The Dirty Secret and the Double Standard: Male Masturbation, Homosexual Stigma, and the Long History of Shame

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The Dirty Secret and the Double Standard

Male Masturbation, Homosexual Stigma, and the Long History of Shame

How centuries of moral panic about male self-pleasure became a weapon against gay men — and what the research actually says.

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The history of male masturbation in Western culture is a history of spectacular and sustained overreaction. It is a history of physicians inventing diseases that did not exist, of religious authorities condemning a practice engaged in by virtually every man alive, of mechanical devices patented and marketed to prevent something that cannot be prevented, and of an extraordinary amount of institutional energy directed at the single proposition that a man touching himself was destroying himself and possibly civilization along with him.

It is also, less obviously but just as significantly, a history of how the stigma around male self-pleasure became entangled with the stigma around homosexuality — how the same moral and medical framework that classified masturbation as deviant also classified same-sex desire as deviant, and how those two classifications reinforced each other across centuries in ways that are still producing measurable effects on the mental and sexual health of gay and bisexual men today. (Foucault, 1978)

The research on all of this is extensive, clear, and almost entirely ignored by the cultural conversations that continue to shape how men understand their own sexuality.

This article is an attempt to correct that.

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The Origins of the Panic: Onanism and Its Consequences

The modern Western panic about male masturbation has a fairly precise origin point. In 1716 an anonymous pamphlet titled Onania, or the Heinous Sin of Self-Pollution was published in London, drawing on the biblical story of Onan (who was actually punished for refusing to father a child with his dead brother’s wife, not for masturbating, but this inconvenient textual detail was ignored) to argue that masturbation was a sin with specific and terrible physical consequences. (Laqueur, 2003)

The pamphlet was a commercial success. Forty-five years later, the Swiss physician Samuel-Auguste Tissot published L’Onanisme, a medical treatise that gave the religious panic scientific credentials by cataloguing the supposed physical effects of masturbation: weakness, nerve damage, blindness, epilepsy, mental derangement, and death. (Tissot, 1760/Wellcome Collection)

Tissot’s work was enormously influential. By the nineteenth century, as the Wellcome Collection documents, the anti-masturbation movement primarily focused on men, and the Victorian medical establishment had expanded his catalogue of horrors into a comprehensive theory of male sexual pathology. (Wellcome Collection, 2018)

Victorian physicians were explicit that the danger of masturbation lay in the waste of seminal fluid. The body’s vital energy was believed to be concentrated in semen, and its loss through any means other than reproductive intercourse was considered medically catastrophic. As consulting surgeon R. J. Brodie wrote in 1845, masturbation was a perverted inclination that “destroys the germ of manhood.” (Matthews, 2016)

This framework — male sexuality as a finite resource to be conserved, with masturbation representing a catastrophic and self-inflicted depletion — was not merely medical theory. It was a moral architecture that classified male self-pleasure as weakness, deviance, and a failure of masculine self-control. And it had a direct line of descent into the framework that classified homosexuality in exactly the same terms.

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The Connection: How Masturbation Stigma Became Anti-Gay Weaponry

The link between anti-masturbation rhetoric and anti-homosexual rhetoric in the Victorian era was not accidental. Both drew on the same underlying framework: the idea that male sexuality properly expressed was reproductive, heterosexual, disciplined, and directed outward toward a female partner. Any deviation from this model — masturbation, same-sex desire, excessive sexual appetite of any kind — was classified as a deviation from healthy masculinity. (Foucault, 1978)

Victorian and Edwardian physicians explicitly listed masturbation and homosexuality as related conditions, often suggesting that masturbation in youth led to homosexual behavior in adulthood. The 1890s anti-masturbation movement cited prevention of homosexuality alongside prevention of blindness and insanity as among the benefits of controlling male self-pleasure. (Darby, CIRP; Wellcome Collection)

The same medical apparatus that produced anti-masturbation devices — a genuinely extraordinary range of mechanical contraptions designed to prevent arousal and penile stimulation — also produced the first formal classifications of homosexuality as a psychiatric disorder. These were not parallel developments. They were expressions of the same underlying project: the classification, surveillance, and attempted correction of male sexuality that did not conform to the reproductive heterosexual model. (Foucault, 1978; Laqueur, 2003)

The result was a double stigma that gay and bisexual men inherited and that has never been fully dismantled. The stigma against masturbation told men that solo sexual pleasure was deviant and shameful. The stigma against homosexuality told gay men that their desire itself was deviant and shameful. For gay men, masturbation was not just a private practice carrying private shame — it was a practice already associated, by the very framework that condemned it, with the sexual orientation they were also being told to be ashamed of.

