Mor al Pe rsp ec ti ves on Ma stu r ba tion |1
Moral Perspectives on Masturbation (Outline Notes)
Vincent Genovesi, S.J.
1. The Psychological Perspective. From this point of view, masturbation can have different
meanings:
(a) Masturbation can be expressive of a person’s, especially an adolescent’s, efforts to understand
and integrate the various elements of his self-identity as a sexual being so that there can be a further
movement in the direction of mature interpersonal relationships.
(b) Masturbation can also be stultifying and isolating, when a person finds the locus of all pleasure
in himself, with the result that he cannot move on to the further stage of being able to share himself
with another person which is essential to his complete growth.
Masturbation is not a simple single dimensional behavior. There are moral dimensions or
implications to masturbation insofar as it can frustrate or impair an individual’s capacity for the joy
of interpersonal living and loving.
Freud: masturbation should be seen as an action that expresses or reflects some internal
psychosexual state.
(c) Beyond Freud: masturbation is often symptomatic of many nonsexual conflicts—boredom,
frustration, loneliness, a poor self-image, inadequate boy-girl relationships, conflict with parent, too
many pressures in school, etc—all these can create tensions that the adolescent tries to relieve
through masturbation.
Georgen: only if masturbation is the exclusive sexual release where heterosexual relationships are
possible is it pathological. When masturbation is preferred to intercourse, something is wrong.
(d) Although masturbation is not intrinsically immoral, it does raise some moral questions: the
psychological danger that a person may come to value and understand human sexuality more as a
solitary experience than a shared one. This is not to say that masturbation is always and necessarily
a selfish act, but a definite possibility exists that such activity will lead a person in the direction of the
narcissistic rather than interpersonal sexuality. Masturbation is not in complete accord with the goal
of sexuality which is other-oriented love.
(e) At the same time, Georgen can imagine situations in which this goal of other-oriented love
need not be violated or betrayed by the act of masturbation. One example of how love might even be
protected by masturbation involves a married man who masturbates instead of having intercourse
with someone else when sexual relation with his spouse is rendered impossible; or when a man
masturbates in order to obtain sperm for fertility testing to see if there is a way of enhancing the
chances of procreating with his life.
(f)
Masturbation seems to point to the “unfinishedness” of the process of a person’s sexual and
spiritual integration as a human being. To be “unfinished” is not to be immoral or irresponsible; it is
to be challenged towards further growth. We must accept unfinishedness, but we must not choose to
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remain there. There will always be a tension between accepting ourselves as we are where we are,
and striving after the ideals of Christian life.
Hora: Masturbation as a substitute for intercourse with a beloved person when the opportunity for
intercourse is not available is unhealthy and inauthentic. Such masturbation trivializes the
sacredness and mystery of intercourse and diminishes its significance. In this case, masturbation is a
counterfeit of this loving relationship. Masturbation allures and attracts but in the end it is an
illusion which confers the opposite of what it promises: a sense of emptiness and non-being rather
than fulfillment.
2.
Moral Evaluation. Even without clear scriptural norms, there is a long line of magisterial
teaching against masturbation. The traditional teaching of the Church, for example, is articulated in
the CDF document of 1975, according to which:
Masturbation is an intrinsically and seriously disordered act. The reason is that,
whatever the reason for acting in this way, the deliberate use of the faculty outside
normal conjugal relations essentially contradicts the finality of the faculty. It lacks
the sexual relationship called for by the moral order, namely the relationship which
realizes the full sense of mutual self-giving and human procreation in the context of
true love.
2.1
Historical Development: The arguments against masturbation have taken different forms:
(a) The prohibition against masturbation focused on the waste of sperm involved in masturbation.
But critics have been quick to point out that sperm is wasted anyway either in nocturnal emissions or
intercourse during infertile period, or even in intercourse itself since only one sperm is needed to
fertilize the egg; and this argument would have no force in the case of female masturbation.
(b) Unless masturbation were strictly forbidden, the survival of the human species would be
endangered since people would not be motivated to marry and procreate. This approach is patently
false for it gratuitously assumes that most people would find masturbation, more or less
permanently, a suitable and fulfilling substitute not only for sexual intercourse but also for the
psychological fulfillment of an intimate personal relationship and the joys of a family.
2.2 Among contemporary moral theologians, N. Brockman has articulated four positions that
indicate the spectrum of thought within the Church today. It would be helpful to do a quick survey to
collocate the various and relative positions we are familiar with:
(a) “Objectively sinful”. Masturbation is objectively a serious sin. Except in rare cases, it is also
subjectively sinful, and the average person who gives in to masturbation commits serious sin.
This would, for the most part, represent the official Catholic teaching, and yet the Church does
recognize that a person may truly experience diminished freedom in his behavior so that while the
act of masturbation remains objectively a serious wrong, the individual is not always subjectively
responsible for or guilty of a serious sin.
