How Sex Pests Created The Anti-Masturbation Movement

Gird your loins as you tiptoe into Based Camp today, friends! We’re coming after the nofap brigade, tracing how anti-masturbation ideas emerged from ancient class structures and Zoroastrian influences before entering early Christianity. Our discussion examines biblical misreadings, 18th-century medical panics, and 19th-century health influencers who promoted extreme regimens and devices.

Though it might anger some listeners, we cover the flawed science behind modern abstinence campaigns, the commercial motives of current influencers, and why focusing on personal purpose offers a clearer path than targeting one behavior. Whether you like it or not, we think it’s important to separate historical claims from evidence and better understand how these movements have persisted across centuries.

Show Notes

The Before Times

Before Christianity

In antiquity, masturbation was mostly a joke or a practical afterthought, not a grave moral problem. Greek and Roman sources treat it as vulgar or convenient (Diogenes the Cynic is the usual example), not as a threat to the soul or the species.

Though fun side note (use Google Translate for this): Greek medical speculation treated semen as a refined, brain-related fluid. Aristotle wrote that the region around the eyes was especially “fruitful of semen,” and some Pythagorean-influenced writers called semen “a drop of the brain.” Losing it could, in theory, weaken the head. That is humoral physiology, not a warning that solitary sex causes blindness. Nobody in antiquity ran a campaign on that slogan.

Among Christians

Before the eighteenth-century panic, masturbation was a real sin in Christian moral theology, but it sat low on the scale of gravity. It was not treated as comparable to idolatry, murder, or adultery, and it was usually ranked below even simple unmarried sex in pastoral practice.

But about masturbation:

* The biblical story of Onan (Genesis 38) was originally about refusing levirate marriage and coitus interruptus, not solitary sex.

* Later Jewish and Christian writers sometimes folded “spilling seed” into a broader condemnation of non-procreative sex.

* Augustine treated all lust outside procreative marriage as disordered; Aquinas ranked masturbation among the “sins against nature,” below sodomy.

* Monastic writers such as John Cassian and later confessors paid attention to it because it violated vows of chastity. A few late-medieval manuals (Jean Gerson) told priests how to ask about it.

Consider the ten commandments:

Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain.

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy.

Honour thy father and thy mother.

Thou shalt not kill.

Thou shalt not commit adultery.

Thou shalt not steal.

Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbour.

Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s house, wife, servants, livestock, or anything that is thy neighbour’s.

Ten Commandments. Masturbation is not named. It was placed under the sixth commandment (“You shall not commit adultery”) as a form of unchastity, sometimes also under the ninth (coveting). Sins of the first table—idolatry, graven images, taking the Lord’s name in vain—were sins directly against God and therefore graver in kind than any sexual sin. Murder, adultery, and serious theft or false witness injured other people or the social order; solitary sex did not.

In terms of gauging the seriousness of a sin, confessors and theologians used overlapping systems: the Ten Commandments, the seven capital vices, and (most precise for sex) Thomas Aquinas’s ranking of the species of lust.

So let’s get to the seven deadly sins: The usual order (Gregory the Great, then Aquinas) runs: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, avarice, gluttony, lust. Spiritual sins outrank carnal ones. Lust (luxuria) is typically the least of the seven capital vices. Masturbation is one expression of lust, not a capital vice of its own. Gluttony sits just above lust; envy and pride sit well above both.

Then let’s get to Aquinas on lust (Summa Theologiae II-II, q.154, a.12): This is the standard scholastic ranking within sexual sins. Unnatural acts are the gravest as sexual sins because they violate the natural purpose of the generative power itself. Within that group he ranks:

* Bestiality (worst)

* Sodomy

* Unnatural manner of intercourse (wrong vessel, coitus interruptus, etc.)

* Masturbation (“uncleanness” / mollities) — the least of the sins against nature

Then come the “natural” but unjust sexual sins: incest, sacrilege, rape, adultery, seduction of a virgin, and last of all simple fornication (unmarried man and unmarried woman, no violence).

FOR CLARITY: The famous claim that Aquinas ranked masturbation worse than rape is only true inside the genus of lust, looking solely at whether the act follows nature. Rape also contains injustice and injury to another person; overall, rape, adultery, and murder were treated as worse. Aquinas himself says fornication is graver than theft but less grave than murder or sins directly against God.

What confessors actually assigned:

Early medieval penitentials (the practical handbooks priests used) show the ranking in years of fasting. Typical ranges in terms of years of penance:

* Murder: 3–10+ years (more for clerics)

* Bestiality / sodomy: 7–15 years

* Adultery: 3–7 years (bishops 10–12)

* Incest3–15 depending on kinshipSimple fornication1–3 years

* Theft / false witness: often ~1 year for laity

* Masturbation: often 4–40 days for a single act; 1–3 years if habitual, especially for monks

Rough order for a pre-1712 layperson

From gravest to least, in the frameworks theologians and confessors actually used:

* Idolatry, apostasy, making and worshipping graven images, grave blasphemy

* Murder

* Adultery (especially public or violent)

* Serious theft, false witness that ruins someone, grave dishonor of parents

* Sodomy, bestiality

* Fornication, incest

* Envy / coveting that hardens into hatred or harm; habitual gluttony or drunkenness that becomes a ruling vice

* Masturbation (mortal in kind if fully deliberate, but the lowest unnatural sexual sin and usually light penance)

* Fleeting lustful looks, occasional overeating, passing jealousy (often venial)

The Admission of a Catholic Who Investigated a Millennium of Catholic History

One of our friends who we met through the podcast heard we were working on this topic and shared about a book called Autoeroticism: A Moral Problem in the First Christian Centuries? By Giovannie Cappelli (it’s written in Italian). He shared:

“A Catholic guy wrote a monograph pulling together every extant text in the first ~1,000 years of church history that touches on the question of masturbation. He’s very thorough. And he’s catholic, so you know he’s reporting the honest to God truth when he admits that he can’t find anything condemnatory before roughly the 5-6th centuries.

In the end he’s still Catholic, so he still spins it up into being anti-masturbation. He says it would be wrong to interpret the silence of the Fathers as a tacit indifference, because the principles of the