Self-Pleasure
One of the best ways to figure out how to have safe, consensual, and comfortable fun with other people is to figure out what makes you feel good on your own first. Being curious about your own body and what things you find pleasurable helps you get better at not only communicating these things to potential future partners, but helps you have a more informed understanding of where other people’s preferences and boundaries come from. Check out our factsheet here: Exploring Self-Pleasure and learn more about why self-pleasure can be helpful, and how more thought goes into it than we might assume.
Masturbation is a big part of self-pleasure, especially when it comes to sexual pleasure and stimulation. At Teen Health Source we often get questions about how much is too much, whether it’s right or wrong, or even if it’s normal to not want to masturbate. We go into a bit more detail about how we answer those questions here: Masturbation, and that might help get you thinking about your relationship to masturbation and how that factors into your own idea of self-pleasure.
You may also have had your opinion shaped by others answers to these questions, including information that isn’t totally accurate. So here’s a list of 5 common myths about masturbation, and why we don’t think they’re quite right:
- Masturbation is unhealthy.
Masturbation and exploring self-pleasure on their own are pretty harmless! You won’t go blind, you won’t grow hair on your palms, and it won’t affect the size of your genitals or make anything fall off.
- Masturbation can make you infertile.
Masturbation does not change your chances for fertility. It actually doesn’t have any effect on your sex cells at all (sperm or egg cells), or your body’s ability to create them.
- Only sex addicts and perverts masturbate.
There’s a LOT of stigma surrounding whether masturbation is right or wrong, often stemming from religious belief systems or misinformed personal opinions about what kind of people masturbate. The fact is most people do! Regardless of their religious, cultural, or racial backgrounds. Even folks who don’t experience sexual attraction do it. It’s a totally normal part of being a human.
- Only men and boys do it.
We’re often told that only men and boys masturbate, that only men and boys are horny, or only men and boys think about sex. The fact is that everyone regardless of gender can think about sex, and everyone regardless of gender can masturbate.
- There’s something wrong with you if you don’t masturbate.
While we’re more commonly told that masturbation is wrong and you shouldn’t do it (which as we’ve said isn’t true), we might also be made to feel like there’s something wrong with us if we don’t do it, which also isn’t true! For some folks that’s just not the way they like to experience pleasure, or explore themselves and that’s totally okay too.