The Church is a little bit more guarded regarding the diminished freedom aspect:
Psychology helps one to see how the immaturity of adolescence which can
sometimes persist after that age; psychological imbalance or habit, can influence
behavior, diminishing the deliberate character of the act and bringing about a
situation whereby subjectively there may not always be serious fault. But in
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general, the absence of responsibility must not be presumed and this would be to
understand people’s moral capacity. [9]
The CCC [2352] reiterates this doctrine. Masturbation is an intrinsically and gravely disordered
action. But in order to form an equitable judgment about the subject’s moral responsibility and to
guide pastoral action, one must take into account the affective maturity, the force of acquired habit,
conditions of anxiety, or other psychological and social factors that may lessen or even extenuate
moral culpability.
(b) “Diminished freedom.” Masturbation is far from being a simple sexual sin but is part of the
complex process of maturation. While it is always objectively sinful, habitual masturbation usually
involves a significant diminishing of freedom, so that in many cases it is unwise to consider the
person who has this problem as being morally responsible, at least in regard to serious sin.
Joseph Farraher maintains:
For a person to be formally guilty of a mortal sin of masturbation, his act must be
fully a deliberate choice of what he fully realizes is a serious evil. If the act is
performed only with a partial realization or only partial choice of the will, the person
is guilty of venial sin. Serious sin must always involve a fully deliberate choice of
what one fully realizes to be seriously wrong. Such a choice is not easily to be
presumed in the case of a person who wants to love and serve God.
According to Harvey, one cannot sin by accident. If one is sincere and careful in his spiritual life, in his
effort to love and serve God, he is not likely to give full consent to the act of masturbation.
(c) “Fundamental option.” While masturbation is a moral question, for the average person it is not
necessarily to be regarded as seriously sinful. A particular individual action has meaning insofar as it
makes incarnate and intensifies the fundamental moral choice that man must make between God and
creatures. It is difficult to imagine that an act of masturbation could be regarded as such a
fundamental choice.
Attempts to determine the moral status of the act of masturbation must first locate that act within
the much larger context of a person’s life. It is necessary to know, in other words, what the act is
saying about a person’s fundamental decision or option. If a person, committed to living lovingly in
relationship with God and others, does an act like masturbation—is this to be taken to indicate a
radical change in this commitment so that the person is now moving away from a loving and giving
lifestyle and is beginning to live primarily in a self-centered manner? Or is it the case that the act of
masturbation does not really reflect, at least not necessarily, the interior state of the person. It is
entirely conceivable that the act is coming from the fringes and the periphery of a person’s life and it
does not therefore represent a serious change in his desire to live for God and others.
This persuasion and line of thinking take seriously the fact that masturbation can be symptomatic or
reflective of many different personal states of being and thus can have varying human beings.
Discovering and establishing the human meaning of the act in a concrete case is never simple. The
frequency and intensity of the act in a concrete case is never simple. The frequency and intensity of
the act are important variables; a person with intense fantasy as the only source of personal intimacy
will differ significantly from a person who masturbates who has a healthy experience of intimacy.
(d) “Neutral attitude.” Masturbation is such a normal part of the growing up process that the only
serious evil that can be attached to it arises from the unfortunate guilt feelings that come from early
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training and negative attitudes towards sexuality. Masturbation represents a phase through which a
person grows towards interpersonal relationships.
2.3 Possible meanings of the act, according to the study commissioned by the CTSA. The value of
looking at these “possible meanings” is that we should realize that actions are not isolated and one
dimensional. They reflect and express a person’s moral profile.
(a) Hedonistic. It is performed simply for the sake of pleasure involved, without any effort at
control or integration, can be indicative of self-centeredness, isolation, and even evasion of personal
responsibility. To exploit one’s sexuality in this manner deliberately and consistently creates a
serious obstacle to personal growth and integration and constitutes the substantial inversion of the
sexual order, an inversion that is at the heart of a malice of masturbation. Sexual faculty is supposed
to be a means, context, dynamism to bring two persons together to form a loving and committed
relationship for it is only in this context that growth and integration and fulfillment is possible.
Masturbation inverts and destroys this order by making the sexual faculty isolating rather than
uniting, stagnating rather than promoting growth and integration.
(b) Pathological. Psychological maladjustments could also result in this kind of masturbation,
where the impulse to masturbate seems to be a compulsion, bringing little or no satisfaction at all,
and yet frequently repeated even if there is no rational explanation for the behavior.
(c) Masturbation that is regularly preferred despite the availability of moral opportunities for
intercourse seems to indicate that the individual involved is operating out of a sexuality that has not
been fully integrated.
2.4 The variations in the human meanings attached to masturbation are likely to be reflected in
the moral evaluation of the act. Before one makes a judgment that masturbation is subjectively
sinful, or that it is not, one must first make a determination whether the action accurately expresses
that person’s fundamental loving relationship with God and other is being deliberately altered or
rejected.
