The answers to questions they’re too embarrassed to ask
In Ron Howard’s classic movie Parenthood, single parent Helen discovers a bunch of pornography in her son Garry’s bedroom.
Unsure of how to respond, she asks her daughter’s boyfriend, Tod, if he will talk to Garry. Tod is happy to oblige.
Later, after his conversation with Garry, Tod approaches Helen and tells her that Garry has been masturbating and felt like a pervert. Garry was very relieved when Tod told him, “That’s what little dudes do.”
That’s what little dudes do.
Is that true?
Is masturbating just . . . normal?
Masturbating is a huge issue for young people. How huge? It’s difficult to put numbers to it. Sure, plenty have taken surveys, but as a guy who looks at a lot of surveys and studies, I can tell you that these numbers vary a lot. I’ve seen surveys revealing that over 90 percent of males and females masturbate in any given year. Others show less than 50 percent for females.
One of the comprehensive studies I quoted earlier in the book, The Social Organization of Sexuality, surveyed people ages 18 to 59. Of those aged 18 to 24, 58 percent of men admitted to masturbation, and 41 percent of women. When the same age group was asked if they did it once a week, only 29 percent of men and 9 percent of women admitted to that frequency. That same survey asked the respondents how many felt guilty after masturbating. Fifty-four percent of men said they did, and 46 percent of women.1
But this survey was taken in 1992, before Internet porn was readily available. What about more recent studies?
Seventeen magazine currently reports that over 80 percent of guys masturbate, while only 60 percent of girls do.2 U.S. News reported similar numbers from a National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior in 2011. But this study was more specific about age:
For both sexes, the likelihood of engaging in masturbation appeared to increase with age. Among boys between the ages of 14 and 17 the percentage of those who had masturbated at least once rose from about 63 to 80 percent. Among girls, those figures were lower but still followed an upward slope, rising from about 43 percent to 58 percent across the same time-frame, according to the report.3
Let me just say, I’ve met very few men (just two, actually, in my entire life) who told me they didn’t masturbate regularly in their teen years. The percentages are very high for boys; I think it is easily 90 percent or more.
This isn’t surprising. Males are more visual than females in a world overflowing with sexually charged images, and the male sex drive is strong . . . out of control, at times.
This doesn’t mean females have no sex drive. Some are very driven by sex, and others experiment, curious about something so desired by most of the world.
Regardless of the exact numbers, it seems that over half of young people are doing it.
Plus, today’s young people are waiting until their late twenties, on average, to get married, so must resist sexual temptation far longer. Fewer of today’s twentysomethings are married than any generation prior at the same age. A 2014 PewResearch report revealed that only a quarter of Millennials are married. When previous generations were the age that Millennials are now, 36 percent of Generation X, 48 percent of baby boomers and 65 percent of the members of the Silent Generation were married.4
Grandma and Grandpa didn’t have to wait as long for sex. And they didn’t have to dodge porn on every screen either.
Let’s just say masturbation seems like a solution for many. Not to mention that our world doesn’t see any problem with it. Some doctors actually recommend it, calling it the “safest sex,” healthy for your prostate (men), and a huge stress release.
Is the world right?
Is masturbation no big deal?
How should we respond if we suspect our kids are masturbating? Should we respond at all? If so, what do we communicate about this embarrassing subject?
Young Kids
First, understand that the word masturbation might insinuate many different acts. Toddlers might find that it feels good when they slide down the pole on the playground. I wouldn’t call this masturbation.
My friend recently asked for advice. “My four-year-old likes rubbing her crotch against the car seat because it feels good. Sometimes she’ll keep doing it throughout a car ride. Should I make her stop?”
I think the most important response is to avoid overreaction. No, your daughter isn’t a pervert, and she isn’t destined to be a stripper someday.
It might be time to open up some of those books about sexuality, body parts, and the changes we all go through, though. (I highlighted some of those in chapter 3.) During some of these casual and calm talks, a parent can mention how these parts are very special and will be used to make babies someday. If the “crotch grinding” continues, you could probably just casually ask her to stop doing it in the way you’d ask her to stop picking her nose.
I’ve talked with numerous parents who have dealt with this, and in most cases it was just a phase and it passed. Don’t freak out.
Puberty
Once kids hit puberty, they might discover that it feels good when they touch their genitals, and they might experiment with it. This could start out as a pretty innocent act. Many young people might describe it as, “It tickles.”
Again, this often can be an innocent exploration of the human body, and it contrasts greatly with the person who is viewing porn, lusting, and masturbating.
