Does masterbation cause blindness
Masturbating Causing Blindness: Debunking the Myth
No, masturbating doesn’t cause blindness. Let’s debunk this myth and highlight some other common misconceptions about masturbation.
Masturbation is often a natural part of a healthy sex life for single people and couples alike. But there are lots of masturbation myths out there that might try to convince you that masturbation is unhealthy or dangerous.
For decades — and maybe longer — these misconceptions and urban legends have perpetuated stigma, shame, and fear around a common practice of self-pleasure.
For example, some people might believe that masturbating “too often” can negatively affect the eyes. But can you actually experience vision loss or blindness from masturbating?
Losing your vision or going blind isn’t a common side effect of masturbation.
“This unfortunate myth about masturbation — causing blindness, acne, or other health hazards — is quite untrue,” says certified sex therapist and resident sexologist for Adam & Eve Jenni Skyler, PhD, LMFT. She explains that this is an “old myth made to control the masses with a fear that sexual arousal would cause out-of-control behaviors and the collapse of society.”
Masturbation can cause damage to the eyes in very extreme cases, such as an instance reported in this 2014 study.
“On a rare occasion, vigorous activity of any kind — including masturbation — can increase blood flow and heart rate and pop a blood vessel (to include in the eye),” Skyler explains. However, eye injury from masturbation is extremely rare and requires excessive force.
So, if you’re regularly masturbating with moderate force and vigor, it’s unlikely that your self-pleasure could lead to a popped blood vessel or loss of eyesight.
Going blind from masturbating is just one of many masturbation misconceptions. Some other common myths surrounding masturbation include:
- masturbation is bad for you
- masturbation causes health hazards
- masturbation should never be done with a partner
- masturbating with a vibrator will damage your genitals
- masturbation will ruin your marriage
- masturbation is considered a form of cheating
- there are no health benefits to masturbation
Where do these false beliefs come from? According to Skyler, they’re typically perpetrated by:
- older media messages about sex and sexuality
- religious messages that claim masturbation is dangerous
- cultural messages or family beliefs that stigmatize self-pleasure and sexual expression in general
- ineffective or rigid sex education programs that promote sex negativity
Despite these claims that masturbation is unhealthy or harmful, the truth is that the side effects of masturbation are generally positive.
Masturbation and self-pleasure can offer a rich opportunity to build an intimate relationship with yourself and your body, Skyler says.
With masturbation, you can explore and experiment with:
- your erogenous zones
- desire and arousal
- how your orgasms work
- your imagination and fantasies
Skyler argues that masturbation may be essential to sexual health and wellness. “If we don’t know about our own pleasure spots, how are we going to be able to tell a partner where to find them?”
Self-pleasure can also be great for your overall sexual health. You can experience the benefits of sex with a minimal chance of contracting a sexually transmitted infection (STI) or becoming pregnant.
“If a person masturbates multiple times a day, it can make the body feel fatigued and tired,” she adds. “[But] the most common side effect of masturbation is a deep sense of relaxation and rejuvenation.”
Masturbating is perfectly healthy and natural.
Self-pleasure won’t cause you to go blind — unless you do it so intensely, you pop a blood vessel in your eye, which is extremely rare and unlikely.
But if you were taught growing up that masturbation is wrong or dangerous, you might experience feelings of guilt and shame when you masturbate, Skyler says.
In rare cases, you could also experience self-pleasure patterns that are difficult to control, such as the urge to masturbate at work or in public places.
When you’re conditioned to see masturbation as unhealthy, your body may “shut down” in response to self-pleasure, as well as desire and arousal, Skyler adds.
If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone.
Skyler recommends permitting yourself to craft a new narrative embracing masturbation as healthy, enjoyable, important, and welcome.
Seeking support from a sex therapist or mental health professional can also help you unlearn sex-negative messages — including these myths — and reframe your beliefs around pleasure.
“Don’t forget: Self-pleasure is our birthright,” adds Skyler. Once you examine these unhelpful beliefs, you can start to feel good and enjoy all of the wonderful benefits that masturbation offers.
Masturbation Causes Blindness - Masturbusting Myths with LELO
“Don’t touch that, you’ll go blind.” We’ve all heard it. But is there any truth in the idea that there’s a direct connection between your sight and your sexual senses? I mean, it’s been around so long that it seems to have acquired a truth all its own. It’s almost superstitious now.
