When I was a preteen, my parents handed me a book to introduce me to the world of puberty and sex, a book that included a chapter called “Touching Feels Good.”
Of all the things I remember about my childhood, of all the clear memories I have of playing Legos and Barbies and lip-synching to Cats and Smokey Robinson for audiences of playmates and parents, I cannot recall whether this formative text, and that particular chapter, provided me with new information or the affirmation of something I had already experienced.
Long before I ever had a sexual partner, I discovered firsthand1 that humans are wired to experience sexual pleasure. Wired to experience, and enjoy, sexual pleasure.
I know that for some people this topic is morally fraught, but as a teenager, I was never really concerned about other people’s thoughts on the morality of pursuing sexual pleasure with oneself, perhaps because the book I read told me that it’s “normal to touch your sex organs for pleasure,”2 and “whichever way makes you happy is the right way for you.”3 As a kid and later as a teenager, I was intensely concerned with what was normal, with fitting in, and thus was grateful to hear that, in this regard, I was like most people. I was normal.
For many, many Christians, though, the pursuit of pleasure—generally, or sexual pleasure specifically—is a fraught thing, even when it’s pleasure without a partner. The idea that “if something feels right, it is right” is deeply suspect; strains of Christianity have long thought of temptation to pleasure as the work of the, well, the Tempter. How we think about pleasure, and, in turn, about sin and incarnation, will certainly impact our understanding of what makes for “good Christian sex.” Looking specifically at masturbation (an aurally unpleasant word of uncertain etymology—let’s call it self-stimulation instead, shall we?), which is partnerless sex, allows us to consider a whole host of topics, including cultural myths, pseudoscience, the differences between men and women, pornography, and self-harm.
Still, it’s kind of awful to talk about, isn’t it? This is the chapter in which I would love to quote everyone else and use every evasive narrative tactic I can muster, because I am perfectly content with readers knowing that I have slept with some people, but not that teenage me was keenly aware of how I liked to be touched before I ever got around to having a partner.
Why is that? I imagine my reticence, my embarrassment (I am blushing in the Corner Bakery, where I type), has a great deal to do with the cultural baggage around self-stimulation—in pursuing pleasure with and for oneself alone. But it’s important, and so before we move to sexual relationships with others, let’s start with the idea of “pleasure” itself and unpack how it has been understood culturally and theologically. We’ll look, too, at the biblical story Christians used to cite as a prohibition against solo sex, and see if it can provide any insight into how we are to include seeking after pleasure in our pursuit of a faithful, Christian life.
MY RETICENCE TO speak about pleasure and the solo pursuit of it is not just because it’s embarrassing as all get-out. It’s also because I’m a woman talking about the solo pursuit of pleasure. Much of our cultural conversation around sex and pleasure is highly gendered. Think about slang terms for masturbation—like “wanking” in England, or “jacking off” in the States—which are insults in the nominative: That guy’s a wanker; what a jack-off.
Those classy insults are almost always lodged at men. In the last century or so, the idea that the pursuit of sexual pleasure is solely the provenance of men and boys came into wider acceptance, on a variety of fronts. First-wave (white) feminists and suffragists encouraged the notion that (white)4 women were more likely to be the moral protectors of the home, practitioners of self-restraint and resolve, who could encourage (or guilt) men into denying their baser selves (and thus should be given the vote for the betterment of society).5 Self-proclaimed Christian fundamentalists asserted the more genteel, fragile nature of women and the need for men to claim their strength and spiritual headship, to rein in their sexual instincts and live as godly men.
Feminism grew and changed as the years passed and the nature of the equality of the sexes was articulated in new ways, while fundamentalist Christians dug in their heels on gender difference. Desire for sexual pleasure among women either did not exist or was a sign of deep confusion about what a true or biblical woman was supposed to be like, was created to be.
Maybe I don’t feel comfortable copping to self-pleasure because somewhere, deep down, I think it’s not okay for women to want sex. If that were the case, I wouldn’t be alone.
I asked my survey respondents about their experience, if any, of masturbation in childhood and adolescence. Did you . . . ? If so, how did you understand that act? (As shameful? Natural? Private? Awesome? Not interesting?) Many, many of the respondents answered in the affirmative (a popular response was “yes, constantly!”) and many answered “private and awesome.” Some were not interested, some only started masturbating later, after they became sexually active. But no small number of women reported that they had for a long time been unaware that women could bring themselves to orgasm. That was “just a thing boys did.”
