This is a sad question...but have to ask

[star_anonymous]

I would like to ask if masterbation is okay in our religion?
I am sorry that this is such a question but I had to ask.

You see when a person is not married and has sex, it is seen has very sinful.
But when a person is married and has sex it is thought as good.
But my question about masterbation, should that be okay because isn't one married to themselves?

Anonymous (wonder why chose that screen name)

[shamsu]

Mastubation is better than having illicit affairs and sex. To be able to refrain from it is even better, but in todays world of overwhelming sexual distraction how can you blame a hormone driven teen if he (or she) indulges in this activity that science says is normal. The truth is that it is even seen in animals. As humans we do have an animal side dont we.

Yam

Shams

[kmaherali]

The need for it can be minimized though. I perceive this as a magnificient opportunity of persuing a higher life through the avenue of self restraint. One can overcome this instinct through correct approach to life and hence enjoy life to its fullest potential.

Paramhansa Yogananda who preached Yoga in the West and successfully founded an organisation for self realization said:

"They are blessed who are victorious over the sexual instinct. Because suppression may only increase one's difficulties, yoga teaches sublimation. The average person can be free of temptation by avoiding the company, environments, books, movies, that stimulate sex thoughts; and by training the armies of self-control, by seeking good company, by proper diet (eating little or no meat and taking more fresh fruits and vegetables), by exercising regularly, by engaging in creative activities such as art, invention, writing. Above all, by keeping the thoughts on the wonder, peace, and all-satisfying love of God, the insatiable desire for the pleasure of sex is transmuted by the divine love and ecstatic joy experienced in deep meditation."

There has been discussion on sexuality under the topic: "Solutions to Sexual Problems" in this section. You may want to go there.

[star_anonymous]

Thank you both of you, but I would like more feedback from other people, I would also like kmaherali to explain his answer more.

Thank you

Anonymous

[kmaherali]

I would also like kmaherali to explain his answer more.

Thank you

Anonymous

YAM,

Can you be more specific about what you need more explanation?

[shamsu]

In the ginans it is mentioned

Kaam Krodh jena ghat mahe zaher jagiya
Tenae jitya jitya daav sarve haariya.

Sex and Anger, in whomsoever they are manifest.
He loses all the winnings he had achieved.

Also in 'See harfee' there is a part where it is mentioned about keeping control over the toungue and the langot (underpants).

Professionally speaking

I believe that forcing yourself to abstain from sex can cause major system overload if you have not prepared yourself with daily bandagi.
(Eg: 40 days and 40 nights the movie).

But star_notsoanonymous wants others to give feedback so I will shut up now.


Shams

[Alim_virani]

Yam,
Sorry? Sorry to ask a question? Don’t ever, ever, be sorry to ask a question. It’s best to understand a religion, rather than except it, faith only comes once you question it.

In my opinion…
I would first like to mention that sex, in Islam, is nothing to be ashamed of. While Christianity (which I respect) may treat it as a means to an end (or dirty, or sinful), it is recognized in Islam as a perfectly natural, healthy thing.

I would also like to say that in Islam you are punished by your sins, and not for your sins. That is to say that if you commit a sin, God will not punish you for it. Instead the act of committing a sin wills push you further away from the true path; it will make you push you further away from god. This happens because when you decide to commit a sin, it signifies a flaw in one’s character. Thus the act of committing the sin itself is the punishment.
So let’s look at how masturbation might affect your self (in character, in soul, virtuousness ext…) in a negative manner.

1) When you masturbate you think of another person without (I assume) that person’s consent. Would you feel comfortable letting this person know that you think of him/her when you masturbate? This goes beyond social taboos: Imagine if this person could see your thoughts when you masturbate, how you would feel. And let’s change it around. What if someone you had no prior feelings for, told you that they masturbated to you.
A counter claim to this is that you masturbate to pornography. It can be assumed that the men/women in pornography assume that people are masturbating to them, and some might not even mind that.
Well this is just as bad as the above. Think of why it would be hurtful to know that someone masturbated to thoughts of you, why it’s a violation. When you masturbate to thoughts someone you turn them into objects. That person doesn’t have deep ideologies, or thoughts, or personality, but is simply a shell. Thus you degrade and demean this person, in your mind.
So let’s look at why this hurts your character: When you repeatedly degrade/objectify a person, you begin to have similar out looks on all humanity. I know it sounds like a huge stretch but think about it. Can you constantly hold two opposing views without one spilling one on to the other? Can you think of a human begin as purely an object while masturbating and then, as soon as your done, think of another human as part of God’s glorious creation?

