Masturbation

I know what your thinking, strange title for an article on masturbation! Not as strange as you might think. Most of us sit down each morning and munch on our favorite breakfast cereal without a thought of how those little flakes of bran and corn came into being. Even less of us know that many masturbation myths can be directly linked to the humble breakfast cereal. The two are linked in more ways than you might imagine, read on and find out how... Many of you will be familiar with Graham Crackers but not many with the thinking that lead to it's creation. Sylvester Graham [1794-1851] was a free thinker and reformer in his time. In the 1830's the American diet consisted mainly of red meat and blood. Graham specialized in highlighting the perils of poor eating and masturbation. Until Samual Tissots book: Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Onanism the evils of masturbation had been simply a moral one, Graham took this a step further and made it a health issue. In the 1830s Graham took his show on the road, lecturing an inquiring public about the perils of self pollution, as masturbation was then refereed to. As the first of it's kind it had an amazing impact on the general populace and the man behind it was just as dynamic.

IT seems likely masturbation has always been the most common and universal of human sexual experiences — but only in recent decades have attitudes toward sexuality in general, and masturbation in particular, begun to improve. There never has been a "golden age" of sexual freedom and tolerance, though specific taboos have always varied widely. The frequent condemnation of masturbation apparently stems from a suprisingly simple mandate: there's safety in numbers. For centuries, all forms of sexual pleasure unlikely to result in population increase have routinely been denounced as wrong. In order to understand current attitudes, it helps to examine earlier human cultures. Before history, which is defined by the existence of written records, the evidence proves sketchy. Our closest living primate relatives, the Bonobo chimpanzees, share 98.4% of our DNA. The Bonobos are notable for their lack of sexual inhibition, engaging almost constantly in the full variety of sexual acts humans do, including frequent masturbation. Significantly their social order is amazingly harmonious; the regular sexual satisfaction among them seems to minimize conflict and aggression. Bonobo behavior may indicate how we ourselves could function if our belief system's distorting abstractions and concepts did not exist. Prehistoric petroglyphs and rock paintings from around the world evidently depict male masturbation, though these are entirely matters of interpretation. Most early people seem to have connected human sexuality with abundance in nature. A clay figurine of the 4th millennium Before Current Era [i.e., B.C.], from a temple site called Hagar Qim on the island of Malta, depicts a woman masturbating.