One woman recalled being at a statewide leadership retreat as a teen, and the topic came up, as it does among teenagers late at night:
Someone brought up guys and the fact that they masturbate—and it was roundly agreed that girls wouldn’t do that; they would never be so disgusting. I never confessed—but I’ve thought of that night many times and the perceived taboo of women’s sexuality, and/or sexuality in general. The other girls were from the metro area; I was from the sticks.
In our culture, we are often made to understand that women and girls are not sexual beings, and are properly disgusted by sexual displays and acts. Any sexual interest we have is thus unnatural or strange, something to be embarrassed about. In much of Christian culture, too, particularly over the last 150 years in the United States, gender difference has been reinforced through prescriptions of “biblical manhood” and “biblical womanhood.” This is a new-ish historical development; for a long time, the most familiar women in the Bible were (other than Mary, the mother of Jesus, sainted virgin) temptresses and prostitutes: Eve, Delilah, Jezebel, to name just a few. Feminist theologians have criticized both understandings of strict gender divisions, suggesting that women are ill-served by being offered only two ways of being in the world: Madonna or whore.
Outside of the Christian tradition, but in the West more generally, women were seen as the ones controlled by their bodies and passions; men were the coolheaded, spiritual ones in much of Western culture for centuries. Case in point: the word “hysterical,” meaning unduly emotional, comes from the Latin and Greek words for uterus. Women were seen as uniquely susceptible to such feelings of hysteria, due to some dysfunction in their lady parts.
The more we learn about gender and sexuality, however, the more obvious it is that there is no clear demarcation between male and female, much less ideal personality types for each gender. There is incredible diversity, a host of intersex conditions, a spectrum upon which we spend our lives trying to locate ourselves. Some women love sex. Some men don’t. Some folks only like sex under given conditions. But we’re doing no one any favors by suggesting that women don’t like sex and men are basically begging for it during every waking moment.
IT’S NOT JUST gender that makes the discussion of pleasure complicated. Human beings have long wondered about the connection between our bodies and our souls or spirits or characters. In the first half of the nineteenth century, when medicine and psychology were both emerging as scientific disciplines, there were yet a number of specious connections made between physiology and personality. Phrenology asserted that the shape of someone’s head could indicate their character; certain common variations in facial features across races were understood to represent different strengths and weaknesses among groups of people.
In the early twentieth century, acne was seen as a side effect of masturbation and thus moral failing. Pity those turn-of-the-century teenagers, especially those with oily skin! Other children were told that touching themselves would lead to hairy palms or going blind . . . Obviously neither is true, but the persistence and dubious (or diverse?) origins of those superstitions suggest that we have long been in the business of shaming people for seeking pleasure. Do not do this strange, unnatural, bad thing, or there will be distressing consequences that will reveal your sin to others. You will be found out.
Why are we so ambivalent about our bodies? Why do people work so hard to pass that ambivalence on to their children? I used to lead a women’s group at a church I served, and one day we got to talking about how our children refuse to allow us any privacy in the bathroom. Dealing with varied menstrual products with an audience is the worst. I’m not a particularly private person, but even that pushes my limits. Still, the most frustrating thing for these women was trying to explain away what their children were seeing. They used slang and euphemisms, and generally refused to explain that this was a natural way for a woman’s body to work.
I confess, I’ve not come clean with my kids about all the details of sex yet—even the baby-making part; they know about sperm and eggs, but not the mechanism by which they meet. I don’t think they’re ready, though my oldest one is getting close. But menstruation? The topic seems terribly innocuous to me and yet it nonetheless caused these lovely and capable women to bend over backward trying to avoid telling their children the truth.
Are we channeling the spirit of those verses in Leviticus that lay out how menstruation renders a woman unclean and defiles anything she touches during that time of the month? Or the church fathers who believed that original sin was literally transmitted via semen and intercourse? Or the reformers Martin Luther and John Calvin, who proposed that human nature is totally corrupted and depraved and has been since Adam and Eve?
