A few weeks back, I wrote the following for Rachel Held Evans’ symposium on whether masturbation is permissible for Christians:
If our ethic is to be Christian, then it must be qualified by the cross and resurrection of Jesus. That is to say, the pattern for our lives and actions must be shaped by a love that treats pleasure as the (sometimes delayed) fruit of our sacrificial self-giving for others, rather than a good without qualification.
If we disconnect the experience of sexual pleasure from the moment of giving ourselves for another, to another in love, we fundamentally distort the meaning of the human body in its sexual dimension. In the auto-eroticism of masturbation, we pursue a particular sort of satisfaction or a particular experience of pleasure. But it is through the mutual self-giving in love that our humanity is established (whether in sex or beyond), rather than the abstract experience of pleasure or the fulfillment of a craving or felt need. However enjoyable it might be, masturbation fails to fulfill this form of human sexuality, and as such is corrosive to the integrity of our persons and our intimacy of the Spirit.
That answer depends upon a number of prior commitments that, let’s face it, just seem weird to most people these days. So let’s unpack the question with help from an objector, Danny Gulch. In a comment he raised three lines of reasoning against my analysis that I take up below.
Masturbation and self-sacrifice
Gulch suggests that masturbation can be a form of sacrifice, as in a situation when a husband desires sex and his wife doesn’t. In such a scenario, the man lays down his desire for his wife and the wife sacrifices, in Gulch’s words, “her desire to be the entirety of the husband’s sexual satisfaction.” This sort of mutual self-sacrifice isn’t a total sacrifice—both the husband and wife make small compromise and everyone stays happy.
If my position were simply that the goods of sex were constituted by self-sacrifice alone, then I could see how a view like Gulch’s might be plausible . But the sacrifice and self-giving for another's good go together. The moment of sexual desire is not a desire for pleasure per se, but rather a moment of desire for another as other, for the union and consummation with a person made in the image of God. The formal structure of the masturbatory act seems to undermine the unitive dimension of this love, which is why I think it is wrong.
But notice what Gulch wants the wife to give up, namely that she is the “entirety of the husband’s sexual satisfaction.” It’s not clear to me that she should, given that the only other options in this world for such satisfaction are himself—which destroys the externally directed nature of erotic love completely—or some person who is outside the marital bond, which doesn’t square at all with Jesus’s teachings on lust.
Asceticism and self-sacrifice
Gulch puts his second worry this way: “A Christian ethic being tied to self-sacrifice quickly leads us to assume that the greater the sacrifice the better, or to be good at all it must require complete sacrifice.” Gulch suggests that “ascetism earns no bonus points,” which is absolutely true.
Yet as he notes, this point is also open to the rejoinder that “sex is relational.” He suggests that it’s tacit in my description, when it’s actually pretty explicit: here too his argument only works if we cut off the “for others” that I added twice in pointing toward a sacrificial self-giving.
It is true that encorporating the askesis of self-denial and self-sacrifice into the structure of marital love might lead to abuses of a more extreme variety. Yet it is also true that not permitting them may lead to abuses, too. The possibility of abuse isn’t itself an argument—it’s simply a fact that prudentially minded people have to consider.
Sex and our Desire for God
Finally, Gulch restates Anna Broadway’s statement (which accords well with my own) that the desire for sex is fundamentally a desire for God, and that as such both marriage and masturbation are “imperfect substitutes for being united with God,” such that neither is immoral.
I won’t speak for Anna, but I will note that Gulch’s restatement seems to me to be more of a reinterpretation. Anna never equates the desire for sex with a desire for God. Instead, she suggests that the union of man and wife is an image of the unity of the persons of the Trinity. There is a fundamentally creaturely dimension to this imaging—it is a desire for another person that results in a particular picture being given to the world.
That’s a very different claim than simply equating sexual eros with a desire for union with the Almighty, as Gulch needs to make the parallel between marriage and masturbation go. And even if sexual desire was simply constituted by a longing for God, the form and mode of its expression would still have to be bounded by the terms God established for it. Using Anna’s Trinitarian approach, masturbation would be the equivalent of pursuing a Platonic deity: it is absorption into the personless Being, rather than a mutual self-giving. That is, unless you want to say that Christ meets us uniquely in the mastubatory act, but then I wonder why we’d ever bother doing anything else like taking communion or reading Scripture.
Mutual sacrificial self-giving love for the good of the other by a husband and wife: every word in that formula matters. It’s not a complete statement about the shape of Christian teaching about sexual ethics—it says nothing about children, most obviously—but when thinking through autoeroticism it gets you a long ways toward seeing why it undermines marital and personal flourishing.