This being said I would like to mention that I agree Shamsu. In the west, both men and woman, do not have a sense of modesty. Considering that you (I assume) are surrounded by this, it might be incredibly hard to resist masturbation. In that case I simply suggest that you take what I have said in mind.

2) This second point is far more complex, and it includes why promiscuous sex is ill advisable and why masturbating to thoughts of your wife/husband is as well.
Let’s take someone that treats sex as nothing different than eating food, say a pie. A pie taste good and when you feel like it, you eat some. Similarly when you feel like having sex, so you do. Well first of this disregards restraint. You wouldn’t eat 15 pies, because they tasted good. Secondly, and more importantly, I think this view, to be brutally frank, is silly. This view regard sex as nothing more than an act which results in pleasure; it is very hard to argue against it using only rationality. Instead let me employ what you already know (I assume): Would you feel alright with small children having sex, or say would you find it normal for perfect strangers to have sex, or would you be alright with your long time wife/husband having sex with someone else? Sex is not nothing, and has never been nothing. Even to those that treat it as nothing it is still something.
Let’s define sex: Sexual desire is the desire for contact for another person’s body for the sharing of love that it brings. The act of sex is the fulfillment of this. I would define intercourse then as the failed attempt to fulfill this desire.
The person that has promiscuous sex, whether knowingly or unknowingly is trying to fulfill the desire for sex with intercourse. If you need to have intercourse with strangers, to have pleasure, to replace a normal relationship, then you are missing something inside of you. There is something that is wrong with you (IE not enough confidence, don’t feel important, don’t feel loved) that you need fix, rather than escape from. In the end intercourse becomes “merely an exhaustive, rather than constructive undertaking, resulting in nothing but total loss.”

If you get to know a person, garner an emotional connection, and build a companionship then you can have sex (rather than intercourse). This will be infinitely more rewarding than intercourse, since rather than a fleeting monetary pleasure you will have an intellectual/emotional/loving pleasure.

So masturbation works in the same way. When you masturbate you are trying to fulfill a desire for “contact for another person’s body for the sharing of love that it brings”. Masturbation to is not just for pleasure, it is brought about for longing for a loving relationship. Thus when you masturbate you are trying to fill that void of not having loving relationship, or perhaps the desire for a more advanced relationship than the one your in, to the point where you would know the person (emotionally, intellectually, lovingly, ext…) and you could have sex (rather than intercourse).

With marriage the same concept arises. Let’s say you are married with a person you know, and you have had sex. Let’s say this person leaves for an extended period of time, and you miss him/her very much, and you long for contact with his/her body for the sharing of love that it brings. So you masturbate to thoughts of him/her, and past memories of sex. Yet in this case two you would be replacing you longing for one thing (exchange of love) with masturbation. How does hurt your character? You don’t deal with you feelings of longing for this person, and in the end you only hurt yourself with that sort of temporary relief.


In would like to mention that this is all my opinion, I am not saying this as dogma. I simply phrased this argumentatively since it’s easier for me to.

[faisall667]

Alim said: If you get to know a person, garner an emotional connection, and build a companionship then you can have sex (rather than intercourse). This will be infinitely more rewarding than intercourse, since rather than a fleeting monetary pleasure you will have an intellectual/emotional/loving pleasure.

Are you trying to say that it is okay to have sex without being married, if you r then I totally disagree with you.

Faisal

[star_anonymous]

Thank you for this discussion.

Shams said: But star_notsoanonymous wants others to give feedback so I will shut up now

If you think I am star_munir, well you r wrong because I am not. That was the first screen name that i saw so I put a star_ in front of my screen name. I am sorry Munir.

Anonymous

[shamsu]

Please dont call my friend Munir sorry.

[kmaherali]

The following article that appeared in today's Calgary Herald is a preview to the TV programme to be aired on CBC at 9.00 pm Monday (tomorrow). It highlights issues relating to internet sex. How people are getting addicted to it and the consequences. It is shocking and disturbing!

