Does Masturbation Make You Blind? – Dr. David Lay

It’s incredible that, even today, people believe this old myth about masturbation! Dr. Ley explains where it came from. — Stripchat Sexuality Resource Center

Does masturbation make you go blind? Or does wanking make you go blind?

So it’s funny. A guy named Benjamin Rush was a physician and a signer of the Declaration of Independence back in 1776 in the United States, and Benjamin Rush believed that masturbation made you go blind. Benjamin Rush created that belief. He also treated masturbation with leeches. Please, whatever you do, don’t think about where he put the leeches to try and make people stop masturbating.

Masturbation doesn’t make you go blind and it’s interesting — because what the research actually later found out is that there are a couple of interesting things connected to sex that do make people go blind and that do affect their behavior, make them act in crazy unhealthy kind of ways.

This is probably what Benjamin Rush was seeing and it’s the untreated effects of syphilis and gonorrhea, sexually transmitted infections that were present in the New World, in America in the 1700’s. It wasn’t masturbation that made you go blind, but it was sexually transmitted infections.

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