Masturbation Month and Its Long History

Every May, sex-positive shops and educators mark Masturbation Month, an observance devoted to a practice that has been condemned, medicalized and mythologized for centuries. Its origin makes more sense against that background of shifting beliefs.

Attitudes were not uniformly negative in the past. Accounts of antiquity describe Sumerian ideas that linked the act to potency, an Egyptian creation story in which the god Atum brought the world into being, and Greek views that treated it as a normal substitute for other outlets, one that spared people from frustration.

How condemnation took hold

Later traditions turned harsher. Ancient Taoist thought regarded semen as a carrier of life force, and similar ideas about wasted vitality appeared in other traditions. Christian teaching labelled the act selfish, and by the early modern period it was blamed for a long list of ailments, from acne and gout to blindness, epilepsy and insanity.

Female masturbation was described in medical writing as a moral disease, and some girls were subjected to surgery in the name of treatment. In the early twentieth century, figures such as the cereal maker John Harvey Kellogg campaigned against it as part of a health reform movement, and inventors patented restraining devices. These measures are now regarded by historians of medicine as harmful and baseless.

The scientific turn

Research changed the picture. Alfred Kinsey led major surveys of sexual behaviour in men and women during the 1940s and 1950s, which found masturbation to be among the most widespread of sexual activities. Later, William Masters and Virginia Johnson, pioneers of laboratory sex research, concluded that it produced no negative medical effects, short or long term. Today mainstream health bodies regard it as a common and normal behaviour.

Liberation and backlash

With the social changes of the 1960s and 1970s, the subject became easier to discuss in public. In the 1970s the educator Betty Dodson, sometimes called the grandmother of masturbation, published a book promoting solo sex for women, and Joani Blank opened one of North America's first sex shops built around education.

In 1994, the American Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, suggested that masturbation could be covered in school sex education, and she was soon dismissed by President Bill Clinton. The episode showed how much controversy still surrounded the topic.

Origins of the May observance

In response, a group of sex-positive retailers launched Masturbation Month in May 1995, presenting it as a protest against efforts to silence open talk about sexuality and as a way to reclaim the subject as something to celebrate.

The observance has been taken up in Canada as well, where sex shops and educators use the month to start conversations about pleasure and health.