Masturbation and testosterone 7 days later
Another myth of the anti-porn movement appears to have fallen
In 2003, a group of four scholars appeared to have published science demonstrating that, on the 7th day of abstinence following last ejaculation, testosterone spiked in their sample of 28 men. In December 2021, the study was retracted. Two of the four authors could no longer be found. The two who did remain agreed that they had published the same findings in a different paper published in Chinese. For those who may be unfamiliar with why this is a problem, authors are not allowed to submit the same work to multiple journals for a variety of reasons. Briefly, it wastes journal’s time, reviewer’s time, and increases the risk of publishing unreliable findings (e.g., among 100 reviewers, two at one outlet might not catch an error).
This paper had been credited as launching the Reboot treatments online in dozens of national news articles, including treating youth. The paper was widely cited by religious and profiting anti-porn groups as a reason to abstain from both masturbation and pornography.
How did we get here?
In April 2020, I contacted Prof. Jiang with a polite request for his data to replicate their findings. Releasing published data to a qualified statistician (I am a senior statistician at UCLA) is a common practice and allowed, sometimes required, by journals. The main goal of such a policy is to allow scientists who are concerned about published data to either (1) verify the findings or (2) competently raise concerns to the journal editor, if appropriate. I believed that the variance was unexpectedly high in the 7 day conditions reported. This could indicate that they had failed to capture an outlier or single data error, producing erroneous results. Indeed, the data had never been replicated by another laboratory. Of course, it also could be due to a number of other issues, so I reserved judgement and properly requested the data from the first author.
What followed was a series of angry emails from the author refusing to disclose, then seemingly admitting to not having, the data in question. In such cases, the protocol is to contact the editor of the journal for assistance. I found the editor, Prof Zhang, to be responsive and believe he attempted to be helpful. These exchanges continued until March 2021, when I simply became busy with other work. The data were never provided.
The study was ultimately retracted. I do not speak or read Chinese and am not able to evaluate the remaining claims. I have no idea if my inquiry for data ultimately led the editor to discover the other undisclosed paper and missing authors.
Nineteen years post-publication, we are now publishing on the health disinformation that grew out of this article in the “Reboot” online treatments. The damage from this article to public health information appears widespread. In fact, these Reboots were identified as having the least accurate information of any on men’s sexual health issues across TikTok or Instagram last month. Many on social media continue to cite this (now retracted) study.
Of course, the authors may have had no idea how their data would be misused or misrepresented by Reboot coaches. That is a very sympathetic problem to have as a scientist. Perhaps the data even existed at one time and were not in error? However, double-dipping in publications and missing authors is highly suspect. It appears this is as far as we can go to debunk this disinformation.
UPDATE: A colleague kindly linked me to a person who translated the Chinese. They verified it lacked 3 (of 4) authors and had different day numbers in the abstract. In other words, the articles might have been similar, but the original claim of a 7 day “spike” by a “group” from China is verified as no longer published.