Documentary peers into world of Internet sex addicts


Jay Stone
CanWest News Service

February 6, 2005

A few years ago, a Vancouver lawyer named Alan had the Internet installed on his office computer, and discovered that it was what he now calls "a gift from the devil." Within a week, Alan had found the porn sites that seem to dominate the Web. Within two or three weeks, he was addicted to watching them. They took over his sex life. Like eight million people in North America, he was pursuing online sex for at least 11 hours a week.

For Alan, cybersex meant masturbating to erotic pictures on his computer.
Eventually, he was spending so much time in his secret fantasy world that he couldn't work. He wound up in a residential treatment centre of addicts -- in his case, sexual addiction. He now protects himself by cancelling his Internet service.

Alan, 56, is one of the stars of o.com: Cybersex Addiction, a documentary about sexual addiction and the way hundreds of thousands of people are now having sexual relationships online, never actually meeting other people except in the imaginary or once-removed world of computer contact. "I will probably die sitting at this computer," says Calgarian Nicole, 31, an information technology consultant who dresses for her Internet sessions because her computer comes equipped with a camera. "There's just nothing else for me."

Nicole doesn't have much food in her house; she spends most of her life online. "It's like there's no one home any more. It's spooky," she says.
O.com was directed by Melanie Wood, a Vancouver documentary maker who became interested in the subject of the isolating effects of technology through an earlier documentary, A Stranger In Our Home, which told the story of Internet predators. For o.com, she found four Internet sex addicts willing to talk about their habits, and, in Nicole's case, reveal their face to the cameras. It's a provocative story, although, as Wood acknowledged in an interview, not an especially visual concept, which may be why she juices up the tale with scenes of scantily dressed dancers leaning over computer terminals, a bit of metaphorical choreography that only detracts from a fascinating subject.

The documentary is a brief study of both sexual addiction and alienation: it doesn't talk about the people who perform on sex sites -- often very young children or, in some cases, the very old -- but about the people who have become emotionally disabled by watching it. One of the experts is Paulette Thomasson, B.C's only registered clinical counsellor with a certification in sex addiction. Thomasson regards sex addiction as a disease, like alcoholism: a compulsive behaviour that a person has difficulty stopping and that interferes with their life.

Internet sex addiction is just one kind of sex addiction -- in an interview, Thomasson mentioned such other types as paying for sex, in which arousal comes from the exchange of money, and anonymous sex, which is about the excitement of the unknown -- but it is as fast-growing as the Internet itself. The secrecy of computers has taken away the social restraints of sex addiction.

"They would never walk into a pornography store and buy pornography, or pick it up at the local 7-Eleven," Thomasson said by phone from Vancouver. "They would never go to an X-rated video store. However, once the computer came into their homes and the Internet was there in the privacy of their homes, boom. They can do whatever they want, and they don't have to worry about the social implications."

Thomasson said that treatment comes through therapy and by cutting off the sex addicts from their supply of Internet porn. They are urged to get rid of their computers; if they need them for their jobs, they are told to stay away from some sites, or to order a Christian server, which blocks access to porn.

The biggest problem for Internet sex addicts is that they isolate themselves, shutting out their families and friends. "It's really hard on children, especially adolescents," she said. "I had a young woman in the other day with her father who had disclosed he was a sex addict. Her concern -- she's in her 20s -- was, how can she trust her history with her father? Was he sexualizing her? How could she trust him? It shatters their reality."
© The Calgary Herald 2005

[star_munir]

The topic is not started by me. I am not star_anonymous
To star_anonymous : its ok no need to say sorry..

[star_munir]

The topic is not started by me. I am not star_anonymous
To star_anonymous : its ok no need to say sorry..

[st0necol]

Sex and anger manifest in whomsoever,
Has lost all the winnings he has earned.

very touching

and your advice that if one doesnt do bandagi, it can cause major system overload....u're right...i guess i am traveling in the same plane.

well...so it's sinful ? burden on our souls ?

If one tries to go up he/she can't go up because of this habit?? is it so ?

[st0necol]

your previous post before the above one went over my head [:P]

Pornography is haram I completely agree.

What about masturbation and the amount of sins it carries?

[st0necol]

I am waiting for the answer..

[Firukurji]

And those who guard their chastity (i.e. private parts, from illegal sexual acts). Except from their wives or (the captives and slaves) that their right hands possess, - for them, they are free from blame. But whoever seeks beyond that, then those are the transgressors." 23.5-7
And let those who find not the financial means for marriage keep themselves chaste, until Allah enriches them of His bounty." 24.33

Commenting on this verse, they could be varied interpretations. It could fall under the category of those who seek fulfillment of their sexual desires outside the framework of marriage, and as such they are deemed transgressors.

