Pure Manhood

"What about masturbation?"

To understand what's wrong with masturbation, we must understand the objective and meaning of sex. God created sex for the purposes of making babies and of bonding. Masturbation achieves neither and reinforces the myth that men need sexual gratification whenever they desire it. If you think about it, masturbation is kind of like birth control for people who don't have a partner. You want the pleasure, but you don't want its life-giving effects.

As for the meaning of sex, look at God's design for it. When a couple is married, they promise at the altar that their love will be free, total, faithful, and open to life. When they make love, they speak those wedding vows with their bodies. Their love is free: It is not coerced or driven by lust. It is total: Until death do they part; they hold nothing back from each other, including their fertility. It is faithful: It includes the mind, eyes, and heart, as well as the body. It is open to life: It is not deliberately sterilized. Consider all that sex is supposed to be; in this light, masturbation is not even a shadow of love.

Masturbation also harms your ability to love because you are bonding with fantasies. During sexual pleasure, the brain releases epinephrine, which helps to imprint sexual images onto your memory. Because God designed you for one woman, he wants sexual images to be burned into your brain. But he wants to brand into your mind the beauty of your wife and her alone. When we turn from his design, we harm ourselves. This is why the Bible says, "Every other sin which a man commits is outside the body; but the immoral man sins against his own body" (1 Cor. 6:18).

If a man never overcomes the habit of masturbation, what will happen if he gets married? Instead of making love, he'll use his wife as an outlet for what he thinks of as his "sexual needs." Prior to marriage, he may think, "Man, it will be nice to get married one day, so that I can experience all this stuff for real." But if he does get married, he'll soon discover that marital sex is not the fulfillment of porn or masturbation. They are a distortion of love—driven by lust and selfishness instead of love and selflessness.

If you look at the qualities that women look for in a man—courage, selflessness, strength, honor, confidence—you'll notice that masturbation is pretty much the opposite of all of them. Instead of increasing confidence, masturbation weakens a man's idea of himself. Instead of making him courageous and strong, it saps him of his strength.

God has not given us this strong sexual drive so that we would spend it on ourselves and become slaves to our weaknesses. Rather, as Pope John Paul II said long before he became pope:

God who is Father, who is Creator, planted a reflection of his creative strength and power within man. . . . We should sing hymns of praise to God the Creator for this reflection of himself in us—and not only in our souls but also in our bodies.11

Our world desperately needs a renewal of true fatherhood, and no matter what vocation we are called to, we must mature into this role. The idea of becoming a father may seem distant, but the virtues or vices we practice now will shape who we become. Let us begin by battling our selfish tendencies and learning self-mastery. Although masturbation can become a very tempting habit, it can—and must— be overcome.