Masturbation Is The Safest Sex
But it has a such a terrible reputation.
Growing up, my mother was terrified about the day I would learn about sex. She coached me to pretend to be sick and go to the nurse’s office in grade school just so I would miss Magic Johnson’s sex ed video. When I was as young as eight, she’d tuck me into bed with the warning “be good!”
My mom was afraid that I’d started masturbating long before I even knew what she was talking about. As far as she was concerned, I didn’t need to know anything about sex. In high school, she refused to let me get nutritional counseling because she was so sure it was just some ruse to get birth control against her wishes.
I got older and mom warned me that only evil people “played with themselves.” Masturbation was a form of sexual deviance, and then the church echoed that idea.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, purity culture was a very big deal. The ministry internship (ahem, cult) I entered after high school also taught that masturbation was a sin, because lust was a sin.
During my internship year, Ron Luce (cult leader) gave an infamous sex talk where he outlined what was and wasn’t okay when it came to sex within a “godly” marriage. Masturbation was off the menu and he relayed a story about how “a very famous preacher” once told Ron he was…