Does one lead to the other?
Again, when should a parent be worried? Should we even address this?
Looking for Answers
I remember the first time I discovered something “tingly” below the waist. I was about eleven years old. I hadn’t gone through puberty (I was a late bloomer—all of my friends had body hair before I did), but I realized it felt good when I rubbed my penis a certain way in the sheets of my bed. Sometimes I found myself doing it until I reached orgasm.
I didn’t do this every day, and I really don’t recall thinking about girls or the female body when I did it. I just remember it feeling good.
By sixth grade my interest in the fairer sex had increased logarithmically. Sexual imagery began catching my eye, and I was distracted when my female classmates wore tight or revealing clothing.
One day in seventh grade, I distinctly remember overhearing a girl talking with her friends about watching a guy “jacking off.” She made a hand gesture and I remember thinking, How would that work? That night I tried it . . . and I was hooked!
I can’t tell you the exact moment, but masturbation quickly became a sexual thing for me. It wasn’t just some innocent tingly feeling anymore. I thought about girls when I masturbated, and by twelve, as I shared in the previous chapter, I began viewing or thinking about pornographic images, and those always led me to masturbate.
The mind is a powerful thing.
At this point, the act of masturbation always made me feel guilty. I knew what lust was . . . and I was definitely lusting.
It became a habit, something I continued through much of my teen years. It’s something I never brought up to anyone, something I was embarrassed by, but it was also something I really wanted deliverance from.
My dad subscribed me to a Christian magazine at the time, Campus Life. Each issue had a column about sex. Every time I received an issue I immediately turned to the sex column and read what the author had to say. He occasionally addressed issues like lust, but he rarely mentioned masturbation. I was always disappointed with what I read because the author never addressed the specific questions I had.
No one used the words I had heard.
No one addressed the thoughts I had.
No one was willing to talk about the truth in explicit detail.
Today’s kids have numerous unanswered questions about this topic. I know, because every time I talk to young people about the subject, they approach me afterward to ask questions. And whenever we offer a question box for kids to ask anonymous questions, you’d be shocked to hear the kinds of questions they ask.
Our kids have questions; some of them have to do with masturbation.
Will they come to you for answers?
Getting Explicit
Near the beginning of this book I mentioned a study from the journal Pediatrics entitled, “Beyond the ‘Big Talk,’” encouraging parents to consider having repeated discussions with their children about many aspects of sex instead of just one “big talk.” The study concluded that “the more parents talked with their children, the closer their relationships.” But I think the most fascinating aspect of this study was the benefit of speaking more explicitly.
Don’t let the world explicit scare you. By explicit, I don’t mean “naughty” or “inappropriate.” I mean it in the true sense of the word. Explicit just means clear, overt, and unambiguous. Often, parents tend to be the opposite concerning the subject of sex. Parents are usually hesitant, vague, and ambiguous. In extreme examples, parents will avoid even saying certain words, or just say “down there” when referring to genitals or body parts. This subtly tells our kids that the subject is naughty and should be hush-hush.
I realize this can be embarrassing, but don’t give in to the temptation to hush the subject. The Pediatrics study above revealed that the relationship between parent and child really “benefitted when the discussions moved beyond ‘safe’ or impersonal subjects such as puberty, reproduction and sexually transmitted diseases to more private topics such as masturbation and how sex feels.”5
In other words, kids have explicit questions, and they appreciate it when their parents give them explicit answers.
Another study out of Montreal a few years ago revealed that more teens relied on advice from their parents than any other source. The advice of friends and celebrities ranked notably lower on the list than parents. Sadly, the same study revealed that 78 percent of moms believed their children looked chiefly to their friends for guidance on sexual behavior. In other words, parents ranked as the number one influence, but most of them thought their kids’ friends were number one, so many parents sort of gave up even trying, ignorant of the impact they actually had.6
Don’t give up. Your kids need to hear from you.
Are you ready to be a source of explicit truth about sex and even masturbation?
I find that today’s young believers have two major questions about masturbation:
Let’s look at these answers explicitly.
Is Masturbation Wrong?
The Bible never uses the word masturbation. It talks about sex plenty, but the closest it comes to talking about masturbation is when a guy named Onan was supposed to provide an offspring for his brother’s wife, and instead of doing his duty . . . well . . . Genesis 38 tells the story rather explicitly:
So whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from providing offspring for his brother. What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight; so the Lord put him to death also.
vv. 9–10 NIV
I guess I missed that Veggie Tales video.