The influence of Augustine, fourth-century Bishop of Hippo, even on Christians who haven’t read him, really can’t be overstated. And before him, the influence of Plato on biblical writers and the first Christian theologians. Plato and other Greek schools of thought believed that existence was divided into matter and antimatter—material things and spiritual things. The spiritual things, the ideas, Truth and Beauty, those things were unchanging, pure, lovely, good. Bodies—which women seemed to have a harder time transcending by virtue of childbearing—were “profane,” ever changing, subjective.
Augustine, early in his life, was very influenced by these schools of thought, and by a group known as the Manichaeans, who were similarly dualistic in their understanding of good and evil—matter was evil, spirit was good. Augustine thought being a Christian would require him to give up what was evil—or, at least, tainted by sin. He famously prayed, Give me chastity and self-control, but not just yet.6 Augustine didn’t ever go so far as Jerome, who thought lifelong celibacy ought to be normative for Christians, but he did tend to think sexual pleasure almost always involved turning away from God toward the desires of the body, even in marriage. But the bishop’s career was long, and he came to understand sexuality differently over time. My friend Kyle,7 who just finished writing a brilliant dissertation on Augustine, the Trinity, and Love, points out that “in his very late Genesis commentary, Augustine argues that sex and reproduction are normal and good, and Adam and Eve would have had sex and begotten children even in paradise. Alas, his reasoning is that if God’s only goal for them was companionship, God would have created a second man instead of a woman.”
(Oh, those church fathers! So timeless in some things, so ridiculously impacted by the biases of their own times in others.)
As much as those early Christians were influenced by body/soul dualism, however, the far more enduring theological conviction is that our bodies, souls, minds, and hearts are intertwined. That’s the heart of Christian incarnational theology. God creates us in the divine image, creates us with bodies, creates us through earth and divine breath, creates us good. Jesus is fully human and fully divine; in these bodies, with these minds, we’re both powerful and vulnerable.
The marveling poetry of Psalm 8 names the paradox across the centuries:
When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers,
the moon and the stars that you have established;
what are human beings that you are mindful of them,
mortals that you care for them?
Yet you have made them a little lower than God,
and crowned them with glory and honor.
(PSALM 8:3–5)
Our bodies are not base matter to be transcended, their needs ignored or denied in pursuit of holiness. They are us, gifts from God, though, indeed, mutable and mortal, prone to (in the words of the wonderful theologian Kris Culp) vulnerability and glory.
A CENTRAL THEOLOGICAL question over the years, however, is about the nature of human life—is it altogether sinful in light of the Fall?
The vast majority of people have sexual relationships at some point in their lives. And many people have engaged in self-stimulation at some point; by age twenty, 92 percent of men and two-thirds of women.8 Infants have been known to touch themselves, as do young children “before the age of reason.” They do it innocently, which challenges the idea that the pursuit of such pleasure is particularly sinful. Maybe it’s just another human thing, like eating and sleeping.
If sexual pleasure is such a common—nearly universal—human experience, what makes a difference for people, what makes exploring these early theologians’ work important, is how we interpret that pursuit of pleasure. Does it necessarily require turning away from God; does sexual pleasure always incite lust or incline us toward sin? Should we interpret that pursuit as sinful and worthy of shame, or as good and natural?
More pressingly, I wonder about the effects of teaching children that something that is natural and commonplace is sinful.
Theologian and ethicist Christine Gudorf would affirm Augustine’s belief that sex and pleasure are part of God’s good creation, but she points out that to claim that sex is a part of God’s good creation is insufficient, given that a bunch of things that exist as parts of creation are decidedly not good. Hurricanes, drought, HIV and malaria, piranhas: those are part of creation but aren’t high on anyone’s list of celebrated phenomena.9
Nevertheless, she writes, “sexual pleasure can be argued as good for a much simpler, more commonsensical reason. It feels good. Like a hot tub for aching muscles, cool water on a hot day . . . sexual pleasure makes us feel good.”
Pleasure, in fact, is itself a good. Not the good, but a good. Sexual pleasure is what Gudorf calls a “premoral good”—which means it should be understood as “one aspect of the general social good.”10 Moral discernment will help us to know when sexual pleasure needs to be sacrificed to other goods—but it is not in itself sinful or wrong or shameful. As human beings, Gudorf states, “we need pleasure; we need body pleasure.”11 We need experiences of pleasure just as surely as we need to limit our experiences of pain and suffering, for our bodies and for our souls.
