By Cyril Anderson

 Part Two of Two

Masturbation can also produce or nurture an unnatural level of obsession with and focus on sex through an excessive delving into fantasy.  Sex is a natural thing, and is a great thing between a man and his wife, but it is only a small part of life, and only a small aspect of the relationship between a married couple.  The over-emphasis on fantasy can distort the relative importance of sex in the whole scheme of things.  In this society, where sex and sexuality are so front and centre, fantasy and masturbation are so prominent and accepted that young people growing up here, particularly young men, get the impression that sex is the centre of life and of the marital relationship.  People who have been successfully married for a while eventually realize that this is not true, but the misconception can be a great psychological block distorting people’s thinking about what marriage and life are about.  This misconception about the relative importance of sex in life can become a danger in marriage, as the marriage progresses, and children come and there is much less time available for such intimacies.  Normally, this should not be such a problem, as along with the aging process comes an enlarged sense of perspective and a maturing of priorities.  That is, sex becomes less of an obsession at the same time as the time and energy for sex decreases.  But in a society with an open and distorted obsession with sex, the desires can become distorted, and in married men this can dramatically increase the temptation to adultery.  

As well, this fantasy of masturbation, because it is so completely controlled, and so much simpler than the complexities of dealing with an actual woman, can, in extreme cases, become preferred by such chronic masturbators over the real thing.  The woman pictured by the man as he masturbates exists all in your head. It's not a real, complex, living breathing human woman that he would actually want to learn how to make love to; it's a caricatured abstraction of a woman. It is not a real woman with a mind of her own that moves as an independent being; the woman in his head conveniently does whatever he fantasizes her doing. It teaches him nothing about the process of actual intercourse, and prepares him in no way for it. On the contrary; it programs him into preconceptions that he has to work at to overcome when he actually gets to bed with a real woman. Thinking masturbation will prepare you to be a good lover is like thinking that solving projectile motion problems with air resistance and all the other complications ignored prepares you to work for NASA as a rocket scientist. The whole business is actually in those messy details. Masturbation tends to program you with cripplingly simplistic axioms about sex that impede effective performance. It's a crippling practice. 

This ability to fantasize is in itself a good thing; it is the imagination that enables us to think abstractly and ponder God and the unseen.  But like all good things, when it gets turned aside to the wrong ends, it can destroy us.

The obsession driven by the always-available fantasy outlet of masturbation, can stimulate the interest in sex, particularly in the man, well beyond the usual natural interest of the woman, who already generally has less of a sex drive than men.  This can produce tensions, as men will want sex much more than their wives.  Real women are not like the fantasy women in their husbands minds who are always ready to go at the drop of a hat.  The wives will feel imposed upon, and the men will feel limited and frustrated.  The sex drive, if stoked as masturbation can stoke it, is an almost inexhaustible flame that, contrary to usual thinking, is not put out through masturbation.  Rather, it is like a fire being fed with firewood.

 On the other side of the coin, in terms of women masturbating and women fantasizing, while, as said earlier, there may be some benefit to a woman exploring her body to figure out how it works, there are limits to this.  Women’s arousal is different from men, usually more cerebral and subtle and less visual than men’s.  Women’s fantasizing tends to follow this as well.  A woman who over-indulges in masturbation and sexual fantasizing in general runs the danger of obsessing in a too unrealistic way about romantic, “prince charming” scenarios.  Women are different from men in this regard; there is a reason why the trashy Harlequin Romance novels at the drug store that a man wouldn’t be caught dead reading fly off the bookshelves.  Now while any successfully married man realizes eventually that some amount of such romance is necessary for sustained harmony with their wife over time, it is virtually impossible for a man to sustain such expectations continually.  It is simply not a strong part of his nature, just as it is not a strong part of women’s nature to have a continuous, raw, physical interest in sex.  A successful sexual component of marriage relies on a comfortable balance where both of these natures are satisfied, complementing each other.  In normal, natural circumstances, this is quite possible, with a little work.  It is when the desires have been unnaturally stoked in each far beyond the usual natural state that problems occur. 

 These differences between men and women are not bad; the process in a marriage of learning how to forge a long-lasting workable despite these differences, through communication, sharing and personal development is one of the most challenging, and ultimately satisfying, projects of marriage.  But when men and women over-indulge in fantasy, the inward focus works to polarize these natural differences and actually heighten them, making it more difficult for men and women to learn how to form a harmonious relationship.  For this reason, and for the reasons mentioned above, Muslims are warned to protect themselves against the temptation of masturbation.  This is not to fall into the hyperbole of old wive’s tales that one will go blind or insane from the practice, but rather to warn that what seems initially to be an innocent release of tensions can easily become a problem more trying than the stresses the practice was originally meant to fix. 

                                         Part One             Part Two