Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [99]
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Question 2: Is it helpful?
This is a very difficult and complex question. If a person is masturbating alone, without the knowledge of his or her spouse and includes pornography or lustful thoughts about anyone other than a spouse, then it is sinful. Since sex is given for such purposes as oneness,a intimate knowledge,b and comfort,c having sex with yourself seems to miss some of the significant biblical reasons for sexual intimacy, though that does not make it inherently sinful. At the very least, frequent solo masturbation is not ideal within a marriage.
According to a biophysicist who has studied the effects of sexual stimulation on the brain, “masturbation is playing with neurochemical fire. It affects one emotionally and neurologically. . . . You will be bound to something, because that is what it does neurologically—it associates the orgasm with something. The question to be asked is ‘What is it binding you to?’”23 We can be bound to anything through repeated masturbation. In fact, Struthers explained that if a man had a baseball cap sitting on top of his computer and daily watched porn on his computer, after a month the man would have a physiological response of sexual arousal to a baseball cap. This is how fetishes end up as a requirement for some men to achieve sexual satisfaction.
Another common practice is masturbating oneself in the presence of and with the approval of a spouse, and it can be beneficial under a number of circumstances. Some spouses are very visual and enjoy seeing their spouse's do this before finishing their time together with sexual intercourse.
And there are parts of the body (for example, the wife’s clitoris) that are not engaged through normal intercourse, so for maximum pleasure to be achieved, it is helpful for the spouse to stimulate that part during intercourse. And we all learn by seeing, so an extra benefit is that by watching, each spouse can learn what pleases the other.
At times when a couple cannot be together because of such things as distance, sickness, injury, or the six or seven weeks of abstention a woman’s body requires after the birth of a child, masturbation can be an acceptable and helpful form of relief until normal sexual relations can be resumed.
One question asked by the soldiers in our church is whether or not each spouse can masturbate while they are apart using images of their spouse's in their mind, in a photo, or even through seeing each other live through the Internet. The answer is yes, providing no one else is involved in any way, including viewing.
In watching a spouse masturbate, one can learn to do the same. For example, masturbating a husband is fairly easy for a wife to learn, as his genitalia are external. But the wife’s genitalia are internal and more difficult to learn, so if the wife is willing to masturbate herself to orgasm while the husband watches, he can learn to do the same for her.
A third type of masturbation is masturbating one’s spouse, which is often also called manual stimulation, and it can be a very enjoyable part of foreplay.
In seasons where normal intercourse is not possible, such as after the birth of a child, the lending of a helping hand to one’s spouse can be greatly appreciated.
A woman’s body most commonly achieves orgasm through the stimulation of her clitoris, which is not engaged during normal intercourse but can be through the hand of her husband.
Question 3: Is it enslaving?
There are a number of circumstances under which masturbation is not beneficial. If it is done out of laziness, then