Among my survey respondents, there were those who felt that the pursuit of pleasure, even as children, even without lust or partner, was a “sin against my chastity.” But there were far more who, even before they knew how to make sense of what they were doing, even before they understood themselves as sexual beings, thought of what they were doing as special, good, private; one woman referred to it as “my favorite feel” when she was a child. Another, on realizing that she could make herself feel good—relaxed and lovely—considered self-stimulation “a gift from God.”
That language gives me pause—we don’t usually think about masturbation as a gift from God. But insofar as human beings need body pleasure, it is a safe (and pretty reliable) way to meet a very human need. Sounds like a gift from a benevolent creator, after all.
This is not to say, however, that chastity is no longer a virtue, or that pleasure ought to be pursued all the time without limit.
I love the writer Caitlin Moran. A broadsheet columnist in England who started out as a music critic, she writes about everything and nothing from a populist feminist perspective. She is hilarious.
I love the social consciousness Moran developed growing up poor and on welfare in the UK, and I love how she describes her adolescence and the fear and anxiety she had about becoming a woman. Her mother gave her neither instructive books featuring Ramona and Howie nor direct access to trashy romance novels; she assumed Caitlin and her sisters would “[pick] it all up from Moonlighting.”12
Things change ever so slightly for the better after Cate’s thirteenth birthday, when she is allowed an adult library card. She has recently fallen in love with Fletch-era Chevy Chase and she intends to check out the movie novelization so she can gaze lovingly at Chase’s picture on the cover and imagine him stroking her face. She finds her book and, as an afterthought, picks up another she thinks is about horses. In fact, it’s ridiculous smut and within the space of an afternoon and a couple of dozen pages she gains quite the education. This is “the key text that will translate ‘new and unusual feelings’ that [she has] been having into ‘masturbating furiously and compulsively for the next four years.’”13
Moran dislikes the “m-word” as much as I do; its pronunciation evokes definitions counter to her experience: “What I am doing, by way of contrast, is dreamlike, delicate, and soft—apart from the occasions where I have grown my nails too long and become so sore I have to repel my own advances for a few days.”14 It is, despite the dangers posed by overzealous attention to oneself, a perfect hobby: “It doesn’t cost anything, I don’t have to leave the house, and it isn’t making me fat.”15
It is a gift, the one thing about adolescence and the encroaching ambiguities of womanhood that she can enjoy and treasure.
Of course, her adolescent preoccupation with wooing herself is exactly what Christians, ancient and modern, are often afraid of. That our pursuit of pleasure will send us into ourselves, will turn us away from God. That we will give in to lust, fantasizing about others, and grow addicted.
In one popular Christian sex ed curriculum, the question of the morality of self-stimulation is raised: Some Christians believe it is always wrong because it usually involves visualizing someone you’re not married to . . . Plus, it’s sexual stimulation outside of marriage. But other Christians, according to the curriculum, think it’s normal. This view, however, is quickly countered with the contention that “it can easily become addictive and controlling.” Entertaining sexual desires inevitably leads people to actions that are harmful or otherwise shameful.
The book I grew up with is not nearly so alarmist, stating:
Masturbating a lot does not do any harm, but it may be a sign that you are trying to make yourself feel better when you are tense or unhappy about something. In that case, it is more important to try to get help with that problem than it is to worry about masturbating.16
Masturbating—straight-up sexual pleasure—is neither always good nor always bad. It is simply a part of being human that can be used to delight and comfort, or as a means of avoidance and self-harm. But sexual pleasure does not in and of itself harm, anger, or dishonor God.
In the sixth chapter of 1 Corinthians, the apostle Paul rather famously charged early Christians to “shun fornication! . . . Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, which you have from God, and that you are not your own? For you were bought with a price; therefore glorify God in your body” (1 Corinthians 6:18–20). This passage is often cited as justification for all kinds of abstinence, but I wonder if that’s what Paul meant.
Is it glorifying to God to deny our bodies—created good, created by God—the things they need for health and joy? Is a prohibition against all pleasure outside of very circumscribed circumstances like marriage—which for most folks, who begin to sexually mature around thirteen but don’t marry until (on average) twenty-six, means more than a decade of frustrated need for release and desire for pleasure—glorifying to God?
