Is No Masturbation Religious Propaganda? - Dr David Ley

Where do religious prohibitions on masturbation come from? How do they still manage to influence our culture and make us feel bad today? Dr. Ley dives into some of the history and theories about the roots of masturbation shaming.  — Stripchat Sexuality Resource Center

Is “No Masturbation” religious propaganda? Yeah, you’re right. Most of the concerns and dialogue about masturbation have really come out of a long history of religious concerns about masturbation and sex in general.

There are some folks who suggest that there are really a couple of reasons why religion exists. One is to create a community and a self-supporting community, but two, it is to control sexual behavior because historically before contraception, if a tribe had young people that had sex kind of when they weren’t ready for it, they could end up having babies and children that the tribe would then have to support and that the young people couldn’t support.

So one of the ways that religions attempted to control sexual behavior was by making people feel bad about it with religious propaganda. Masturbation is a universal human behavior. Overwhelmingly humans masturbate — in fact, there are data there, there are sonograms and ultrasounds and such that show that infants, fetuses masturbate in the womb. They don’t have orgasms, but they’re touching themselves in that area of our body that feels really good when we touch it. That’s what that part of the body is for!

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