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What the Research Actually Shows

Male Masturbation Is Normal, Common, and Healthy

The factual record on male masturbation is unambiguous. It is among the most common sexual behaviors across all demographics, all age groups, and all sexual orientations. Data from the British National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles found that among men, the prevalence of those who had never masturbated was already low at 5% in 2001-02 and did not significantly change over subsequent survey rounds. (Trends in Masturbation Prevalence, 2024)

The health benefits of regular masturbation in men include stress reduction, improved sleep, prostate health, and sexual function. Research consistently shows masturbation frequency is associated with positive rather than negative health outcomes across most measures. (Hevesi et al., 2023)

Gay and Bisexual Men Masturbate More — and Have Better Attitudes About It

One of the most consistent findings in the research literature is that gay and bisexual men report higher frequencies of masturbation than heterosexual men and hold less negative attitudes toward the practice. (Sánchez-Pérez et al., 2025; de Jong & Adams, 2024)

Research suggests that gay people, compared to heterosexual people, are expected to start masturbating earlier, report higher frequency of masturbation, and present less negative attitudes toward masturbation. The likely explanation is structural: sexual scripts in gay relationships are less constrained by the prerogative of vaginal penetrative sex, making gay adults better attuned to a variety of activities that bring pleasure. (Sierra et al., 2023)

This is a genuine and underappreciated finding. The stigma that the Victorian framework attached to masturbation has persisted most strongly in heterosexual men — who are more likely to experience guilt and shame around solo sexual practice than gay or bisexual men. The irony is significant: a stigma that was explicitly directed at homosexual desire has produced less lasting damage to gay men’s relationship with self-pleasure than to heterosexual men’s. (de Jong & Adams, 2024)

Religiosity Remains the Strongest Predictor of Negative Attitudes

Current research finds that religiosity is positively related to avoidance motives for masturbation, which are also associated with negative attitudes toward masturbation. (de Jong & Adams, 2024)

This is the most direct surviving line from the Victorian framework to the present day. The religious argument against masturbation — that it is sinful, that it represents a failure of self-discipline, that it is associated with deviance — remains the strongest driver of negative attitudes toward male self-pleasure in contemporary research. And the religious framework has historically been most hostile to masturbation and homosexuality simultaneously, treating them as related expressions of the same moral failure.

For gay and bisexual men raised in religious households or communities, the intersection of these two stigmas creates a specific and documented harm to sexual self-concept and overall wellbeing. (Herbenick et al., 2023)

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The Modern Manifestations: NoFap and the Persistence of Panic

The Victorian anti-masturbation panic did not simply end when the medical profession stopped manufacturing anti-masturbation devices. It mutated. The contemporary NoFap movement — a loosely organized online community centered on abstinence from masturbation and pornography — recapitulates the Victorian framework in twenty-first century language, substituting neuroscience metaphors for vital fluid theory while making essentially identical claims: that masturbation depletes male vitality, impairs sexual function, and reduces a man to something less than his potential.

What is notable about the NoFap movement from a research perspective is the relationship between its membership and attitudes toward homosexuality. Multiple analyses of NoFap community discourse have found significant overlap between anti-masturbation rhetoric and anti-LGBTQ rhetoric, with some community members explicitly framing homosexual desire as a consequence of pornography use and masturbation — a digital update of the Victorian physician who warned that adolescent masturbation caused homosexuality in adulthood.

The research does not support any of these claims. There is no evidence that masturbation impairs heterosexual function in men who masturbate at normal frequencies. There is no evidence that masturbation causes or influences sexual orientation. And the mental health literature consistently shows that sexual shame — including shame around masturbation — is associated with poorer sexual function, not better. (Hevesi et al., 2023; Herbenick et al., 2023)

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The Specific Harm to Gay and Bisexual Men

For gay and bisexual men, the double stigma has specific and measurable health consequences. Research on sexual stigma among gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men consistently finds that internalized stigma — the absorption of cultural shame about one’s sexuality — is associated with increased rates of depression, anxiety, substance use, and sexual risk behavior. (PMC, Mpox Stigma Review, 2025)

The mechanism is not complicated. When a man is told that both his desire and the way he satisfies that desire are shameful, deviant, and pathological, and when those messages arrive simultaneously from medical, religious, and cultural sources across his formative years, the result is not a more sexually disciplined man. The result is a man whose relationship with his own sexuality is damaged in ways that produce exactly the outcomes the shame was ostensibly designed to prevent.