In fact, it’s such a pervasive rumor that we at LELO can all attest to it having at least some effect on us in our youth, and that’s not fair. As part of Masturbation Month, we’re challenging some of the taboos and misconceptions about masturbation by tackling them head on. Today, we’re asking the question:
DOES MASTURBATION MAKE YOU GO BLIND?
No, there is absolutely no direct connection between vision and masturbation.
There are occasional urban legends about a friend of a friend who blew some blood vessels in their eye from orgasming ‘too hard,’ but there’s not much in the way of medical documentation to prove those kinds of rumors.
Disproving this myth requires a simple equation. What percentage of people masturbate? If you answered ‘90%, and 10% of people are liars,’ then you’re probably close. And now, many people go blind suddenly and inexplicably? About 0.2% of the population (based on a global average of 0.8% of blindness in the general population, with 21% of those cases having no definitive medical cause).
See? The math doesn’t quite add up, does it? And that figure even takes into account the general depreciation of vision in old age. If the myth were true, we’d all have service animals.
SO WHERE DID IT COME FROM?
This myth was brought to us directly from the city of Lausanne, Switzerland. In 1760, the Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot released l’Onanisme, a treatise on the ‘diseases caused by masturbation’.
In it, he claimed (amongst much, MUCH other batshit craziness) that zinc is vital for the processing of vision, and much zinc is lost through orgasm. Therefore, masturbation saps us of the ‘essential oils and vitamins’ required for sight.
This was the basis of much of his anti-masturbatory work, summarised in snappy soundbites like this: “How can one be otherwise than weak, when the strength of life is constantly discharged? It is the semen alone which renders a man strong.”
Unfortunately, this kind of pseudoscience has some appeal even today, and Tissot’s issuings, so to speak, took hold and propagated. For 200 years and more, we’ve believed masturbation will exhaust our oils.
Tissot’s extreme Calvinist Protestant faith had no influence on his findings, I’m sure. Especially not when he also claimed: “[sexual intercourse] with a beautiful female exhausts, less than with an ugly one.” Thanks Switzerland. We call, how you Americans say, bullsheet.
https://youtu.be/aRO2RZVi59E
Celebrate Masturbation Month in style.
Read about other masturbation myths:
Masturbation Myths #1: Hairy Palms
Masturbation Myths #3: Decreased Sensitivity
Masturbation Myths #4: Alopecia
So what about you? What’s the craziest masturbation myth you’ve ever heard? Leave it in the comments…
Masturbation - is it really harmful?
From the history of masturbation, you already know that the dangers of self-satisfaction were discussed even before our era. But it was the Puritans who shouted the loudest about him in the 18th century in England. They distributed the anonymous pamphlet Onania, which said that masturbation entailed impotence, gonorrhea, and epilepsy. Fear has big eyes, so men not only lowered their hands. They believed that it was better to sleep with your wife than to have fun with your right hand if there was a risk of becoming impotent or being left without a penis at all. nine0003
The position of the Puritans became even more popular after the publication in 1760 of Samuel Tissot's Onanism.
Tissot was a Vatican advisor and the first physician to actively insist that masturbation was the cause of many diseases.
For example, the German philosopher and noble moralist Immanuel Kant, who lived just in the 18th century, believed that masturbation is a sin more terrible than suicide. Suicide requires courage from a person, and self-satisfaction is a voluntary rejection of one's personality for the sake of an animal need. nine0003
After he published Metaphysics of Morals in 1797, in which he wrote that masturbation was a pure evil, some parents literally went crazy. For boys, trousers were sewn in which they could not touch their penis through their pocket. And the girls were forbidden to ride a bicycle so that, God forbid, they would not enjoy it. School desks were designed in such a way that students could not cross their legs during class or use their hands under the table.
In the 18th century, the “Yugum penis” was also invented - it is also a ring of pollution.
This infernal device controlled erections. The ring squeezed the male member and did not allow him to increase in size. In general, the guys themselves were against erections. Because at the edges of the ring, spikes were waiting for their penis.
By the middle of the 19th century, everyone finally believed that masturbation was life-threatening. Adults recognized adolescents who satisfied themselves as weak-minded. Parents gradually became furious and agreed to burn their daughters' clitoris with a red-hot iron, if only their lives would not go downhill. Boys could be castrated or given electric shocks to accurately discourage the desire to open their arms. nine0003
Meanwhile, there was still no medical evidence that masturbation causes gonorrhea, blindness, impotence and dementia. Religious fanatics and philosophers took all these arguments out of thin air in order to simply intimidate the masses.