This wasn’t masturbation. This was the “withdrawal method” of birth control. (It’s amazing how reading the Bible with your kids at the dinner table will springboard quite a few discussions about sex.)
The Bible doesn’t address masturbation specifically, but it certainly addresses lust.
We’ve talked about God’s plan for sex explicitly in chapter 4, so no need to rehash everything. But let’s look at the highlights and then specifically at lust.
As we know, God’s plan was made plain in the garden: A husband and a wife are to be united as one in the flesh. But some people didn’t want to stick to their own spouses. They wanted others too, or they didn’t want to wait for marriage. So God made it obvious, starting with the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20:14: “You must not commit adultery.”
That’s pretty clear. Don’t have sex outside of marriage.
Then in the New Testament, the apostle Paul communicates on the topic in many passages, very explicitly in 1 Corinthians 6:18: “Run from sexual sin! No other sin so clearly affects the body as this one does. For sexual immorality is a sin against your own body.”
Again, the term sexual sin means “the voluntary sex of an unmarried person.” In other words, run from any temptation to have sex with someone you’re not married to. Paul uses this term multiple times throughout his letters in the New Testament, usually saying something like flee from it, or have nothing to do with it.
But sadly, humans always try to come up with excuses for our sins. That’s what the religious people did back in Jesus’ day. They thought they could get away with thinking about sex as long as they didn’t actually do it. Jesus himself decided to address this, calling it lust and labeling it just as bad as adultery.
You have heard the commandment that says, “You must not commit adultery.” But I say, anyone who even looks at a woman with lust has already committed adultery with her in his heart. So if your eye—even your good eye—causes you to lust, gouge it out and throw it away. It is better for you to lose one part of your body than for your whole body to be thrown into hell.
Matthew 5:27–29
Jesus wasn’t known for tiptoeing around issues. He was loving, he was merciful, he was forgiving . . . but when it came to religious people trying to justify their sins, he was forthright and frank. Don’t lust. You might as well have sex with someone who is not your wife, because it’s the exact same thing. I look at the heart, not the fake actions you parade around!
Paul chimes in on the same idea, advising us to flee “youthful lusts” (2 Timothy 2:22).
So we know that sex was created for marriage, sex outside of marriage is wrong, and if we think we are being good because we just imagine having sex with someone we aren’t married to . . . we should pluck our eyes out!
So let me ask you. Is masturbating while looking at porn wrong?
The answer is pretty clear. Lusting is wrong. If we think we’re not sinning when we look at or imagine pictures of people we’re not married to, then we’re fooling ourselves.
Let me say it again. Lusting is wrong. If we lust while masturbating, then it’s wrong.
Now, I’ve met the occasional person who tells me, “I don’t lust when I masturbate. It just feels good.”
Here’s my opinion about that:
If you’re a guy, you’re not only an adulterer, you’re now also a liar. The male plumbing doesn’t work that way. We don’t achieve orgasm while thinking about Hannibal marching across the Alps with his elephants. I’ve talked with countless teenagers about masturbation in my twenty-plus years of youth ministry, listening to their candid confessions, and have never encountered a kid who thought about his geometry homework while masturbating. He might have been thinking about curves . . . but not the ones in geometry class.
Guys lust when they masturbate. End of story. Don’t bring up the mentally insane or serial killers who actually masturbate to acts of violence. . . . Yes . . . these people do exist. But I don’t think anyone wants to try to frame an argument that, “At least a serial killer isn’t lusting while he kills someone.”
Sure, if a married man masturbates while thinking of his wife, that’s not sin. God knows our hearts and our minds. He knows exactly what we’re thinking about. If we’re lusting about someone other than our wife . . . it’s sin.
I’ve also heard single guys argue, “I’m thinking about my future wife when I masturbate, so it’s okay.”
Again, I realize that this is a difficult temptation. But let’s not distort truth to rationalize sin. I always reply to this argument by pointing out that if a guy is thinking about someone who is his “future wife” . . . she ain’t his wife yet. If a cop caught him looking in her window, he couldn’t argue, “But that’s my wife!”
The officer of the law would ask, “Then why are you out here in the bushes looking in her window if that’s your wife?”
“Well . . . it’s my future wife.”
Try that one sometime and see how far it gets you. (And God’s a little smarter than most cops . . . no disrespect to my friends in blue.)
Most males, if we’re being completely transparent, lust when we masturbate. And lusting after anyone but your spouse is adultery.
