In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, one of the main characters, Lydgate, is driven by rain one afternoon into a small library. He pulls at random a book from a shelf and opens it to a page on anatomy. He is drawn to a description of the valves of the heart, at which point, Eliot tells us, the young man realizes his life’s passion: “The moment of vocation had come” for the physician to be.
I’ve always liked the idea of literary synchronicity, of books reaching out to direct our thoughts and lives.
Recently, for example, a copy of Rabbi Soloveitchik’s treatise, The Halachic Man, appeared on the shelves in my synagogue and seemed to call out to me. It’s a difficult read full of references to philosophical traditions from the pre-Socratics to Hegel and beyond, and I found myself wishing I had some kind of overview of the history of philosophy. Later in the week, my wife told me she had found in the house and was reading something called Sophie’s World—a history of philosophy written in the form of a novel. And we had two copies, so we started reading it together.1
And then there’s the case of Holy Nation: A Guide for Shmirat Habris, a small pamphlet that showed up in my synagogue this week. Some well-meaning congregant left a stack of them. I didn’t know what the title meant until I opened one and learned it was a book on “the severe sin of wasting seed.” I felt like I had to read it and had to write about it.
“Shmirat Habrit” means, literally “guarding the covenant,” and “covenant” in this context is a euphemism for circumcision, and circumcision is, in turn, a euphemism for the location of the circumcision. So, in short, “Smirat Habrit” really means guarding your johnson, and that means, you know, leaving it alone . . . .
It’s a serious business, the pamphlet informs us:
The Arizel writes that one draws down souls every time one wastes seed. These souls are considered one’s children. The forces of evil then capture these souls and torture them, stealing their energy for themselves. These souls are greatly agitated and despise their father for doing this to them. They seek vengence on him, causing him much anguish. . . .
The spilling of seed, it goes on, caused the flood, is worthy of the punishment of karet, i.e., separation from God; it likens masturbation to worshipping idols, to desecrating all 613 mitzvot. “Spilling seed is more severe than any other sin,” the writer says. “It defiles one in this world and in the world to come.”2
That’s enough to make any man pause.3
Thankfully, the pamphlet also includes helpful tips on how to avoid the sin and atone for it4 and promises that, though this is “the hardest challenge,” overcoming it brings great rewards.
While I don’t take the pamphlet’s dire warnings literally, while I can see how others might be appalled by them, I appreciate their symbolic power and usefulness as a corrective to the secular attitude that ranges from, it’s impossible not to masturbate to shout your masturbation.
Perhaps the most famous example of the former idea is the infamous Seinfeld episode “The Contest,” in which the four main characters bet to see who can last the longest as the “master of their domain.”
None of them gets very far because, really, who can resist?
The Victorians tried, after all, and it didn’t work out well for them.
It’s one of those memories from graduate school I can almost not believe was real, and maybe my old roommate Mari will back me up in this. But as I recall, sometime in the 1990s, in the hallowed halls of the University of Chicago English Department, where the names Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Eliot (both George and T.S.) loomed large, one professor devoted an entire semester’s course to nineteenth-century anti-masturbation tracts.
He was a practitioner of what was then called “The New Historicism,” a method of criticism that delighted in rescuing long-ago forgotten cultural artifacts—travel guides, advertisements, anti-masturbation tracts—and using them as lenses through which one could generate new readings of old texts. I didn’t take the class, but I recall students talking about it and seeing some examples of the tracts. Some of these included ads for horrifying anti-masturbation devices such as this one.
The implication behind the course, as I understood it, was that Victorian culture was not just repressive but disturbingly sex-obsessed, and nothing was a greater symbol of stultifying Victorian repression than its anti-masturbation campaign replete with threats of hellfire, hairy palms, and insanity. We PhD students and teachers, of course, knew better. Masturbation was not a sin (sin didn’t exist). Everyone did it, whether they admitted it or not. And far from being bad for your health—draining energy, causing madness—on the contrary, it was a healthy and normal expression of sexuality.
