his sensationalistic book De l’onanisme (On Masturbation). In it he informed his readers that the inevitable consequences of masturbation were “a weakening of all the bodily senses and all talents of the mind, the loss of fantasy and of memory, and debility. Shame and dishonour follow. All functions become disturbed, cease at times and become painful. Long-lasting, troublesome, strange, horror-inducing illnesses set in, with sharp and continuously recurring pains. During the years when a man should be most vigorous, all the infirmities of old age become apparent. One loses the capacity for every human activity and becomes debased to a useless burden of this earth.”[18]

As confessor and spiritual guide of a masturbating and healthy crowd of young people, every priest must, of course, have known that all of this was complete rubbish, a fiction from A to Z. Not once, however, did the Catholic Church raise its voice against these lies, despite their fatal effects and the damage they caused. On the contrary, it adopted and reinforced them with ever-increasing enthusiasm, until it ultimately stigmatised masturbation as a mortal sin which, if not confessed and expiated, would irrevocably condemn its practiser to the eternal torments of hell.[19] J. C. Debreyne, priest and physician, recommended in 1842 the adoption of the following “sound” pedagogy: “We should threaten such boys with shame, with contempt, with dishonour, with all imaginable terrors, with the most painful, the most debasing, the most shameful diseases, and finally with an early death, followed by everlasting punishment.”[20] Evidently the intent was a pedagogy like that defined, in another context, by the American psychologist Friedenberg: a process whereby many youngsters are sickened and terrified, their pride destroyed, and are convulsed with humiliation so that control may be restored at a less than human level.[21] Moreover, the victims were physically attacked as well: “They were circumcised or infibulated.[22] In the 19th Century their sex organs were burned or blistered, the nerves of the penis were severed (…) When operating techniques improved still further, the testicles (…) were surgically removed. In sum, eventually, medical treatments of masturbation became so drastic that they began to resemble the medieval tortures which they once had been supposed to replace.”[23]

The first doubts were voiced in France. A Dr. Christian expressed the opinion in 1881 that masturbating children would certainly lose their brains, their health and their life, but that from the age of 16 years on the habit became innocuous, because ”nearly everyone does it.”[24]
This didn’t, however, prevent a certain psychologist Lorulat from publishing as late as 1928 a book in Paris in which he stated as well-established fact that masturbation weakens memory, intelligence and health: the digestion becomes troubled, which often causes diarrhea; the chest remains narrow, which often results in tuberculosis; the heart is overstrained, hence palpitation; the excess of blood pressure in the brain impairs eyesight; moreover there arise nervous inflammations, spinal consumption, insomnia, spasms, streaks of pain. The penis atrophies and becomes very small, with only the glans staying large: this enables one to recognise the masturbator immediately. Other symptoms are the way he avoids looking you in the eye and his uncertain gait. Of course, he gradually becomes impotent, and during this process he becomes a coward, egoist, liar, hard-hearted, lazy and permanently depressive. “Despair is often so strong and causes such sadness that the unfortunate who abandons himself to this habit finally takes to suicide in order to escape from his misery.”[25]

The truth of the matter is that such pedagogues – honoured and praised by their society – all too often managed, with their lies, to hound young people to death, to cause, themselves, the very suicides which they attributed to the habit of masturbation.[26]
This went on until 1948, when the Kinsey Report put a stop to it. Now, finally, massive, painstaking research established what priests as confessors had always known but carefully kept secret: almost every boy masturbates, and most of them do it intensively. After Kinsey, no one could watch a school football or basketball game without laughing at the myth that masturbation impaired the health of boys.
Liberated from moralistic inhibitions, medical science now developed quite different opinions: positive values were attributed to masturbation; the absence of masturbation was considered an abnormality.[27] In a Dutch family medical manual, Dr. O. M. de Vaal advises parents to pay more attention to the sexual hygiene of their adolescent son: by his bed they should provide a box of tissues or some handkerchiefs so he can tidy up after ejaculation. De Vaal assumes that most parents don’t need to encourage their son to masturbate, as most boys discover how to do it themselves or are taught by their mates, but if a boy older than 14 still isn’t doing it, his father should have a serious talk with him.[28] Along the same lines, an American psychiatrist, Alayne Yates, mother of 13 children (her own and adopted) says in her book on sex education that if a boy at puberty isn’t already masturbating, he should start with it now.[29]