It was not until 1897 that the English physician Henry Havelock Ellis published his major work, An Inquiry into the Psychology of Sexual Relations, in which he tried to prove that Tissot was wrong.
Ellis studied how many famous people lived in the 18th century and did some research on masturbation. He concluded: "Moderate masturbation does not cause any significant adverse health effects in healthy individuals of good origin." Ellis was the first physician to divide self-satisfaction into moderate and excessive. nine0003
His work was continued by the Austrian psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who wrote an essay "On Specific Types of Masturbation". At the beginning of the 20th century, he did a lot to change people's attitudes towards sex and pleasure. Reich insisted on allowing abortion and divorce. Advocated for sex education and hygiene education. He explained that it makes no sense to simply put in prison criminals who have committed a crime on sexual grounds.
By the middle of the 20th century, most people in Europe no longer believed that masturbation was a direct road to madness and death. And someone has already begun to talk about the fact that satisfying oneself is generally a useful thing.
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5 myths about masturbation that you shouldn't believe
There are so many misconceptions about masturbation that if you put them all together in one book, you'll get a good collection of essays. Many myths were invented back in the Middle Ages, but are still used in disputes about the benefits and harms of self-satisfaction. Today we will talk about such myths. Some of them are funny, while others make you wonder what kind of people you live with on the same planet. Let's start with the most famous myth. nine0003
1. Hairy palms and poor eyesight
This myth dates back to 19th century Victorian Britain. Against the backdrop of sexual liberation, which frightened the conservatives of those times, scientists were given the task of denigrating masturbation, which they did. There was a rumor that self-satisfaction worsens vision and even causes blindness, hair begins to grow on the palms, a nervous tic appears, and in general this is a mental illness. Yes, yes, a little over a hundred years ago, because you winced at the memory of a glimpse of breasts seen on the street, your parents could well have taken you to a mental hospital for “rehab”.
Naturally, these myths have nothing to do with reality - just "scientists" took several special cases from practice like atavisms (increased hairiness), diseases unrelated to masturbation (diabetes, which causes blindness) and mental disorders (which at that time it was common, because life was much harder then, so people’s roofs were moving out) and they made a horror story out of them, corresponding to the trends of that time. nine0003
2. Latent homosexuality
Separate, especially gifted individuals declared (and speak about it even in our time) that masturbation is a latent homosexuality. They explain their theory by the fact that self-satisfaction is a hidden desire to satisfy a person with the same orientation. Why, then, not go further and not recognize holding a penis in your hand while urinating as a desire to take the helm of your friend? By the way, some animals are also engaged in self-satisfaction. So monkeys are gay too? A crazy idea that is similar in adequacy to the previous one, but scientists were at least paid for that one, and this one is being promoted to the masses by the same people who believe in reptilians, the shadow government of Masons and other “reliable” theories.
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3. Early and depraved sex life
“In general, this is only for bad boys. My son doesn’t do this, I forbid him!” We think you have come across such topics on the Internet. Firstly, almost everyone masturbates, and this is confirmed by statistics. Satisfies up to 90% of guys and up to 70% of girls. The rest do not do this, either because of physical and psychological reasons, for example, because of asexuality, or because of the religious way of life. Secondly, the assertion that masturbation leads to debauchery is complete nonsense. Self-satisfaction sometimes even prevents the onset of early sexual activity, due to the fact that sexual energy splashes out. nine0003
4. Impotence and infertility
Another favorite myth about harm from self-satisfaction. No, it will not worsen potency - on the contrary, it maintains it at the proper level. Of course, we are talking about reasonable limits, since masturbation several times a day can cause psychological addiction to self-satisfaction and, as a result, leads to problems in bed.
If there is no sex and onanism, then stagnant processes appear that can negatively affect men's health, including making you infertile. Regular masturbation reduces the risk of congestion. Experts from Bathmate shared information that reasonable self-satisfaction can help maintain the original size of the penis and men's health during prolonged absence of sexual intercourse. During masturbation, the penis is pumped with blood, stimulates the production of the hormone testosterone, the renewal of seminal fluid and the secretion of the prostate gland. nine0003
5. Member will not grow
How to put pressure on a man and make him quit any activity? Tell him that because of this he will not stand or his penis will decrease. Firstly, the penis grows up to 18-20 years, after which its size no longer changes, and it simply cannot decrease. Secondly, masturbation does not affect penis growth during adolescence. Other factors are responsible for this, such as genes, hormones, proper nutrition, and so on, but not the desire to satisfy sexual appetite.
