From church to Gandhi: The war against sex for pleasure

By Sangeeth Sebastian

Many years ago, one summer afternoon, while we were in school, we received an unexpected sermon, from our school principal, a clean shaven Catholic priest, known for his authoritarian and punitive style of functioning, on the consequences of immoral behaviour.

In a sombre voice reserved for punishments, he announced through the intercom box in our class that Tony Jose of IXC has been expelled from school for ‘grave moral turpitude.’   His announcement was followed by a barely concealed threat.  “Anyone who failed to uphold the tenets of the school will be dismissed without further warning,” the voice warned.

The announcement threw the class into a flurry of speculation over Tony’s possible crime.  Our doubts were eventually settled during interval when Brijesh alias BBC of IXC revealed what the principal was trying to hide behind his verbal exuberance. Tony was caught jerking off in class.

While frank talk on sex is still unusual in many Indian schools, parents and educators are constantly on guard throughout a child’s early years and adolescence to detect any signs of masturbation.  (Schools in 19 the century Europe had anti-masturbatory benches to prevent boys from crossing or closing their legs.) Teenagers caught in the act are still made to feel ashamed and fearful of their behaviour. Many still envisage calamities, from going blind and mental illness to furry palms and tuberculosis to even death, for engaging in solo sex, according to surveys. Why such fear and panic for the world’s most common and “safest sexual activity”?  

It all began with a quack

While the church condemned all forms of non-procreative sex, including masturbation, which it regarded as an “intrinsically disordered sin” right from the beginning of the Middle Ages, the man who was primarily responsible for starting this fear and panic around the act was an eighteenth century theologian turned quack called Bekker.  

Sometime in 1715 he came up with a pamphlet in England called Onania; or, The Henious Sin of self-pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, in both sexes Considered with Spiritual and Physical Advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice.

To ensure the success of his work and to bring religious prohibition to the practice, he linked the practice to the Biblical story of Onan (how clever?) which had nothing to do with masturbation. Inspired by the pamphlet’s huge success in England, Samuel Tissot, one of the most revered physicians in Europe at the time, came up with his own version of the pamphlet called L’Onanisme, a few decades later.  Tissot’s version, without any substantiating proof or evidence, went on to list a slew of “masturbatory horrors” including blindness, hairy palms, crooked back, spinal tuberculosis, low self-esteem, pimples, epilepsy, venereal disease, madness and death as the possible fallout of masturbation. Thus an invidious idea hatched in the mind of a quack was granted the much needed credibility by a famous physician. L’Onanisme was eventually translated into several languages.

Gandhi and sex

While it’s unclear if L’Onanisme was translated into any of the Indian languages, one of the earliest books on brahmacharya published in Hindi lists problems similar to the ones listed by Tissot as the possible danger of semen loss. Nobody gave greater credence to this theory in independent India than Gandhi, who himself had an idiosyncratic and medieval understanding of sex. 

A curious mix of Pope and ancient Indian law giver Manu, Gandhi was obsessed with conserving semen, which he believed should be retained for physical strength and health. In his antipathy towards lust and sexual pleasure he behaved more like a medieval Christian monk than a Hindu. He described intercourse between a man and a woman “an ugly thing” and insisted like Pope that couples should limit sex to the “safe period” of a woman’s menstrual cycle to avoid the use of contraceptives.  Sexuality, in Gandhi’s world view, was to be banished to the nether regions of eternity, writes Girija Kumar, author of Gandhi & His Women Associates.  A view also shared by historian Ramchandra Guha. “For Gandhi, all sex was lust. Far better that women resist men and men control and tame their animal passions,” writes Guha in his book Gandhi: The Years that Changed the World, 1914-1948.  

Little wonder then that in 2009, when India banned sex education, after right wing religious groups raised objection to the introduction of masturbation and safe sex in the programme, the rallying figure in their fight was none other than Gandhi.