There’s an idea in Judaism that if you practice an aveira enough, your yaetzer hara, i.e., evil impulse, will convince you it’s a mitzvah, a positive good.5 One is tempted to say that popular culture has proven this saying true.6
I remember as a young man reading in Ann Landers a letter from a teen asking whether masturbation was okay, and the grand dame of advice assuring her readers that, contrary to those awful Victorians, we modern folk understand today that masturbation is not only not bad for you, but can be a positive good because it “relieves tension.”7
I came across this idea again only a few days ago in the 1990s novel Ready Player One.8 In that story, set in the near future, the main character cites with approval the teachings of a fictional internet magnate, James Halliday, on the matter at hand:9
I would argue that masturbation is the human animal’s most important adaptation. The very cornerstone of our technological civilization. Our hands evolved to grip tools, all right—including our own. You see, thinkers inventors, and scientists are usually geeks, and geeks have a harder time getting laid than anyone. Without the built-in sexual release valve provided by masturbation, it’s doubtful that early humans would have ever mastered the serets of fire or discovered the wheel. And you can bet that Galileo, Newton, and Einstein never would have made their discoveries if they hadn’t first been able to clear their heads by slapping the salami. . . .
What sometimes passes for genius in fiction is truly astonishing.
Maybe E = mc2 was locked up tight in the crevices of Einstein’s brain until, as the kids say, he busted a nut and released it. But I doubt it.
It certainly doesn’t accord with my experience. Without getting into morbid autobiographical detail, I’ll just say this. If masturbation led to greater productivity, I’d have published my first novel by the time I graduated junior high. I’d have finished college in two years, completed grad school in three, and my novels, essays, and social critiques would be scattered in bookstores and libraries across the nation.
Alas, it was not so. Indeed, if I had been better able to “guard the covenant,” I suspect I’d be a lot closer to living that dream than I am now. . . .
I had a friend in college who used to tell how in boarding school, he would ask his friends to raise their hands if they masturbated, and when no one did, he’d laugh and call them all liars. At Vassar, he proudly shouted his masturbation.
And, yes, by all statistics, there’s a whole lot of whacking off going on.10
So, how can it possibly be a bad thing? Aren’t all attempts to control it not only wrongheaded but futile? And doesn’t religion have a lot to account for, a lot to apologize for with regard to the misinformation and shame it has promoted around this topic?
Yeah, but. . . .
First, let me say that I’ve met and known people who have gone years as masters of their domain and have been better off for it.11 Regardless of what anyone tells you, it is possible. Whether it’s desirable is another matter, but let’s not counter propaganda with propaganda. Men can live without masturbating. And it doesn’t make them crazy or frustrated or slow their success. Usually, the opposite.12 Nobody on his deathbed ever said, “I wish I had masturbated more,”13 but I’d bet some have wished they had done it less.
Except in a few extreme cases,14 I can’t think of many situations in which masturbation is a positive good15—as opposed to being, at best, carbon neutral.16 But I can think of many situations where it works against relationships, self-esteem, and productivity.
So the question becomes, how do we have a more honest, realistic conversation about masturbation? One in which we don’t threaten eternal damnation but also don’t pretend it’s an unequivocal good?
Some of this has begun in online culture, in discussions such as this one on whether or not one ought “to fap.”
These kind of debates tend to center on the auto-addictive quality of the behavior, though they mostly focus on the question of porn use. Peterson and Huberman, for example, talks about the way men get in a porn-induced pleasure feedback loop that makes more difficult actual sexual and emotional relations. The much vaunted “release” of orgasm, Huberman says, gives you a dopamine hit that leaves you depleted in much the same way as is caused by drug abuse.
Of course, for the Orthodox Jew, the problem is more acute. Masturbation is not just a bad idea, its forbidden. It’s no more permissible than a cheeseburger or a shrimp cocktail, less so really, because, when it comes down to it, if you need to eat a pork chop to survive, it’s allowed. It’s hard to make the same argument about self-pleasuring.
And yet I have it on good authority that the sin is so common in Yeshiva it has sometimes been known as “The Aveira.”
I believe the enlightened contemporary Orthodox approach has been to “decriminalize” it, which is not the same as permitting and certainly not the same as promoting. The idea is something like, “We can’t stop you, but we want you to know it’s not good for you. You may not be able to stop yourself, but you can try, and God will reward you for trying.”
Is this a recipe for inducing guilt and shame? I don’t know. Maybe.
I’m forty-plus pounds overweight. When I have half a pint of ice cream, I feel guilt and shame. Should I? Yes, I should. It’s shortening my life at the cost of temporary pleasure.17
Guilt and shame have a place in the life of a man. If masturbation is interfering with productivity, one’s relationship with oneself, one’s wife, or God, then, yeah, it probably should induce some guilt and shame.