The second-century church father Irenaeus wrote, “the glory of God is the human person fully alive.” Not repressed, shamed, afraid, or lonely. The glory of God is in human beings living in the light of grace, in the presence of the good, the true, the beautiful, the holy.
Moran’s description of her sexual awakening is just this—life is no longer drudgery; life is no longer terrifying. There is this soft, lovely, exciting thing and, importantly, “it feels like it will—eventually—somehow—I don’t know how—and only if I attend to its lessons carefully—make me dress right, say the correct things, give me the impetus to leave the house and find whatever it is that’s out there for me.”17
CHRISTIANS ARE SIMILARLY called to attend carefully to the lessons of our sexuality. Because it is private, it can become isolating; because it is a balm, it can become a panacea; because it can be part of a healthy life, we often forget that it can be dangerous. My friend Kyle, the Augustine expert, points out that Augustine was not just some prudish stick-in-the-mud: “In the ancient world, sex almost always meant conception—that is, there was no reliable contraception—and childbearing was an extremely dangerous proposition for women (and still is in a lot of places).”
Chastity provided not just freedom from whatever host of sins you could toss under the umbrella of sexual immorality, but freedom from the potential of disease or death. Chastity was not about limitation for many—especially early Christian women in religious orders—but about new freedoms to live fully into grace.
Christians are called not to indulge their every desire—if we continued into adulthood with the masturbatory practices of adolescence no one would ever get any work done—but to attend to our desires as a part of living into grace. Attempting to repress or sublimate our desires and human needs, accepting the shame or condemnation of our humanity as embodied creatures, does not help us connect with God. In fact, it is there that we run into trouble.
Sexual and pornography addictions are real problems, and devastating in their consequences. Though they are notably not yet included in the DSM-V as diagnosable illnesses, they’re obviously what we might call “adverse sexual behaviors.” Contrary to the rhetoric of many Christian groups, however, it’s not simply exposure to sexual material or tending to our desires that causes them. Untreated anxiety, depression, obsessive compulsive disorders, trauma, substance abuse, loneliness or isolation: these can contribute to unhealthy sexual behaviors, and those behaviors’ growing in importance in one’s life. Just like many folks with alcohol and drug problems use those substances to self-medicate underlying psychological issues, some folks use sex or porn. Just like kids and adolescents are more prone to develop unhealthy dependencies the younger they are when they start to use alcohol or drugs, early exposure to porn, especially intense porn on the Internet, can be more risky than when adults encounter it.
Video poker is like that, too. The rush from winning, from betting, from risking, affects our brains chemically—especially in those chemically impressionable adolescent years. But we rarely get so bent out of shape about kids getting addicted to gambling.
Removing the shame and isolation, treating underlying mental health issues, and preventing exposure to explicit materials, though, seem like much more effective responses to dealing with the evils of addiction and the bazillion-dollar pornography industry than attempting to get humans to rid themselves of a part of their humanity.
Indeed, Moran’s concern about pornography is that there is too much bad porn out there: if there were more porn that highlighted what actual women actually enjoy, a whole range of sexual ills might be remedied, most especially unrealistic expectations among young men and false portrayals of how to bring a woman to orgasm (very few women like x, y, and z. For serious, gents). The problem with bad porn for Moran (other than the crimes periodically involved in making it) is that it leads to bad sex.
I’m significantly more ambivalent about pornography than Moran is, but I do believe that sexual pleasure is a wonderful thing, and that it can open us to others and the world in important ways. Knowing what gives us joy can help us to know how and where to seek it, and, just as critically, recognize something that’s not satisfying, or joyful or good. Experiences of pleasure can also help us to relax, to gain confidence and the assurance we need to grow into healthy adults.
For most people, the pursuit of pleasure is a good they are able to hold alongside other goods. Moran grew out of her constant self-wooing. Same goes for most of the self-lovers in my survey. Gudorf also addresses the claim that masturbation invariably leads us inward, to isolation and sin.