However, it could refer to extra-marital relations and what falls under the category of Zina (adultery). According to this view, masturbation does not fall under the meaning of this verse.

However, my understanding is that it could be perrmissible under the following conditions:

1. if the person is unmarried,

2. if he or she fears that without masturbation he/she will commit Zina, and

3. if the masturbation here is, rather than fulfilling a sexual desire, just to release the sexual tension resulting from stimulation.

However, the law of necessity, which is one of the principles of Shari`ah, should also apply here. For example, if someone is afraid that he would commit a greater sin like Zina or he will be harmed by some psychological disorders, then the ban on masturbation would be relaxed just to remove the hardship, based on the Shari`ah principle that states that “necessity is judged according to the circumstances that warrant it.”

That means going to the extreme in masturbating is not permissible in all cases, for the following two reasons:

1. it would be resorted to not as a case of extreme necessity to release the tension and the pain resulting from sexual arousal, but to fulfill the sexual desire, and

2. it is harmful to one's health, and whatever is physically harmful is not allowed in Shari`ah, according to the consensus of the Muslim scholars.

[kmaherali]

Party for One

Today, May 28, is National Masturbation Day. The holiday (if we may call it that) was so-named in 1995 by a San Francisco-based sex shop after U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders was forced to resign for suggesting that (among other things) masturbation should be included on sex-education curricula. It is expected that billions of men and women will honour the spirit of the day all over the world, though perhaps no more so than on the other 364 days of the year.

Masturbation is a unique form of sex. It was frowned upon in some eras, tolerated in others, and celebrated in none. Even today, the stigma endures. In Nova Scotia, a labour arbitrator just upheld a company’s decision to fire a man for masturbating in a bathroom stall at work. “The employee [was] warned about his behaviour two years earlier,” a news report informs us. However, the union argued that “he had not been properly warned because managers were too embarrassed to directly tell him what the complaints were about and instead spoke in euphemisms about ‘unusual noises.’”

In ancient Greece, masturbation was seen by some as a sort of divine gift. But ancient Judaism frowned on it, as did early Christianity. “The [man’s] seed is not to be vainly ejaculated…because of its divine institution for the propagation of Man,” wrote third-century theologian Titus Flavius Clemens (better known as Clement of Alexandria). And Aquinas, by one interpretation, thought masturbation to be worse than adultery or rape.

Then again, Christianity traditionally has held a gloomy view of all forms of sexuality. A man’s seed contains the whole future person, or so the thinking goes, and the woman’s womb traditionally was viewed only as a sort of garden in which the seed grew to become a baby. On this theory, wasting semen was a miniature form of homicide. It didn’t help that contraception (also a religious no-no) was furthered by masturbation—mutual or otherwise.

Surprisingly, though, the Bible gives no clear condemnation of masturbation. Puritans have seized on “the sin of Onan,” who spilled his seed rather than inseminate Tamar, his elder brother’s widow (Genesis 38: 8-10). But according to modern religious scholars, Onan’s real sin, such as it was, was violating a Jewish law that required a man to provide his brother’s widow with a son who would inherit his dead father’s property and care for his mother in old age. That is, Onan’s crime was that he enjoyed Tamar without embracing his duty.

In the Middle Ages, parents reportedly were wont to turn a blind eye to their sons expelling semen, because it made them less rambunctious. But when societies began to become transformed by the Industrial Revolution, masturbation was swept up in the larger trend toward panic mode. Masturbation was said to block a man’s urinary tract, incite laziness, and spread tuberculosis and gangrene. “Curative” therapies extended to iron chastity belts and even surgical removal of the clitoris or testicles for truly chronic masturbators.

In the late 19th century, an American doctor named John Harvey Kellogg (also the breakfast-cereal visionary) advocated an approach based on shaming. “The most loathsome reptile, rolling in the slush and slime of its stagnant pool, would not demean itself” by masturbating, he declared. (In fact, many animals do it.) The Rev. Sylvester Graham, a Presbyterian Minister, was even more strident, and claimed that losing semen was medically tantamount to blood loss.

