Dear Pastor Frank,

Thank you very much for your thoughtful replies to questions about male sexual issues such as masturbation. I am wondering how men can integrate a healthy sex life with a healthy spiritual life and a healthy community life, from around, say, age 14 to around age 114, pre-marriage, during marriage, and post-marriage (or post-menopause, while still married). How can the churches be helpful in this regard, especially with declining attendance reducing the number of men it can reach? Calls for celibacy except when married, to a wife who is willing and able, seem to be a harmful ruse. Should the church be promoting hand-jobs if pre-marital sexual intercourse is condemned? It seems like we should explain that to the next generation of young men. Any thoughts you have would be tremendously appreciated. Your website seems to be one of the few things that can point the way through our nation’s current conflicts about sex and religion. Eric

Frank answers: Dear Eric, I appreciate the concern you raise. Young men are few and far between in the declining mainline Protestant churches that have embraced more progressive views on sexual issues. Young adults are more plentiful in the evangelical megachurches where traditional sexual ethics are taught, namely, abstinence except in marriage. The preachers also discourage masturbation, but that won’t stop unmarried young men (and women) from masturbating. It would be interesting to hear from them about how they deal with this discrepancy between what their preachers say and what they do. Do they “sin” and then ask God for forgiveness and then do it again? This can be spiritually debilitating. (At least young Catholics know it’s only a “venial sin” that is easily forgiven.) It would be better to teach a healthier view of human sexuality. But frankly, the churches haven’t been good at it and are embarrassed to address such topics publicly. Yet if you want to connect sex and spirituality, you have to turn to religion.

We also know that young adults are waiting longer to get married and have children. It’s not just a matter of what they might do to satisfy sexual needs for the long haul before they get into the marriage bed. It’s a matter of whether they’re interested in sex at all. The U.S. birth rate has been declining for years. In fact, the decline in church attendance and church membership can be correlated with the decline in birth rates over the last several decades. The fact is that in the developed countries of North America, Europe, and East Asia, their populations aren’t being replenished. They’re declining. So in Japan we find senior citizens working until later in life because their labor is needed. A decreasing work force means that there is less money going into social security funds to support retirees. This is as true in China as in the U.S. You ask about the connection between healthy sex lives and a healthy community life. Here it is at its most fundamental level. Humans, like every species, must reproduce themselves to survive as a species. We need to produce children to provide for the physical, social, and economic needs of the elderly.

So while I see nothing sinful about masturbation, and agree that it is needed by the young who aren’t ready for mature sexual commitments, and by single people generally, and by men (and women) whose partners aren’t able to satisfy their sexual needs, we cannot bless autoeroticism to the neglect of promoting marriage and family. This was the final concern raised by social and behavioral scientists at the end of 19th century. After two centuries of medical pronouncements that masturbation is harmful to physical and mental health, Sigmund Freud torturously overcame his bourgeois aversion to the practice to conclude that there is nothing physically or mentally harmful in ordinary (but not obsessive!) childhood and youthful masturbation. But, in his view, women will by nature and men must by duty grow out of it for the sake of civilization. By the 1960s, Hugh Hefner had left Freud far behind.

Your actual question about promoting “hand jobs” is easy to answer. I don’t know of any Christian writer who has recommended masturbation as a Christian way to avoid penetrative pre-marital sex. Christian teaching has not been open to masturbation, even though it is not mentioned in the Bible, because it “spills the seed” that should go for procreation, although its benefit of relieving sexual tension has been recognized by modern clinical sexology. Onan’s “spilling the seed” (Genesis 38) has been appealed to, but it was coitus interruptus, not masturbation. For deceiving his deceased brother’s wife to provide her with offspring under the Old Testament Levirite Law, he was stoned to death. Nevertheless, since the 18th century “Enlightenment,” masturbation has been called Onanism.

In fact, masturbation has been recommended by health authorities as the safest form of sex. Autoeroticism has been especially emphasized during the time of COVID-19. Mayo Clinic and the New York City Health Department recommended masturbation and virtual sex as the best forms of safe sex. The New York City Health Department stated that “Masturbation will not spread COVID-19, especially if you wash your hands (and any sex toys) with soap and water for at least 20 seconds before and after sex.” Furthermore, it’s worth acknowledging that masturbation helps to reduce stress and tension, as well as improve sleep quality, and therefore might be a powerful coping tool in these nerve-racking times. And, yes, the authorities did promote the use of sex toys.

