Masturbation is not a topic people commonly talk about. This taboo activity, however, is something researchers have found to be commonly practiced throughout all age groups and in both sexes.
Self-servicing over the centuries
"Masturbation has been the subject of intrigue and criticism for millennia," said Jennifer Bass, communications director at the Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction, noting the behavior has long been criticized and repressed.
"There has been a stigma about masturbation as long as we've been writing materials ... from writings in the Bible to writings in the early and late 19th century," Bass said. "We have devices in our collections [at the Kinsey Institute] that were used in the past to prevent masturbation because it was considered so harmful ... We have all kinds of myths and taboos in our society, and some of them are based upon real issues and some are based upon historical fear."
Dr. Annette Owens, a certified sex counselor in the area, said many of the cultural ideas about masturbation are reinforced in childhood.
"In past generations a lot of parents would give their children negative associations with masturbation," Owens said. "For instance, they'd say you could go blind from masturbation."
Owens explained that those homegrown lessons were also present in advertisements.
"When Kellogg's Corn Flakes came out, it was [advertised] as a way to prevent masturbation, believe it or not," she said. "It was just coming from a time where there was a different view about masturbation."
Who is doing it?
Bass maintained that masturbation is a "normal" and common human practice which often starts in puberty for men.
"There are very few young men who have not masturbated," she said. "Once a young man hits puberty, there is a direct correlation with ejaculation and arousal."
For women, masturbation may occur later as there is no known correlation between female sexual development and self-stimulation.
"Masturbation with women sometimes is a learning process, and it's not a connection to puberty," Bass said. "For women it's a different process, and it may take them longer to get to know their own desire to recognize and participate in masturbation for their own pleasure."
Considerable research has been done in an effort to calculate the number of Americans who participate in self-stimulation, Owen said, citing a University of Chicago study from the 1990s published in "Sex in America" that calculated participating percentages for certain age groups in both men and women.
"In 18- to 24-year-old men about 30 percent masturbated once a week or more, and about 30 percent also masturbated sometimes," Owens said. "In 18- to 24-year-old women nine percent said they masturbated once a week, and 25 percent said they did sometimes."
According to Owens, the percentages throughout the age range of 18 to 59 varied only slightly. More than half of those interviewed who masturbated felt guilty about it.
"There was not much of a difference between the age groups," she said. "The message is that not one age group masturbated more or less -- about all looked very similar and fairly even throughout."
University of Chicago researcher Aniruddha Das looked for clearer distinctions between age groups by examining possible correlations between sexual practice and masturbation frequency. Using statistics compiled from the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey,Das published his findings on masturbation in the July-September 2007 edition of the "Journal of Sex and Marital Therapy."
Though Das' findings do show that many people do use masturbation as a form of compensation for partnered sex, they also show a significant number of people participate in masturbation without the desire for compensation.
"These people seem to have more sexual partners over their lifetime and find more sex practices sexually appealing ... [therefore] they engage in more masturbation," Das said.
Das' work also showed those people who grew up with the influence of the sexual revolution beginning in the 1960s were more apt to participate in masturbation.
Why do it? Why not?
Though many people may masturbate, questions are still raised about the benefits and risks related to self-pleasure.
Masturbation is often used by people as a means of relaxing or exploring their sexuality, Owens said. Other people might object to masturbation on a spiritual or even physical level, she explained.
"I certainly see clients that don't do it, and that's also fine," she said.
In a number of isolated cases masturbation can become a physical problem, Bass noted; however, these incidents are rare.
Owens acknowledged that incredibly frequent male masturbation might decrease sperm count and result in a lower chance of conception in some cases.
"The only [health] risk associated with masturbation is a compulsive need to masturbate that takes you away from other parts of your life," Bass said. "Sometimes people go to extremes to enhance their pleasure and those are definitely exceptions to the rule"
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