Next to helping you learn about yourself, masturbation has a very important role in human life. It is a means for women as well as men to relax : "when one has this pleasure, one feels relaxed and calmed until the tension rises again later". Because sex is new to everyone at first, it can feel like you are thrust into the unknown in situations where anyone would naturally be apprehensive, sometimes even anxious. Testing new things by yourself first can help you feel more comfortable with a partner.
Masturbation and pleasure-training
Masturbation can train you to know what your body is capable of in its response to pleasure, in the enrichment of its sensations and its feelings, as well as in the blossoming of your fantasies. It's extremely balancing to discover and to exploit your own possibilities of pleasure. During adolescence, masturbation gives physical pleasure a purpose and a
place in the young person's life. At all ages, masturbation functions to compensate for or to replace other sexual games when they're impossible, whether for a moment or permanently. For animals, masturbation also seems to play this role and to be used as a method of reassurance: female monkeys use a finger or other object, male monkeys use their hands, elephants use their trunk, wild deer and domestic bulls rub themselves against trees, dogs and cats use their tongues …
Masturbation and freedom of the game
In addition, for human beings, masturbation calms fear and stress, because pleasure has a fundamental role in one's psychic balance. Masturbation also has a playful role, of escapism without danger for oneself or for others : by releasing your fantasy life, by playing with erotic images, by escaping into an unreal world you can level out, release tensions, build up your secret garden where you martial your strength and feed its vitality in order to hold out in a crushing, exhausting society where the perspectives offered are often inferior and empty, where you're submerged by social relations without pleasure, dissatisfied and anonymous. Sometimes masturbation has no role of replacement : sex for you and your partner is good, but one of you feels you are missing out on another type of sexuality, where you don't have to pay attention to anybody else, where you follow your own rhythm and the wanderings of your own imagination.
Masturbation and sexual balance
In a couple, one or the other may also want a higher frequency of orgasms : masturbation is the simplest means to achieve this desire and to dissipate the frustration. And actually, masturbation can also involve the partner, becoming a part of the game for both : to reduce human sexuality to vaginal penetration means neglecting the wealth and variety of the behaviours that can bring human enjoyment. Masturbation offers to the couple a possibility of different sensations, to women for whom this way of reaching orgasm can bring another kind of pleasure; to men, for whom masturbation often brings an intensity of excitement that is not allowed by either the softness of a vagina nor the obligation to hold on for a certain time.
Masturbation and guilt
Some feel guilty about resorting to masturbation, as if they stole something from their significant other : if to be satisfied by masturbation leads you to refuse sex with your partner, naturally that's a problem. But, in a couple, it's not necessary that we do everything together; must all our pleasures be strictly shared? shopping, sports, music, reading? If masturbation isn't an escape, but a search for balance, then you both will be at ease, and can experience your sex life with each other without tension. Whereas frustration due to an insufficient sexuality might cause you to resent your partner, and even wish to turn away from sex with him or her.
A personal choice
As a matter of fact, there's a multitude of ways to live out your sexuality. Masturbation is one: by yourself or in the presence of your partner, frequent or occasional, solitary or mutually shared, it colors the life of one person, is absent in the life of another one, is present in that of the third, but retains its fundamental quality of always being accessible without ever being imposed, something that people can take or leave according to their whim.
Doctor Yves Ferroul, on December 6th, 2000 (Free translation from Melissa).
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