A child psychologist, Professor Beets, is equally positive: “Before they praise youngsters who successfully ban everything sexual from their lives, perhaps moralists, confessors, educators and others should ask themselves just what they are doing. Is the vegetable a proper ideal for mankind?” He notes that the boy who lives in abstinence, “when he grows older will give the impression of coldness, of being non-committal (…) Should such a child be intelligent he may succeed in passing through life without self-pity. He will neither admire nor hate himself; he will never become passionate over anything. He will never know what it is to be admired by others, to praise somebody; he will never be enthusiastic. He will not allow himself to be shocked or crushed. He will never see a reason to weep, thus he won’t weep. The idea of running away, of fleeing, will never cross his mind. He will never be torn by desire, one moment being on this side, the next on the other, like the boy who has experienced orgasm, and longs for orgasm, but wishes at the same time not to feel this lust.”[30]
As early as 1876, as a matter of fact, a psychiatrist by the name of Oskar Berger wrote that in his opinion 99% of all young men masturbated, and a physician of the famous Rugby School in England supposed the percentage to be 90-95%.[31] “Several scientists before the time of Freud advocated childhood sexuality and masturbation as both normal and healthy[32], but these authors were kept silent and had problems getting their books published.[33] Thus it was hardly precedent-shattering when a medical congress in 1912 declared masturbation a normal activity and “its absence among boys at adolescence a sign of disturbance.”[34] Since then this view has prevailed. “Clinical experience teaches us that if masturbation begins too late or is totally absent, this generally is a bad omen (excepted only the cases where regular intercourse is started at an early date). Masturbation is indispensable for a healthy adolescence.”[35] Borneman considers masturbation the sexual activity best suited to children before and at puberty. It should not be seen as any kind of substitute. Repression of the habit makes a boy ill. Those who have not masturbated as children will later have difficulties in getting satisfaction from intercourse.[36]

With today’s conviction that masturbation is innocent, or even necessary, we may be tempted to smile with pity at that episode in our cultural evolution when horror tales were spread about the dire consequences of “self abuse”. It’s easy to be amused at all those apparatuses invented by crafty businessmen with which alarmed parents burdened their son to prevent “secret sin”: it was made impossible for him to touch his penis, or iron wires pressed into the flesh in case of an erection, or an electric bell sounded in the parents’ bedroom as soon as a disaster occurred.
But when we realise what all this nonsense meant to those it concerned, our laughter passes away. The inner struggle against his sexual needs which adults demanded from every “nice” boy, and the precautions they imposed upon him under the influence of moralists and physicians, had but one immediate and inevitable result: to concentrate all his attention and thought upon his sexual feelings, exciting them and making them obsessive. Hunger renders the desire for food an obsession; imposed abstinence does the same with the sexual appetite. A healthy boy with a free upbringing, when feeling “horny” from whatever cause, will rub his penis to get rid of this tension, and afterwards he will resume his play or his work. Another boy of the same age who has imposed upon himself the obligation of “chastity” is continuously troubled by lustful desires; he will try to distract himself, but this only concentrates his thinking more upon what has been forbidden. Finally he gives in when the natural impulse becomes too strong, but immediately afterwards he feels desperate, depressed and worries about the consequences to his health or spiritual salvation. This kind of masturbatory pattern is quite obviously inimical to mental and physical well-being. Sexual education based on these principles breaks down the personality and fills youth with distress.

Continue to Masturbation: Guilt Feelings
[1] Kirchhoff, C. & G. F., Untersuchung im Dunkelfeld sexueller Viktimisation. In: Kirchhoff & Sessar (Eds.), Das Verbrechensopfer. Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1979, 292. [Author’s reference]
[2] Hertoft, P., Unge mænds seksuelle adfæd, viden og holdning. København: Akademisk Forlag, 1968, I 111. [Author’s reference]
[3] Peyrefitte, R., La jeunesse d’Alexandre. Paris: Albin Michel, 1977, 99. [Author’s reference]
This is an exaggeration, typical of Brongersma, in that it has come about through citing a modern novel as a historical source. Aristophanes, Knights 29 merely says that masturbation “chafes the skin.”
[4] Peyrefitte, R., Alexandre le Grand. Paris: Albin Michel, 1981, 268-269. [Author’s reference]
[5] Stoll, O., Das Geschlechtsleben in der Völkerpsychologie. Leipzig: Veit, 1908, 496. [Author’s reference]
[6] Martialis, M. V., Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Garnier, [1885] IX 27 [Author’s reference].
Brongersma has misunderstood (besides characteristically embellishing what Martial wrote with “randy” and “willingly”). As he has said earlier, masturbation was thought to reduce the strength of athletes, and this is why the “young athlete”, as Martial calls him, wore a fibula. No Roman source suggests fathers made their sons wear fibula “to preserve until puberty [their] chastity.” [Website footnote]
[7] Deschner, K., De kerk en haar kruis. Amsterdam: Arbeiderspers, 1978, 82. [Author’s reference]
[8] Dingwall, E. J., Male Infibulation. London: Bale, Sons & Danielsson, 1925, 21. [Author’s reference]
[9] Martialis, M. V., Oeuvres complètes, Paris: Garnier, [1885] IX 42 [Author’s reference].
Again, Brongersma has misunderstood Martial (quite apart from misleading the reader by leaving him to believe that the poet Horace was meant by “Horatius” rather than the father of the three 7th-century BC Horatii). “This epigram is aimed at a certain Ponticus, who is in the habit of masturbating without ever having sexual intercourse, and he is bitterly reproached by Martial, who delivers a virtual hellfire sermon, using parodic, quasi-philosophical arguments which are very remote from his own view of the matter, as it emerges elsewhere […]. This moralizing outburst and Martial’s hypocritical argumentation in particular would be hard to explain unless Ponticus is taken to be a would-be moral philosopher, like the Chrestus of 9, 27 and the Pannychus of 9, 47, preaching sexual abstinence but masturbating when no one sees. […] Martial himself quite obviously did not consider every sexual activity not aimed at child birth as unjustifiable; […] elsewhere, he thinks it acceptable as a last resort (as such, he practised it himself; cf. 2, 43, 14; 11, 73, 4). […] This is essentially in line with the prevalent view of masturbation in antiquity, which generally did not condemn it if practised for want of something better, although there were naturally those who chose to reject it, as there were those who advocated it (particularly Cynic philosophers).” (Christer Henriksén, Martial, Book IX: A Commentary, Uppsala, 1998, pp. 196-7) [Website footnote]
[10] Szasz, Th., Sex op recept. Meppel: Infopers, 1982, 96. [Author’s reference]
There are not the slightest grounds for insinuating similarity between pre-Christian Graeco-Roman sexual beliefs and either the hostility of the Talmud to non-procreative sex or its obsession with harsh punishment and retribution for even harmless acts, and it is a vicious and inexcusable libel to suggest that masturbation was an exception. [Website footnote]
[11] Haeberle, E. J., The Sex Atlas. New York: Seabury, 1978, 377. 464. [Author’s reference]
[12] Ussel, J. M. W. van, Geschiedenis van het seksuele probleem. Meppel: Boom, 1968, 212. Ussel, J. M. W. van, Intimiteit. Deventer: Ven Loghum Slaterus, 1975, 105. [Author’s reference]
[13] Ellis, H., Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Philadelphia: David, 1913, I-278. [Author’s reference]
[14] Bousquet, G. H., La Morale de l’Islam et son éthique sexuelle. Paris: Maisonneuve, 1953, 58. [Author’s reference]
[15] Haeberle, E. J., The Sex Atlas. New York: Seabury, 1978, 2, 185. [Author’s reference]
[16] Jackson, S., Childhood and Sexuality. Oxford: Blackwell, 1982, 46. [Author’s reference]
[17] Simons, G. L., Het grote seksuele records boek. Amsterdam: Triton, 1977, 145. [Author’s reference]

