Featured Image Credit: Photo by Deon Black via Pexels
Topics: Sex & Co.
Syeda Khaula Saad
Let’s have a moment of honesty here: I masturbate a lot. Like, a lot. So much so that my best friends have a running joke that if they call me and I don’t pick up, it’s because I’m too busy rubbing one out. I like to think of it as giving my vibrators a purpose.
But I’d be lying if there haven’t been times when I’ve side-eyed myself a little and thought, “Am I masturbating too much?” Women have little to no refractory period after they orgasm, so oftentimes, after I’d finish a solo session, I’d just keep going… and going… and going. While it felt totally normal to me, hearing my friends find it nearly impossible to do the same definitely made me feel like I was overindulging. Looking back now, I know that wasn’t the case at all.
“There is no such thing as too much or too little masturbation,” Jordan Rullo, Ph.D., clinical health psychologist, certified sex therapist, and Flo Health medical expert, tells Betches.
She explains that while frequent masturbation has health benefits for cis men and women (unfortunately, there is very limited data on masturbation habits of trans and nonbinary people), there’s no sort of guidance on what that frequency should be. So, how often should I masturbate to reap the health benefits?
“For women, continued masturbation beyond menopause facilitates blood flow to the pelvic area and genitals in order to help maintain healthy genital tissues and physiological arousal,” she says. “For men, some data suggests that an increased frequency of ejaculation (not necessarily through masturbation) can be protective against prostate cancer.”
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Bottomline: flicking the bean, shaking hands with the milkman, giving yourself a low five — it’s all actually really good for you. So, if you’re feeling weird about your masturbation habits, you might want to consider why that is.
“As a sex therapist, the concern is not about the frequency of masturbation, but instead around the consequences of masturbation,” Rullo explains. “If you think you’re masturbating too much, are you having difficulty controlling your sexual urges and find yourself engaging in masturbation during risky times or in risky places (like at work or in your car)? Are you turning toward masturbation instead of sex in your relationship? Is your masturbation causing depression or anxiety, or are you turning to masturbation to manage your depression or anxiety?”
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And if you think you’re masturbating “too little,” she urges you to consider your mental health. Are you feeling especially anxious or depressed? Rullo says that women who are depressed have a 50-70% increased chance of experiencing some sort of sexual dysfunction — which could mean having little to no desire to engage in any kind of sexual activity, including masturbation.
So, suppose you’re masturbating to a point where it’s disrupting your life, or you’re not able to masturbate even though you typically do or would like to. In that case, it might be time to take a step back to reexamine your relationship with masturbation. If it becomes a concern, bringing the issue up with a therapist might be helpful.
But if masturbating all day (without it affecting the rest of your life) or not at all are just norms for you, then there’s not much else to it. Everyone’s sex drive is different, and it’s totally okay that what you find standard is not the same as someone else.
“Really, it’s a matter of sexual education, normalization, and working on shame reduction so you can experience masturbation as a healthy sexual outlet,” Rullo says.
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So if you see my phone on DND, you know where I’ll be.