How should you approach it with young men whose hormones pose a seemingly insurmountable obstacle? Scare tactics? Rational discourse? Weird pseudo vagina dentata devices?
I don’t know. I don’t know what would have worked when I was a kid. Maybe a pamphlet like Shamirat Habrit would have helped. Maybe not. With the ubiquity of porn, with the rising tide of sexbots, it’s only going to get tougher.
If I had the answer, I’d write a pamphlet of my own and leave it lying around churches and synagogues across the country. In the meantime, all I can say is that maybe we can think more deeply about it than has been done by the likes of Ann Landers, Jerry Seinfeld, or the narrator of Ready Player One.
I had not mentioned to her my thoughts about reviewing philosophy. But we have a lot of books lying around in our home from previous tenants and this one just chose to make itself known at just the right time.
The source for the prohibition against masturbation is in the story of Onan, who God struck dead for “spilling his seed.” An argument could be made—and I have made it—that Onan’s crime was not masturbation per se but rather trying to avoid impregnating his wife. Nonetheless, the rabbis have been pretty consistent in proscribing this activity.
I use the word “man” here intentionally. As far as I know, the requirement to “guard the bris” is one unique to men in Judaism.
Don’t ogle women, say tehillim (psalms), use the mikveh, turn to food if necessary, get married young, say more psalms.
A paraphrase of Tractate Yoma 86b.13 of the Talmud: When a person commits a transgression and repeats it . . . .it becomes to him as if it were permitted.
We’ve seen this in the sexual arena from the “porn is degrading and misogynistic” slogans of the seventies to “Six Reasons Why Porn May Be Good For You”; in the drug era from marijuana can turn you into a psychotic killer to it’s calming and anti-inflammatory , and in the discussion of psychedelics, which have gone from dangerous “bad trips” and flashbacks to a miraculous cure for addiction, depression and whatever else might ail you.
She got a lot of blowback on this, some negative, mostly positive.
I had never heard of this novel until recently when a friend at my synagogue gifted it to me because he knew I’d appreciate the 1980s pop culture nostalgia. I’ve been reading it on and off for a few weeks, but this passage came up this weekend in another example of lit-synchronicity.
So to speak. . . .
But maybe not as much as you would think. What percentage of men would you guess self-pleasured in a given month? 99 percent? More like fifty, according to the NIH. In the 2009 National Survey of Sexual Health Behavior (NSSHB), a U.S. nationally representative survey of 5865 men and women ages 14–94, 28% of men ages 70 + , 43% of men ages 14–15 and 60–69, and more than half of men ages 16–59 reported having engaged in solo masturbation in the prior month (Herbenick et al., 2010).
I know. Some of you, like my old Vassar friend, will say they are lying. . . .
Freud, by the way, is on my side. He believed that sublimated sexual impulses, i.e., redirected sexual impulses, were the cause of all great achievements, basically the opposite of the fictional Halliday’s argument.
Well, to be honest, William Blake did write a poem in which an old woman complains, “And now Im coverd oer & oer / And wish that I had been a Whore,” but I’m not sure that’s the same thing.
There’s a disturbing scene in the 1998 movie Happiness, for example, in which a character explains he would choose to masturbate rather than commit a heinous sexual crime.
I’m talking about the solo variety here. If it’s between a married couple, I can imagine situations where, theoretically, it could bring a couple closer together—even though I know the halacha doesn’t agree with me on this. Count me as agnostic on this aspect of the Law.
Or “parve,” as some of my Jewish friends might say.
I once had a dietician. I told her once I had eaten some cake, I wasn’t supposed to. “Did you enjoy it?” she asked. I said I did. “Good,” she said. “Then it wasn’t a total waste.” That was her way of saying, don’t feel shame about it. You may as well enjoy it. But try not to do it so much. That’s another approach.
I wonder if he could get away with that nowadays…..
I recall being an undergraduate at The College of the University of Chicago, sitting in on a graduate seminar on the philosophy of Duns Scotus in Spring Quarter 1991. The professor, as I recall it, was straying a bit far afield in his comments, away from Duns Scotus's contemporaries into some seriously interdisciplinary territory which would have surprised 13th century Franciscans and their Scholastic contemporaries.
One uppity grad student interjected at a pensive pause to ask the professor, "Excuse me, Professor, but this strikes me as being mental masturbation."
Without skipping a beat, the professor in question shot back, "Have you come yet?"
I graduated from the Anthropology Department.