HOW MUCH MASTURBATION IS HARMFUL FOR YOU?

 

BY DR HUGO

When I came across this picture online, I burst into a long bout of hearty (and maybe even raucous) laughter - a reaction I think the writer must have intended to provoke. It did not help any that the notice, in addition to pointing out what the toilet floors were not designed to handle, went further to allude to the prohibitive cost of "professional" removal of semen stains on the floor, and then advised readers on what to do when they got bored. Hilarious!

At first.

Then that got me thinking.

Sometimes, in the course of our fertility consultations, we encounter people - guys and babes alike - who worry that they masturbate too often. Especially among menfolk of all age groups, there seems to be this nagging uncertainty about the health impact of their hands getting all too busy down there all too often - usually when the girls are not looking. By “too often”, some of these men mean they masturbate two to four times a month, others mean getting down and creamy one to two times a day. 

My take is that neither of these frequencies is outside normal limits. As such, these men do not have anything to worry about. Masturbating a few times every day is not exactly harmful, in itself. In fact, if facts are to be believed, then it is instructive that a 2003 study in Australia found that men who ejaculated more than five times a week were a third less likely than their peers to develop prostate cancer. Of course, such a frequency of ejaculation can be attained by sexual intercourse too - but that comes with its own risk of sexually transmitted infections.

So while regularly getting busy with your hands may not be expressly harmful for you, there is something else that could. If your masturbation interferes with your normal life by getting in the way of your schoolwork, your work, your sexual and other relationships, then you are in need of the services of a sex therapist. As conventional sex therapists are not exactly commonplace sights in Nigeria, you may wish to settle for an assessment by a psychologist working in conjunction with a gynaecologist who is a fertility specialist.

In summary, it is not the frequency of your masturbation that could affect you negatively. It is how much your masturbation gets in the way of your normal life that could become a problem. If, as per the notice above, you have to leave school and go home to masturbate, well, that would be you qualifying to be labelled an addict to masturbation. As with an addiction to drugs, an addiction to masturbation feeds on itself to the detriment of the sufferer. But that is what happens when masturbation goes from recreation through preoccupation to obsession.