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.