In recent years however, there have been theologians who questioned the official teaching of the
Church that even through subjective extenuating circumstances may excuse a person from personal
guilt and responsibility for a serious sin, masturbation is itself always an objectively serious and
moral wrong.
(a) Keane does not regard masturbation as always objectively a seriously moral wrong. The act
however does always embody a significant premoral or ontic wrong insofar as it closes off “both the
aspects of personal union and procreation of the sexual act.”
(b) Dedek seems to express the consensus among Catholic moral theologians. The potential
immorality of masturbation does not consist primarily in whatever obvious pleasure the act may
involve, even though the CC 2351 does regard sexual pleasure as morally disordered, lust and
inappropriate when sought for in itself isolated from its procreative and unitive purposes.
Rather, masturbation must be morally evaluated more in terms of its basic compatibility or
incompatibility with the meaning and purpose of human sexuality. In its full and rich expression of
its genital dimension, human sexuality is meant not only to be love-giving, unitive and
interpersonal, but also life-giving, procreative, and heterosexual. That is why masturbation must
be seen as necessarily incapable of expressing faithfully and substantially sexuality’s full meaning
and purpose. In this innate inability and handicap to embody and reflect the richness of human
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sexuality lies the moral danger associated with masturbation—to stunt one’s growth
intersubjectively and heterosexuality is a serious matter.
Yet it is not entirely clear is how any individual act of masturbation constitutes a significant
distortion of the meaning of human sexuality. In the words of Charles Curran:
Perhaps in the past, theologians have illegitimately transferred to the individual act
the importance that belongs to the sexual faculty. I am not saying that individual
actions are never important; but in the total consideration of masturbation,
individual actions do not always constitute a substantial inversion of human
sexuality.
Or, in the words of Dedek: it is not entirely clear how a single act of masturbation or a short series of
these acts is a substantial inversion of growth or a substantive withdrawal from the human meaning
and finality of human sexuality as unitive and procreative.
3.
Synthesis. If our sexuality is God’s way is calling us into communion with others, if it is both
the physiological and psychological grounding of our capacity to love, then we must be on guard
against any self-centeredness and self-preoccupation that can enter into our lives and become part of
our daily routine through human sexuality. In this context the moral danger of masturbation: it can
entrap a person in such a way that he becomes so fixed on himself, on his own body, and his own
sensual pleasure that his capacity to love in a relationship with a partner ceases to be functional.
This moral danger associated with masturbation is rooted in the kind of psychological danger that
Kraft sees. Masturbation is particularly seductive because it is an easy accessible way to reduce
tension and to explore genital pleasure and fantasies without interpersonal vulnerability and
investment. In masturbation, we do not have to risk rejection, embarrassment, or failure. Instead of
engaging in mature relationships, we can create a world of make-believe people where everything is
possible and there are no limits. In a sense, masturbation can satisfy interpersonal yearnings while
remaining an individual, “safe and riskless” affair. In this fantasy we can explore the world of
interpersonal intimacy, or we may think we are exploring this world of interpersonal intimacy,
without leaving our room, or more radically, without leaving ourselves. Masturbation can lead to an
affair with oneself, a solipsistic self-contained world that does not open us to the enriching relation
with others. The “folly of masturbation” consists in the fact that through masturbation we silence the
Spirit urging us to love. As a result of this, we end up being more lonely and empty because the only
satisfaction masturbation can provide is momentary and solitary, not growth oriented.
The habitual masturbator is pressured to live according to immediate gratification, and to see life and
other people in terms of self-satisfaction; and these motivations and perceptions may well continue
to play an unconscious role in whatever personal relationships he enters into and attempts to
develop.
Honesty prompts us to admit that in the ordinary course of events, it is not always clear that
masturbation does in fact give birth to such selfishness, self-centeredness, and rejection of
vulnerability that a person’s desire or capacity to love is curtailed, thwarted, or destroyed. Granting
that the full richness and meaning of human sexuality lie in its potential to confer life and love,
masturbation without question will always remain objectively an incomplete and inadequate
expression of sexuality.
But it seems that most often, especially among adolescents and young adults, recourse to
masturbation indicates not a selfish or narcissistic flight from love, but rather a honest concession to
the fact that a person is not presently prepared for, or capable, of, either love and its obligations or
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parenting and its responsibilities. Many people who masturbate with some regularity do so, perhaps
not so much because they fear intimacy and vulnerability or because they refuse to love, but because
they have not yet discovered the kind of love that allow for morally appropriate genital intimacy.
And yet, far more often than not, these people do eventually find love, embrace it, and come to learn
the lessons it has to teach.
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Source: Vincent Genovesi, S.J. “Moral Perspectives on Masturbation” in In Pursuit of Love: Catholic
Morality and Human Sexuality, second edition (Collegeville, Minnesota: Liturgical Press, 1996), 31437.