On Masturbating without Lust

Awkward as it may be, over the past several years I’ve written a number of posts on the impact of my upbringing, with its emphasis on sexual purity, on my sex life both past and present. This time I want to turn to a subject I don’t believe I’ve explored yet, and that is my adolescent “struggles” and internal conflicts over masturbation.

I’ve written before about the huge physical response physical touch evoked in my body when I first started dating. I’ve written, too, that early in my sex life I could only orgasm when creating fantasies of nonconsensual sex or roleplaying nonconsensual sex. I see these things as connected to my upbringing, which I explain further in my posts. But the truth is that I had had orgasms before, much smaller ones, and in a very, very different way.

When I was seven or so, I discovered something that felt really good. I would put wadded sheets beneath me and move up and down on top of them until I felt a sort of crescendo of pleasure. I had no idea what I was doing except that it felt good. I always did it fully clothed, and I never touched myself. When my mother caught me one day, she didn’t tell me not to do it. She honestly didn’t seem upset at all, and for that I am grateful. Instead she simply told me not to do it when any of my brothers were in the room.

Fast forward a few years. When I was about eleven, I found a book on how to tell your children about sex while at the library. I hid behind a row of shelves and opened the book nervously. The first section I came upon was about masturbation. I was completely taken aback. I had had no idea that what I had been doing had any connection whatsoever to sex. I was rather horrified, to be honest. But mom hadn’t told me to stop, and I hadn’t heard anything at church about masturbation, so I continued doing it, though with a bit of trepidation.

A few years later I read Josh Harris’s books, which argued that masturbation was a sin because lust was a sin, and lust always accompanied masturbation. I found this confusing. I still masturbated from time to time (sometimes I would go months in between, other times I would do it several times in one week), but I never had any sexual thoughts whatsoever while doing so. It just . . . felt good. If I was uptight or stressed out, it would help me relax. I still didn’t undress and I still didn’t touch myself, I masturbated just as I had since I was seven. But was what I was doing wrong? Harris said it was, but he also said you couldn’t masturbate without having sexual thoughts, and I knew that was not true.

I should probably pause and explain this whole lust thing. I think sometimes there’s this idea that lust is some sort of out of control or disordered sexual passion, but that is not how it is used or defined in evangelical circles. Harris defines lust as follows:

Lust is craving sexually what God has forbidden.

In other words, any sexual feelings or desires outside of marriage counted as lust, and even within marriage any sexual feelings and desires for anyone other than your spouse counted as lust. So if you masturbated while looking at a picture of a sexy individual, or while conjuring up images in your head, you were lusting. But contrary to Harris’ assertions, I had never, not even once, “lusted” while masturbating.

After reading Josh Harris, I deliberated. I didn’t ask my parents about it because, well, things like that were not really discussed in our family, and the only talk we got about sex of any sort was don’t. Instead, I swung back and forth like a pendulum.

For a few months, I would masturbate every so often as usual, telling myself that it wasn’t wrong because I wasn’t lusting. Then for the next few months, I would avoid masturbating, telling myself that I must avoid any hint of sexual immorality of any sort, and that I was better safe than sorry. Then I would give in and masturbate again, telling myself that it wasn’t wrong because it wasn’t like I was lusting when I was doing it. Back and forth I went, back and forth conflicted.

This continued into college, still the same way of masturbating, still the lack of any sexual thoughts whatsoever, still the inner conflict. It was not until I rejected the evangelical idealization of sexual “purity” that I became truly comfortable with masturbating. By the time I had fully navigated this change in thinking, masturbating was no longer my only outlet.

When I started actually having sex and eventually (months later) had my first full orgasm, I found that it was head and shoulders better than anything I had ever experienced while masturbating in my usual way. It was like the comparison between the sun and a flashlight. I do think I experienced orgasms of some sort while masturbating, but they were something qualitatively different from the orgasms I eventually achieved during sex.

When I hear evangelicals argue that masturbation is wrong because it involves lusting, I shake my head. I spent well over a decade masturbating off and on and never once had a sexual thought while doing so. All I knew was that it felt good. Honestly, how was I supposed to have sexual thoughts when I was masturbating at age nine, before I even had any idea that what I was doing was connected to sex? I can still do it, by the way—masturbate in my old way without having sexual thoughts. Of course, I can also masturbate in new ways, ways that do involve sexual thoughts and fantasies.

This idea that masturbation is always of necessity accompanied by lust? That idea is wrong, and when evangelicals promote it they risk leaving a lot of girls like me confused and conflicted. But then, cases like mine don’t exactly fit the preferred evangelical dichotomies, so perhaps they’re easier to simply ignore.