As for girls, I’ll be bold enough to say that lust is usually the primary factor. Can I say without a doubt that is always the case? I’m a male, so I’ll have to say the jury is still out on this one. Many females admit to thinking about erotic situations while they masturbate, but many also claim to be “just spacing out.”
The female body works much different than the male. Males strive for a climax, and once they orgasm, they’re done. Guys are all about the climax. Females can be more sensitive throughout the whole act. They might climax multiple times or not at all.
Some females argue that women who masturbate are just filling a void or have attachment issues. Others in the Christian community have spoken out against these claims, like Jordon Monge in her Christianity Today article, “The Real Problem with Female Masturbation.” The subtitle of the article is “Call it what it is: Ladies who lust.”
Monge contends:
We need a strategy that recognizes the sin of lust and calls it by its name, rather than pretending that women have no agency beyond reacting to environmental stressors or psychological difficulties. We must treat lust like other sins—not a way we act out as a consequence of other problems in our lives—but as a sin requiring us to learn the discipline of self-control that we must master if we ever hope to be the women God made us to be.7
I’m not going to point any fingers, because I can’t tell a female how she feels. But I can say this: If we are lusting, we need to call it what it is. More important, we need to look for ways to help our kids flee these temptations.
Helping Our Kids Break Free
The best way to help our kids break free of masturbation is to be proactive about it instead of reactive. Too often, we wait until something is a problem before we address it, when it’s a topic we should have been addressing all along. We have to be proactively teaching about lust in the context of our continual conversations about sex.
Yes, I’m repeating something I’ve said in the previous nine chapters, and I’ll probably repeat it again in the next two. It’s the theme of this whole book: Don’t be afraid to engage in frequent conversations sharing the explicit truth about sex.
I know when I was a teenager struggling with lust and masturbation, I was looking for answers. I had heard plenty of people say, “Wait until marriage for sex.” And frankly, I bought that (not all teenagers do). But not many people in my life were talking about the particulars like lust, pornography, masturbation, and how far was just far enough.
We need to constantly communicate the truth about what God thinks about lust.
You might remember a surprising fact I shared in chapter 4. The number one reason young people wait for sex is . . . God.
The Centers for Disease Control’s National Survey of Family Growth report revealed the number one reason teenagers provided for waiting for sex was that it was “against religion or morals.”8 They waited because they knew it was the right thing to do.
How are our kids going to know the truth if we don’t tell them? I guarantee they are hearing plenty of lies.
So engage in frequent conversations with your kids about porn, lust, and even the embarrassing topic of masturbation.
But don’t just say, “Don’t do it.” Tell your kids how. Give your kids some tools and ammo to flee those temptations.
First, provide the knowledge of the importance of fleeing. Take a passage we’ve discussed before and talk about it, like the 2 Timothy 2:22 verse about fleeing youthful lusts:
Run from anything that stimulates youthful lusts. Instead, pursue righteous living, faithfulness, love, and peace. Enjoy the companionship of those who call on the Lord with pure hearts.
Ask your kids:
I like using Scripture to combat the lies of this world. Let’s be honest. Most young people aren’t “fleeing” lust or sexual sin. Their playlists are full of sexually charged lyrics, and the images they watch on screens are full of racy visuals and “do what feels right at the moment” messages.
What do you think “feels right” when they encounter sexual temptations in the moment?
The key to fighting sexual sin is teaching our kids the power God gives us through a relationship with him and his Spirit living inside of us. The world loves to tell us to do whatever we desire. God’s Word tells us to let his Spirit guide us.
So I say, let the Holy Spirit guide your lives. Then you won’t be doing what your sinful nature craves. The sinful nature wants to do evil, which is just the opposite of what the Spirit wants. And the Spirit gives us desires that are the opposite of what the sinful nature desires.
Galatians 5:16–17
Are we teaching our kids to listen to God or to their own desires?
The age-old phrase “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure” holds true with teaching our kids the truth about sex. The more we teach them about God’s amazing creation and his love for us, the more they’ll understand God’s gift of sex, and the more they’ll recognize any imitations.
John Piper provides some pretty good advice about battling lust in a very memorable acronym, ANTHEM.9 His suggestions include avoiding temptation, saying no to lustful thoughts, and turning our minds toward Christ. Google “John Piper, ANTHEM” for the full explanation.
What can you do today to not overreact, but start calmly and casually interacting with your kids about God’s amazing creation and his beautiful gift of sex?