Where Does The Myth That Masturbation Leads To Blindness Come From?
Thank you for asking about this myth!
Interestingly, I’m finding that fewer people seem to know about this. In the college courses I teach many of them have never heard this myth. Which I think is a good thing! There’s enough misinformation about there about sex that I already have to deal with. So one more myth that’s disappearing makes my life a little easier.
But to answer your question - The idea that masturbation causes blindness started sometime in the 18th century. Many people credit a Swiss physician named Samuel-Auguste Tissot with starting the myth because of something he published where he claimed that it caused blindness, and a host of other problems.
I’m pretty sure that the myth didn’t actually get started by him. He was just one of the first to publish about it. What we know about history is that ideas can spread without them being written down. Talking about something can be a powerful way of getting out both information and misinformation. It was true back in the 18th century, and it’s still true today.
In the 18th century, the Christian Church in Europe viewed masturbation as a sin. So misinformation about masturbation and how it could cause blindness, moral decay, a severe mental break, or even death was probably being spread to help scare men into not masturbating.
Remember that we didn’t know then what we know now about the human body. There was no real understanding of what semen is made up of, and that the body could replenish it without taxing the system.
Around the same time, Sylvester Graham was trying to stop men from masturbating because he believed that if men masturbated they would lose “vital fluids.” And losing those fluids could cause not only serious health conditions like blindness, but could kill them.
And he promoted a cracker to help curb men’s desires to try and save them from themselves. Yup, that’s how graham crackers got started. Though they were very different then they are today. And Graham had really… interesting… ideas on food. If you have some spare time, feel free to go down that rabbit hole. You can start by searching “A Treatise on Bread and Bread-Making.”
You may have noticed that most of what I’ve said so far has focused on men, because through much of the last few centuries people incorrectly believed that women didn’t really have much of a sex drive. There was also no real acknowledgement of the fact that they also masturbated. Some might argue that since female ejaculation is not as common, it wasn’t seen as a threat to their health the way it was for men.
I would argue that it’s mostly that society just didn’t acknowledge that women were sexual beings. That they had sex drives and masturbated.
But let’s leave history and get back to the myth at hand. Masturbation doesn’t cause blindness. It won’t make hair grow on your palms, or cause insanity, or infertility, or anything else like that.
In fact, it’s just the opposite. Masturbation can be really good for you, if you’re comfortable doing it. It can be a great stress reliever, it can help you feel more relaxed, and can help reduce pain. And that’s just a few things of the good things it can do.
If there’s a fun myth about masturbation that you’ve heard about, please share it in the comments.
Until next time, be safe, and have fun!
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