Sangeeth Sebastian is a senior journalist based in New Delhi with a keen interest in transforming cultural attitudes around sex, religion and masculinity. He is currently working on a book about masturbation, porn and relationship

From sinful to social good: How Covid-19 changed masturbation

Sangeeth Sebastian

There is a delicious irony in New York City health department’s endorsement of masturbation as the “safest” sexual activity to stave off coronavirus, because not so long ago, one of America’s senior and well-respected health officials lost her job for advocating the benefits of masturbation to its people after she incurred the wrath of country’s powerful Christian right wing.

The woman was Dr Joycelyn Elders and the man who fired her was —of all people, Bill Clinton (of course, this was before the former US President himself was caught pants down with a young white house intern called Monica Lewinsky).

Thanks to Coronavirus, several Christian countries are now doing a volte-face on their age-old religious beliefs that regard masturbation as “sinful” and “intrinsically disordered”.  A few weeks after the American health department issued its guideline, Catholic countries like Ireland and Columbia too came up with a similar directive promoting masturbation as a safe and healthy sexual option for its citizens.

Governments have finally started acknowledging things which they don’t usually talk about in their official communications such as masturbation, sex toys and pornography, says Polly Rodriguez, CEO and co founder of sexual-wellness company Unbound.

Dr Elders, who is now 86, believes that coronavirus will change the way we approach health. “It’s going to change how we educate our children on sexual health,” she said in an interview to Forbes magazine recently.

While India is yet to come up with any specific safe sex guideline for its citizens, the latest Union health ministry document published under the National Health Portal advocates promotion of—no, not masturbation— “safe sexual experiences” along with sex education in the country.  This in itself is revolutionary because only a little over a decade ago India had banned sex education calling it an “anathema to traditional Indian values” and called for the promotion of yoga instead.

The truth is, for a vast majority of Indians, self-care means more than just yoga. In March, Pornhub the world’s biggest porn site, recorded a 95% spike in traffic from the country during the first phase of the lockdown. Watching porn is a unique expression of male sexuality and male sexual desires. Almost all men use porn, universally, to masturbate. Queries on masturbation have witnessed an upsurge since home isolation began in the country in March, say sexologists.  The pandemic has also suddenly revived interest in little known, but important studies and researches on male masturbation from the past. One such study that has attracted significant attention on social media in the last two months is a 1998 research on the hazards of prone (face-down) masturbation in men done by internationally renowned US-based sex therapist and author Dr Lawrence I Sank. 

According to his study published in the Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy in 1998, men (around 10% in the world) who masturbate in the prone position will never be able to have penetrative sex until they learn how to masturbate “correctly” as the practice inadvertently makes them impotent.  A youtube video on ‘Prone masturbation treatment’ in Tamil, uploaded by Dr Karthik Gunasekaran of the Chennai-based Metromale Clinic and Fertility Centre, has attracted 114k views and 706 comments in less than two months.

Another study on male masturbation, doing rounds on the internet is a 2004 research that links orgasms in men with increased immune function. Published in the journal of Neuroimmunomodulation, researchers at the Department of Medical Psychology at the University Clinic of Essen, Germany, found that masturbation increased the number of inflammatory mediators called leukocytes (white blood cells) and natural killer cells, thus boosting the body’s immune response.

According to a recent report by Practo, a digital healthcare platform, Indians ask about 1,000 sexual health queries per hour, with questions relating to masturbation --- ‘Will masturbation affect your health?’ ‘Can masturbation lead to blindness?’ ‘Will masturbation lead to erectile dysfunction? Will masturbation make you deaf--- among the most frequently asked questions by youngsters in the age group of 21 to 30 who comprise 70% of all online sexual health consults, followed by people in the age group of 31 to 40. As is evident, most of the queries reflect acute anxieties and worries about the practice, even though doctors and international health agencies, including the World Health Organisation has declared masturbation normal, healthy and fun.


So why this panic?  To understand that, we must know the cultural history
of masturbation and the role medicine, once played, and religion, continues playing, in perpetuating a climate of fear and terror around this innocuous practice that lingers with us even to this day.