Research shows that the practice of masturbation does not prevent men and women from seeking out sexual partners. In fact, among women, it has become clear that women who have masturbated are more likely to experience general sexual pleasure and, in particular, orgasm [and thus connection and satisfaction, I’d add] in partnered sex than are women who have not masturbated. Rather than finding that solitary sex is an obstacle to shared sex, research suggests that solitary sex is helpful to women in later partnered sex in a variety of ways.18
The Christian life, Gudorf accepts, is about love of God and neighbor. But, she notes, “sex is perhaps one of the best life arenas for demonstrating that self and other are not naturally hostile. Their relationship is much more complex.”19 Sometimes tending to ourselves helps us to love others better, more fully. Certainly encouraging people in the ways that lead to dysfunction and addiction does not help them to pursue healthy marital or sexual relationships with others.
Moreover, though, Gudorf’s statement calls us to consider what we believe to be the relationships among self, God, and other. Augustine mostly thought that you couldn’t love God if you were loving self and other. Other notable Christian thinkers contend that the Christian life is at its heart about radical discipleship—the denial of self to love and serve Christ in others. At the end of Matthew 25, Jesus shares a parable of the judgment of the nations, proclaiming that on that day the Son of Man will come and divide people into sheep and goats, based on whether or not they served him well. Those in the sheep group seem unaware of what marks them as righteous and thus inquire, “Lord, when was it that we saw you hungry and gave you food, or thirsty and gave you something to drink?” And the Son of Man responds, “Truly I tell you, just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me.”
When we care for others, we serve the Christ in them. When we deny our selves, we presumably have more to give. If I give you my coat, because you have none, I am serving Christ in you. But then I’m without a coat.
Pleasure, though, is not a zero-sum game. If I give someone pleasure, there’s not necessarily less for me. Au contraire. And if I pursue some pleasure for myself, there’s not less for others. This is what Gudorf is getting at: sexual partners can be actual partners, working together, mutually benefiting. Self and other are not always, by nature, hostile to each other. In fact, every now and again, the pleasure increases when it’s mutual.
But I think it’s also worth pointing out that attending to our own selves is important, too. Each of us was created in the image of God, and each of us has sacred worth. We don’t gain worth simply through serving others. That’s a good thing to do, but it’s not what makes God love us and it’s not what earns us a spot on this earth. There’s something valuable about each of us, in and of ourselves. Tending to our own needs is a good and important thing, because we are creatures, beloved by God, created with bodies to care for and delight in.
The biblical story traditionally trotted out as a clear prohibition against self-stimulation features a man named Onan, who is called upon by law and duty to impregnate his late brother’s wife (biblical marriage!). Instead, he has sex with her but at the final moment, “spills his semen on the ground.” You might be wondering what this story has to do with solo sex, but back in the day, masturbation was also called “onanism,” after that guy and his intentionally non-procreative sex act. Remember, if you will, that for most of history the only guaranteed non-procreative sex acts were masturbatory, because contraception was not overly reliable. So, the tradition has it, non-procreative sex—pleasure without consequence—is sinful.
In my read of the story, though (which you can find in Genesis 38:1–10), Onan’s real sin is that he is shirking his duty to his sister-in-law, having sex with her (and presumably enjoying it) without fulfilling his obligation and actually doing injury to her. The practice of marrying your sister-in-law, or giving your dead brother an heir, was a means of providing economic security and protection to a woman who would otherwise be without support, set adrift in a society where women were pretty much only sustained through their relationships with men. Onan has sex with Tamar, but denies her the means to protect or sustain herself. Pursuing pleasure at a cost to another, especially a vulnerable other, is displeasing to the Lord. Shame on Onan.
As the story of Onan illustrates, sexual pleasure can be a sinful thing. Obviously. But the sin is usually more about a broken relationship, a harm done to self or other, than the nature of sexual pleasure in and of itself.
More than being “not always sinful,” sexual pleasure is also a delightful part of being human, and it’s important to affirm that. Perhaps even more important, though, is to note with Christine Gudorf that the love of self, God, and other are not inherently opposed: we can honor God and honor our bodies by attending to our desires with care; we can help our future partners out by figuring out who we are and what we like and long for. The pursuit of pleasure can be used to mask other needs and, indeed, to debase ourselves. But we need not be afraid to know and love our bodies, for they are gifts from God, made for pleasure, made for connecting us to the world and its people. Whatever your experience, past or present, with self-stimulation, a future full of good Christian sex requires coming to terms with the questions posed by sexual pleasure, and an acceptance of oneself as worthy and deserving of that pleasure, as a creature beloved by God.