A Brief History Of Jacking Off

Masturbation is as old as mankind and there are many ancient depictions of it in art. The oldest is to believe to be a clay figurine of a woman masturbating from the 4th millennium BC that was found on a temple site on the island of Malta. However, in the ancient world depictions of male masturbation were much more common.

In fact, male masturbation was a holy image in ancient Egypt. Masturbation was considered to be a magical or trans-formative act. It was believed that the God Atum was created the universe by masturbating to ejaculation.

The ancient Greeks had a healthy attitude toward masturbation believing as most of us do to today, that the act is a normal and healthy substitute for other forms of sexual pleasure. The first argument against masturbation appears in the early doctrine put forth by Augustine of Hippo, who argued that sexual intercourse for pleasure was an exercise in lust. He argued that sex should only be performed for purposes of procreation and that is how we all became forever damned. The Catechism of the Catholic Church lists masturbation as one of the “Offenses Against Chastity” and calls it “an intrinsically and gravely disordered action” because “use of the sexual faculty, for whatever reason, outside of the instance of marriage.

Subsequent critics of masturbation tended to be from the medical community claiming that the act of Onanism was bad for the health as it was considered to be an act of “heinous self-pollution.”

In the Victorian Era, where conservative attitudes led to recommendations that boys’ pants be constructed so that the genitals could not be touched through the pockets. Schoolchildren were even seated at special lowly elevated desks to prevent their crossing their legs in class in case they accidentally stimulated themselves. Girls to be forbidden from riding bicycles and horses in case the sensations produced were too pleasurable. Gee that almost sounds like a good idea for a fetish site nowadays!

Medical attitudes toward masturbation began to change at the beginning of the 20th century when H. Havelock Ellis, in his seminal 1897 work Studies in the Psychology of Sex, included “that in the case of moderate masturbation in healthy, well-born individuals, no seriously pernicious results necessarily follow.”

Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scouts, incorporated a passage in the 1914 edition of Scouting for Boys warning against the dangers of masturbation. By 1930, however, Dr. F. W. W. Griffin, editor of The Scouter, had written in a book for Rover Scouts that the temptation to masturbate was “a quite natural stage of development” and, warned “the effort to achieve complete abstinence was a very serious error.”

Today, modern medicine recognizes that there is no significant harm (short term or long term) caused by the practice of masturbation and regards it as a normal part of human sexuality. DUH.