Today there needs to be more serious teaching about healthy sex lives because it may be that many young adults are unprepared for it. In fact, many men report that they are suffering from a low sex drive (libido). This could be a result of focusing too much on their careers and/or experiencing the anxieties produced by the COVID-19 pandemic. But some psychologists are raising the question of whether some men, and many more women, are interested in sex at all. Or do we go though different times in our lives when our sex drive is more in gear than at other times? See https://frank-answers.com/frank-answers-about-experiencing-a-low-libido/.

To some extent, I think our lack of healthy sex lives reflects our alienation from the very nature of which we are a part. We are disconnected from nature in issues related to global warming and also in the transmission of disease. Remember that most viruses are transmitted from animals to humans (rats, bats, cattle, birds, mosquitos, ticks, etc.). If we were better attuned to nature, we would see that fecundity and procreation is a part of our natural sex drive. The human species is designed to fulfill our Creator’s injunction to “be fruitful and multiply.” Women have twelve times during the year to get pregnant, not one or two like other animals. Men can produce an unlimited supply of sperm which builds up and needs to be emitted, if not in sex or by hand then in nocturnal emissions. But there must be a desire to connect sexually on the part of both men and women, and that seems to be a problem today.

Rooting the sex drive in nature is also the clue for the relationship between healthy sex lives and a healthy spiritual life. The passion that drives a man and a woman to intercourse has a mystical union character to it. We lose our individual selves by being joined into a united self through coitus. But in, with, and under this experience of two becoming one flesh lies the relentless drive toward procreation. Although masturbation is common, entirely normal and healthy, sex finally involves intimate interactions with another person. This presents a minefield during adolescence, when it is easy to make mistakes and get hurt or hurt others. Youth are advised by churches to keep themselves sexually pure until the right partner comes along while the mass media promotes a hookup culture that encourages having sex with multiple partners until the right one emerges. These are very conflicting messages youth are receiving from church and culture.

The problem from both directions is that the aim of each approach is satisfying one’s own needs and desires; hence, finding the partner who gives me satisfaction. A true sexual maturity occurs when a commitment to another person leads to a desire to satisfy that person’s needs and desires. Two people looking to satisfy each other’s needs and desires will result in lovemaking that moves from eros (passion) to agape (self-giving). People know from their experience whether their lovemaking has been about more than lust and whether their sexual delight is more than selfish. Many men will have to learn how to pay attention to and satisfy the needs of their spouse. To this end, neo-tantric sex workshops might be recommended. See https://frank-answers.com/frank-answers-about-yoga-tantra-and-sex/.

This healthy sexual relationship also expresses a healthy spirituality since agape love is “of God.” And a sexually and spiritually mature couple will extend their mutual love to others in raising their children and in meeting the needs of their neighbors. This is what the churches and their pastors need to be teaching. This is what healthy sex and a healthy spiritual life is about.

Our alienation from our own bodies does not help our young men to develop a healthy sex drive. They may masturbate while watching porn on the internet, but then the focus of their energy goes into the screen, not into their bodies. A Tantra massage may be helpful in tuning men into their body and experiencing sex as a bodily experience. Rather than quickly jerking off, a tantra lingam (penis) massage is a slow meditative experience that awakens the sexual energy of the whole body. The partner slowly massages with oil the entire body, moving closer and closer to the genitals and then working on them very slowly. Also, sexual energy is awakened not by touching their own genitals but by allowing the partner to do the touching. The partner slowly brings the man to a powerful orgasm that may or may not include ejaculation. The ultimate aim of a tantra massage is to retain rather than expel the body’s sexual energy so that it revitalizes the energy of the whole body. But if ejaculation results, there is no judgment about that. It could be the best ejaculation the young man has experienced.

Finally, to return to the issue of celibacy, it plays a part in the overall life of a faith community when it is chosen voluntarily as a way of life. Celibacy is embraced as a vocation (calling) instead of marriage as a way of devoting oneself to prayer and works of mercy on behalf of the whole Christian community. It cannot be required and it should not be imposed. It should be freely chosen and publicly declared. Those who undertake a vow of celibacy should be supported in their calling by the whole church as well as by a celibate community. This has been the Catholic and Orthodox approach to the relationship between religious communities such as monasteries and convents and the life of the church in the world. It is a relationship Protestants will have to recover if they want to teach celibacy as a vocational option to sexual life in marriage with children, God willing. On the other hand, Protestants, following Martin Luther, promoted marriage with children over celibacy and monastic life as a God-blessed biblical spirituality. And within marriage Luther discovered and extolled the joys of sex.

Pastor Frank