Healthcare represents a particular failure point. Research on mitigating sexual stigma in healthcare settings finds that gay and bisexual men frequently avoid or delay seeking sexual health care due to anticipated judgment from providers. The internalized shame about their sexuality — including the shame that originated in anti-masturbation and anti-homosexuality rhetoric — makes them less likely to discuss their sexual health openly with physicians, less likely to access testing and prevention services, and less likely to disclose their full sexual history. (NIH Clinical Trial, 2024)

This is a public health problem, not merely an individual one. The stigma costs lives.

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What Kinsey Actually Found

Alfred Kinsey’s 1948 publication Sexual Behavior in the Human Male was one of the first major scientific challenges to the anti-masturbation and anti-homosexuality frameworks that had dominated Western culture for two centuries. Kinsey found that masturbation was essentially universal in men across all demographics, that same-sex experience was far more common than official cultural narratives acknowledged, and that sexual behavior existed on a spectrum rather than in the binary categories of normal and deviant that the Victorian framework had imposed. (Kinsey et al., 1948)

The response was significant controversy. The findings themselves were not seriously challenged — the methodology was rigorous and the data were genuine. What was challenged was the implication: that the framework of sexual shame and pathologization that had been applied to masturbation and homosexuality for over two centuries was built on a foundation of factual error.

Kinsey was right. The framework was built on factual error. The long work of dismantling it — in medicine, in law, in culture, and in the internal lives of the men who absorbed its messages before anyone told them those messages were false — has been ongoing for seventy-five years and is not finished.

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The Takeaway

Male masturbation is normal. It is healthy. The research is unambiguous on both points and has been for decades. The stigma that attached to it across the Victorian era and that persists in attenuated form in contemporary culture is not based on any empirical finding about male sexuality. It is based on a framework of moral and medical error that has since been thoroughly refuted.

The specific targeting of homosexual men within that framework — the explicit claim that masturbation led to homosexuality, that both represented failures of masculine self-discipline, that both were medical conditions requiring correction — caused damage that is still visible in the mental health and healthcare-seeking behavior of gay and bisexual men today.

Gay and bisexual men, as the research shows, have in many respects built healthier relationships with self-pleasure than heterosexual men — precisely because their sexuality required them to step outside the heterosexual script entirely, and stepping outside the script created space to engage with what their bodies actually wanted rather than what the script required.

That is not a small thing. It is evidence that the liberation from shame — difficult, incomplete, and ongoing as it always is — produces better outcomes than the shame ever did.

The shame was always the problem. It was never the solution.

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Sources

Darby, R. (n.d.). The Masturbation Taboo and the Rise of Routine Male Circumcision: A Review of the Historiography. CIRP.org.

de Jong, D.C. & Adams, H.N. (2024). Religiosity, Avoidance Motives, and Negative Attitudes Toward Masturbation. Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction. Pantheon Books.

Herbenick, D., et al. (2023). Masturbation Prevalence, Frequency, Reasons, and Associations with Partnered Sex in the Midst of the COVID-19 Pandemic. Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Hevesi, K., Tamas, S., & Rowland, D.L. (2023). Why Men Masturbate: Reasons and Correlates in Men with and without Sexual Dysfunction. Journal of Sex & Marital Therapy, 49(7), 783–797.

Kinsey, A.C., Pomeroy, W.B., & Martin, C.E. (1948). Sexual Behavior in the Human Male. W.B. Saunders.

Laqueur, T.W. (2003). Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation. Zone Books.

Matthews, M. (2016). The Solitary Vice: Victorian Views on Masturbation. MimiMatthews.com.

NIH. (2024). Mitigating Sexual Stigma Within Healthcare Interactions to Improve Engagement of MSM in HIV Prevention. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04779736.

PMC. (2025). Mpox-Related Stigma Among Gay, Bisexual, and Other Men Who Have Sex with Men: A Narrative Review. PMC12607514.

Sánchez-Pérez, et al. (2025). Masturbation Parameters: Their Relation to Sexual Arousal in Young People Who Engage in Same-Sex Relationships. PMC11962043.

Sierra, J.C., et al. (2023). Parameters of Masturbation: Effects of Gender and Sexual Orientation. Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Trends in Masturbation Prevalence and Associated Factors: Findings from the British National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles. (2024). International Journal of Sexual Health.

Tissot, S.A. (1760). L’Onanisme. [Original publication; historical reference via Wellcome Collection.]

Wellcome Collection. (2018). The Metamorphosis of Masturbation. WellcomeCollection.org.

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