Understanding Asexuality

CHAPTER 5 To Masturbate or Not to Masturbate

In this chapter, I ask and perhaps answer a series of seemingly dumb questions about masturbation. I do so to try to understand masturbation as a sexual phenomenon, but also to understand some of the variability in asexuality.

My first dumb question is this: What is the purpose of masturbation? This first question about the rather delicate subject of masturbation is, at least on the surface, “dumb,” because there is, of course, in many people’s minds no real purpose to masturbation, aside from simple pleasure; it just feels good, and that’s why people do it. But from an evolutionary standpoint, it is a good question, because the existence of any form of sexual variability without clear reproductive benefits (e.g., homosexuality, asexuality, and masturbation) puzzles scientists. After all, how could a sexual variation without potential procreative sustainability compete with one—heterosexual intercourse—that has obvious and built-in procreative sustainability (the replication of genes in the form of children) over millions of years of human evolutionary history? So, masturbation seemingly serves no obvious reproductive purpose, yet it exists. Thus, masturbation misses the (evolutionary) point. (And sometimes, in the case of men, messes the point.)

So the answer, “because it feels good,” begs another question: Why does it feel good? Or, at least, why does it feel good enough to make people do it, even sometimes when there is an available partner? Before we answer this question, let’s give a little background on the incidence and frequency of masturbation. In the classic survey conducted in the United States by the pioneer sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, nearly all the men and about 60 percent of the women indicated that they had masturbated at least once (Kinsey, Pomeroy, & Martin, 1948; Kinsey, Pomeroy, Martin, & Gebhard, 1953). Indeed, one of the great cultural shocks of the 1950s, summarized in Kinsey’s book Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, was that a majority of women had masturbated. Today, people are less likely to see this fact as a revelation and more, perhaps, as a titillating curiosity. A well-conducted national survey of the United States in the 1990s, the National Health and Social Life Survey, sometimes considered the modern follow-up to Kinsey’s work, indicated that 75 percent of women had masturbated (Laumann, Gagnon, Michael, & Michaels, 1994). So, there is support for the notion that masturbation is a common recreation, rivaling—dare I say?—baseball (or hockey if you’re from Canada) as a national pastime.

Returning to our original question, what is the purpose of masturbation? It is true that masturbation does, for most people, feel good and thus serves “the purpose” of pleasure enhancement. It is also true that other factors, including the availability of a partner, can influence masturbation frequency. So, some people do it, partly as a substitute for an unavailable partner.[20]

Beyond these perhaps rather obvious reasons, the ubiquity of the act suggests that masturbation may be evolutionarily adaptive or serve a reproductive “function,” or at least not be detrimental to one’s reproductive success. Indeed, there is likely a purpose to masturbation beyond mere pleasure enhancement or replacement for a lack of sexual partner. In adolescence or young adulthood (particularly if accompanied by fantasy), it may serve as a form of sexual “rehearsal,” or a kind of mental acting out of sexual scenes (First I’ll kiss her like this, then I’ll stroke her like that…). Thus, it may create or at least reinforce important sexual scripts, potentially to be played out with partners later on in life (see also chapter 2). In other words, as an actor learns his role—what he needs to say and do—from a TV script, we learn potentially adaptive sequences of behavior, along with how to deal with behavioral contingencies (If this happens, do this; if that happens, do that…), partially through fantasies.[21]

Sometimes the fantasies are mere snippets of what, in real life, would comprise a longer sequence of behavior. So, for a heterosexual male adolescent, it may be as simple as imagining kissing a woman, stroking her inner thighs, and rubbing her vulva. These imaginings may ingrain into his psyche a short sexual script, the elements and order of which would be adaptive to act out if he were to encounter an opportunity to engage in sexual behavior with a member of the other sex.