[18] Aron, J.-P. & Kempf, R., Le pénis et la démoralisation de l’Occident. Paris: Grasset, 1978, 62. [Author’s reference]
Actually, Tissot was not the pioneer Brongersma thought. The much earlier, anonymously-authored Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution, and All Its Frightful Consequences, with a similar message, was first published in 1714 and soon became an international bestseller with translations into German and Dutch. [Website footnote]
[19] Ussel, J. M. W. van, Geschiedenis van het seksuele probleem. Meppel: Boom, 1968, 44, 223, 238. [Author’s reference]
[20] Aron, J.-P. & Kempf, R., Le pénis et la démoralisation de l’Occident. Paris: Grasset, 1978, 233. [Author’s reference]
[21] Friedenberg, E. Z., The Vanishing Adolescent. New York: Dell, 1959, 144. [Author’s reference]
[22] Szasz, Th., Sex op recept. Meppel: Infopers, 1982, 72-73. [Author’s reference]
[23] Haeberle, E. J., The Sex Atlas. New York: Seabury, 1978, 372. [Author’s reference]
[24] Aron, J.-P. & Kempf, R., Le pénis et la démoralisation de l’Occident. Paris: Grasset, 1978, 182-184. [Author’s reference]
[25] Brethmas, J. de, Détournement de majeur. Paris: Perchoir, 1980, 101. [Author’s reference]
[26] Kentler, H., Sexual-erziehung. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1970, 69. [Author’s reference]
[27] Green, R., Children’s Quest for Sexual Identity. Psychology Today 2: 45-51, 1974, [Author’s reference]
[28] Vaal, O. M. de, Modern medisch advies. Amsterdam: Querido, 1968, 247-249. [Author’s reference]
[29] Yates 1979 [not identified in the author’s bibliography], quoted by O’Carroll, T., Paedophilia–The Radical Case. London: Peter Owen, 1980, 96. [Author’s reference]
[30] Beets 1964, 138-139 [Author’s reference, but it is not clear which is meant of two works listed in his bibliography as published by N. Beets in 1964].
[31] Ellis, H., Studies in the Psychology of Sex. Philadelphia: David, 1913, I-235-236. [Author’s reference]
[32] Forberg, 1824; Kind, 1908 [Author’s references, but neither is identifiable in his bibliography].
[33] Langfeldt, Th., Sexual Development in Children. In: Cook & Howells (Eds.), Adult Sexual Interest in Children. London: Academic Press. 1981, 99. [Author’s reference]
[34] Francis, J. J. & Marcus, I. M., Masturbation - A Developmental View. In: Marcus & Francis (Ed.) Masturbation. New York: International Universities Press, 1975, 13. [Author’s reference]
[35] Kentler, H., Sexual-erziehung. Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1970, 76. [Author’s reference]
[36] Borneman, E., Lexikon der Liebe, Frankfurt: Ullstein, 1978, pp. 1425, 680, 939 [Author’s reference].
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