Masturbation has long been tolerated with a wink in the seminaries of the world as a viable and preferable option to pederasty, homosexuality, adulterous affairs with women, or other violations of celibacy. Yet the church, knowing full well the extent to which even its own clergy cannot resist the pleasures of the flesh, continues to torment the souls and break the spirits of men and women alike with punishments to enforce a morality it does not practice.
The "sin against the Holy Ghost" goes back to a false notion of pseudo-Gnostic mechanics. In Gnosis, the spirit of man is forever opposed to the desires of the body. That the function of the universe is in effect the resolution of all things into a single, spiritual essence, therefore the sooner man lets go of things of the body, the better. The Holy Spirit, as the agent of grace, is supposed to lift man past his earthly desires. Therefore allowing the soul to yield to the passion of masturbation puts man outside the grace of the Spirit. Of course this fantastic dogma holds no water when competing with our natural instincts.
Even the Catholic Papacy has conceded that there is a pleasure principle at work within holy matrimony. Therefore they cannot, realistically and without philosophical paradox, claim that pleasure created sexually by marriage is inherently bad. If that's the case, other sexual pleasures can not be inherently bad either.
Can masturbating, then, damn a person to hell? Several issues intrude upon discussion of this question. In Hinduism and Buddhism, the main spiritual desire is to leave forever the pain of existence, the control of sexual pleasures, while endorsed, is not necessarily a reason for damnation.
Hell, like it or not, is more an object of speculation and projection. Human desires and needs are fact. One can, perhaps, postpone desire and need for a speculation, but there is no need for such things. While no orthodox religion specifically endorses the practice of masturbation, whatever Divine Creator gave us our sexuality would want us to use our curiosity and exploration as a natural part of our development.
For women, even more so than for men, the same system made masturbation all the more taboo. Yet the practice was, and is, not rare in convents. Several historical accounts confirm the presence of an active sexual and masturbatory life for women in holy orders.
The bizarre morality of the Victorians did not help all this social and political repression. While men helped themselves to almost unlimited underground pornography that detailed everything from group sex to BDSM (and a vast supply of Irish and Welsh serving women who had no ability, and sometimes no desire, to resist their advances), well-bred women were informed by medical treatises that "no well-bred woman has any sexual urges at all."
However, it was acceptable for males to be comfortable in the distribution and acceptance of such literature, while they played with maids or took surreptitious trips to French whorehouses. Eventually some doctors broke with tradition, and the first vibrators were developed as a cure for the female dysfunction known as "hysteria," (literally, a womb-problem). Doctors would later realize that they were treating simple horniness but few patients complained.
The aftermath of the Victorians gave way to the Progressive era in the United States. Masturbation was once again a victim of the prejudice of the time. For Victorians, masturbation officially indicated a lack of self-control. In the new Progressive era, the same practice suggested the decline of the empire itself.
In the era of Mahan's endorsement of sea power and manifest destiny, masturbation was feared to lead to effeminacy and enervation of the body and spirit. Doctors in the 1900s urged parents to tie their sons' hands to the bed so they did not inadvertently pleasure themselves in their sleep and thus develop a taste for the result.
Failing that, parents had other tricks. Albert Todd patented in 1903 a "penis coil" that wrapped around the penis and encaged the testicles. It was strong enough device that no effort, presumably from within or without, could break it. Furthermore, to add caution to misery, the device also came with a belt of copper and zinc plates that produced an electric current that supposedly reduced masturbatory urges. To protect the testicles from being burned by the electrical current, Todd recommended covering them with a chamois.
It is difficult to say at what point these efforts crossed the line from misguided social activism and moved all to latent, or even blatant, sado-masochism. Parents' tying their children up is bad enough but placing them in torture devices that could burn them gives lie to the morality of the entire enterprise.
Todd later improved, as all good inventors do, on his original design. His next effort replaced the cage with a solid steel tube that, when filled by a swollen penis, gave an electrical shock and sounded an alarm.
Nor were devices such as these the only sexual deterrents available. In 1906, Raphael Sohn patented a portable penis sheath that locked. It could be worn under clothing, so it offered 24-hour a day protection against voluntary and involuntary temptation. Ellen Perkins in 1908 patented, in effect, armored underwear, that allowed the passing of urine but required the help of an attendant to permit the wearer to defecate. Other devices from the same period guarded against the possibility of nocturnal emissions, also known as wet dreams. Some pricked the wearer in the case of nocturnal enlargement, some woke the wearer (and others) by rigging the penis to an alarm, and some kept the penis cool. All had the effect of strictly repressing and even criminalizing a perfectly natural process.
Male circumcision, up to that point uncommon except among some religious groups (Jews, in particular), was also seen as a prophylactic for masturbation. Originally unknown in the states outside the Jewish community, the practice was first endorsed as a cure for everything from paralysis to cancer. In due course, such claims were disproved as simple medical hoaxes, but the morality industry, desperate to protect men against the allegedly enfeebling practice of masturbation, seized upon circumcision as the next step to "cure" people of that desire.
The logic, if it can be called that, was essentially that the presence of the foreskin invariably required some manipulation of the penis, if only for hygienic reasons. This manipulation might in turn tempt some men to continue manipulating themselves until orgasm. By removing the foreskin, people hypothesized, they could eliminate the desire of young men to touch themselves completely, since the necessary opportunities of cleaning the penis head would be obviated.
Moreover, some doctors recommended that the circumcision be carried out while a boy was awake and without even the courtesy of a local anesthetic, in order to guarantee that along with diminished sensitivity, he would carry the memory of the painful surgical procedure with him and lose interest in sex. That it seemed not to work was not, at the moment, the point. The more serious point is that people were willing to perform such procedures and no one thought to stop them. Forever, when governments and officials attempt to advise people about their own pleasures or attempt to regulate or repress personal sexual activity, they should be routinely ignored, if not defied out rightly.
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