The Secret Sin

Summer made me hard.

Especially when she was in her cheerleader’s uniform. I had made a covenant with my eyes, and I tried to take those thoughts captive, but….

At night in bed, visions of Summer came unbidden. I had pledged to remain pure, but as I envisioned my body on top of Summer’s nubile body, my hand went to a forbidden place.

When my erotic fantasy reached its apogee, and my body had discharged all its erotic tension, I was paralyzed by guilt. I vowed never to do it again.

Then I saw Summer once more in her cheerleader’s uniform.

---

Masturbation is sinful. That was the lesson I unambiguously learned in the purity culture. It stained one’s holiness, “without which no one will see the Lord” (Heb 12:14). It was a form of adultery against one’s future spouse, for “the husband does not rule over his body, but the wife does” (1 Cor 7:4). Marriage was the balm for lust. As one commentator put it, St. Paul didn’t say, “It is better to masturbate than to burn” (cf. 1 Cor 7:9). Driven by lust and fantasy, masturbation enslaves one’s body to sexual passion, placing one under the dominion of sin (cf. Rom 6:14). I even recall one speaker who said that it was a form of homosexual activity because it did not involve someone of the opposite sex. One purity author said of masturbation that “its selfishness is utterly foreign to the Kingdom of God.”

This perspective has a long lineage. Ethicist Margaret Farley writes, “Through centuries of Western thought masturbation was judged to be not only an immoral sexual practice, but one that should be particularly repugnant to human individuals and the human community.” Kant declared that sexual relations with oneself was “an abuse of one’s sexuality” and relegated oneself “below the level of animals.” William James thought it led to insanity. Certainly the Christian tradition contributed mightily to this consensus. Aquinas termed the deed “unchaste softness.” (It also came to be known as the “solitary sin,” “onanism,” and “self-abuse.”) The Angelic Doctor wrote that masturbation is a grave unnatural vice that involves sin against right order and the use of one’s body. Raymond J. Lawrence in Sexual Liberation: The Scandal of Christendom wrote that “resisting the temptation to masturbate” was elevated into “the sexual cause celebre for Protestants.” Corn Flakes and Graham Crackers were invented as wholesome remedies against unwanted sexual desire.

Having pledged to remain chaste until marriage, I strove to “be pure in heart and body,” which included refraining from sexual self-stimulation. As the aforementioned tale indicates, I didn’t always succeed. I learned through bitter experience the same lesson as Luther: “Nature never lets up….we are all driven to the secret sin. To say it crudely but honestly, if it doesn’t go into a woman, it goes into your shirt.” I didn’t have access to porn, but my fertile imagination more than compensated. (As a teenager, I recall surreptitiously purchasing a copy of Maxim and jerking off to photos of Elisha Cuthbert. I wasn’t alone in my solo explorations. During one encounter, Stephanie confessed to me that she had experimented with cucumbers and a curling iron.)

For one young lady reared in the purity culture, her church’s proscription against masturbation and her inability to refrain from self-pleasure created a crisis of faith:

Throughout my teenage years I battled with it constantly. I don’t even know how many hours I spent on my knees at the altar begging God to help me “stop doing It” (I could only ever refer to masturbation as It) until I finally gave up and refused to go forward to the altar anymore.

It was the first thing I ever really felt betrayed by God about. He promised that there wouldn’t be any temptation we couldn’t face, didn’t he?…I don’t even know how old I was when I decided that I was done dealing with all the agony and pain– I was convinced that if I could dedicate that much time and energy into “quitting,” into countless promises and bargains and vows, that no matter how much I tried it just wasn’t going to go away.

Given my extensive catalogue of sexual transgressions, masturbation seems fairly tame. Farley concludes, “Masturbation is more likely to be considered morally neutral, which could mean that it is either good or bad, depending on the circumstances and the individual….it usually does not raise any moral questions at all.”