Doctors often seemed more confused than their patients. Quacks diagnosed anxious women with “hysteria,” and purported to “cure” them by massaging their vulvas, which apparently caused “paroxysms of relief.” To modern observers, this would be sexual assault. But many doctors apparently found this practice to be tedious and unpleasant—and not even sexual in nature. A woman couldn’t have an actual orgasm, they reasoned, because she didn’t expel semen. Treatment could take more than an hour and cause hand cramps among physicians (which suggests they weren’t particularly good at it.) To spare them this shore, they encouraged the development of gadgets that would allow women to “treat” their “condition” at home.

The first models, on display at the Antique Vibrator Museum in San Francisco, were as big as a suitcase. But they were marketed discreetly. The Vibratile (1899) was reputedly “a cure for…everything!” Other mechanisms promised to “restore the joys of youth.” But there were daunting risks of malfunction.

Insofar as masturbation by men was discussed, it often was stigmatized as a mark of weak character. The 1960s sexual revolution changed that, however. Even some Catholic theologians began to express acceptance. Adolescent masturbation is only “child-talk” in “the [adult] language of sex” and therefore “normal… and good,” said Father Andre Guindon, a Catholic University of Ottawa professor, in his 1976 book, The Sexual Language. For adults, the practice can be of greater concern, he said—but not as bad as an addiction to TV. More recently, Margaret Farley, a Roman Catholic nun, wrote in Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, that “Masturbation…usually does not raise any moral questions at all.” (Both theologians have borne the brunt of Vatican disapproval.)

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Doctors now tell us that masturbation reduces stress, boosts the immune system and lowers the risk of cardiovascular disease. Terrifying myths have been debunked. In a 1970s-era book, The Yoga of Perfect Sight, Indian doctor R.S. Agarwal attacked the then somewhat common belief that masturbation “causes blindness.” Nor is it true that a person’s shoulder will be lower on the side of the hand used to masturbate—a myth that raised dark suspicions about aunts and uncles with spinal curvatures.

To some extent, masturbation even has taken on implicit feminist overtones. In her 1976 Hite Report: A Nationwide Study of Female Sexuality, American sex educator Shere Hite wrote of a hard-working single mother who reported that if she couldn’t masturbate at the end of the day, she’d “go mad.” Hite concluded that only 30 percent of women orgasm during intercourse, so 70 percent would be doomed to frustration if they could not achieve satisfaction alone—a form of despair which could undermine their marriages.

As far as government policy goes, the days of Bill Clinton deplatforming Joycelyn Elders seem like ancient history. In 2009, the British National Health Service office in Sheffield issued a leaflet urging teenagers to eat five portions of fruit and vegetables a day, and reported that “an orgasm a day keeps the doctor away.” Extremadura province in Spain launched a program to encourage “the discovery of self-pleasure” in teenagers aged 14 to 17. In Norway, a government-funded video taught kids how to masturbate, using plastic models of genitals.

In Sonnet 129, Shakespeare wrote of empty lust as “the expense of spirit in a waste of shame”—words that might be taken as a description of autoeroticism. Mark Twain applied a lighter touch. In a speech in 1879, he (dubiously) purported to quote Queen Elizabeth I as describing masturbation as “the bulwark of [my] virginity.” Canadian comedian David Steinberg said he feels guilty about masturbation—but only “because I do it so badly.” In a famous Seinfeld episode, George Costanza becomes an object of ridicule when his mother walks in on him becoming intimate with Glamour magazine. From her hospital bed (she had collapsed in a state of shock), she tells her abashed son: “I don’t understand you. I really don’t. You have nothing better to do at three o’ clock in the afternoon? I go out for a quart of milk, I come home, and find my son treating his body like it was an amusement park.”

Masturbation even has become the subject of philosophy, as with Alan Soble, formerly of the University of New Orleans, who has adapted Rousseau to the effect that masturbation is, in the mind’s eye, “the promiscuous rape of every man, woman, or beast to whom I take a fancy.” Indeed, we are perhaps not too far off from the day when masturbation once more enters the realm of thoughtcrime, because the underlying fantasies (formulated without anyone’s consent) might infringe upon the doctrines of #MeToo.

Not that such prohibitions would be any more effective than the writings of Aquinas at ending the practice. Masturbation is an ancient ritual, going back to the apes. Indeed, this solitary, half-shameful, half-rhapsodic act has rubbed itself into the very fabric of the human condition. It might not be a “cure for everything.” But what day cannot be improved without a visit to the amusement park?

https://quillette.com/2019/05/27/party-for-one/