CadeFoster
On being discouraged, I have never seen someone with hairy palms, there’s too few blind people vs. how many masturbate for it to cause blindness and I reckon the majority of men who are now dads probably masturbated hundreds, if not thousands, of times before than happened.
From what I have read there seem to have been two main sources of discouragement:
The medical profession was, at one time, anti-masturbation and there has even been the suggestion that non-religious circumcision was introduced to stop masturbation, though clearly that failed. The trigger may have been the observation that many patients in mental asylums would openly masturbate, so it was seen as something linked to mental illness and maybe even the cause of the mental illness. In practice, it was probably more a case of:
- Their mental condition may have made them less inhibited.
- They had no really privacy and tended to become desperate to get off.
- They were bored.
Anyway, as more became known, they have updated their stance.
Then there is religion: the story of Onan and other pieces of the holy books. These are all variations on the theme of "God gave us sex organs to have children (within a marriage): anything else is an abuse that God doesn’t like. Some sects are more chilled about it than others. The Catholic church has been criticised that an anti-condom stance has hastened the spread of HIV in Africa.
Even some religious sects are quite chilled about it now, and many more people are not particularly religious.
