MASTURBATION AMONG SINGLE: PROPORTION OF TOTAL OUTLET
Among humans masturbation is usually a second-choice method of achieving gratification, and indicates an inability to find a sexual partner. Consequently, one expects and finds that in age-period puberty-15, when most individuals are inexperienced and inept in sociosexual relationships, masturbation is at its peak of quantitative importance. As sociosexual expertise develops with age (and society becomes more permissive toward the older individual) masturbation decreases in importance. This shift from solitary to social forms of sexual behavior is especially evident when one compares the single males in the first two age-periods: in age-period puberty-15 the majority of the groups have their members deriving two thirds or more of their orgasms from self-masturbation, while in age-period 16-20 no group reaches this two-thirds mark.
Among single males one would therefore expect to find the proportion of total outlet from masturbation large near puberty, then decreasing rather rapidly as sociosexual proficiency developed, finally stabilizing in the late third decade of life (age-period 26-30). In general this is the pattern seen in the control, prison, and most sex-offender groups. However, within this general aging pattern certain temporal and quantitative differences seem important. In terms of the temporal element, note the tendency for those groups which were sexually most active before marriage to achieve an early stable masturbatory proportion of total outlet in age-period 21-25. For example, the figure for the heterosexual offenders vs. minors in this age-period is 26 per cent and remains within a percentage point of that for as far as our calculations carry us (to age thirty-five). The heterosexual offenders vs. adults vary only three points in the same period. The prison group also tends to stabilize, masturbation being quantitatively about the same in age-periods 21-25, 31-35, and 41—45. On the other hand, certain groups characterized by difficulties in sociosexual adjustment show a different picture: the unmarried exhibitionists and peepers have as large a proportion of total outlet from masturbation at ages twenty-one to twenty-five as they had at sixteen to twenty. This suggests a delay in sociosexual adaptation.
The quantitative differences are, of course, of extreme importance. The larger the proportion of total outlet derived from masturbation, the greater one may assume were the difficulties (external or self-imposed) in obtaining sociosexual outlet. Among the single males there is a general tendency for both the control and prison groups and the offenders vs. postpubertal unrelated females to draw comparatively little of their outlet from masturbation—and these groups have the fewest sociosexual problems. Those whose fives are complicated by a desire for contact with children or persons of the same sex usually get a large proportion of their orgasms from masturbation. While the exhibitionists and peepers ordinarily directed their interest toward persons of socially suitable gender and age, they suffered in their younger years from sociosexual maladjustments, which were reflected in the large proportion of total outlet derived from masturbation.
One cannot dismiss these quantitative and chronological phenomena without noticing that the decrease in masturbation with increasing age is sometimes halted and temporarily reversed. Such reversals are seen among the single, married, and previously married.
Among the single, such resurgences of masturbation are not large in either absolute or relative terms, but they cannot be ignored since they occur at roughly the same time (in the thirties) in perhaps as many as six groups (control, prison, offenders vs. children, exhibitionists, and the homosexual offenders vs. children and minors). Among the first four of these groups the increase in the masturbation is coupled with a decrease in the proportion of outlet derived from premarital coitus. This “coital depression,” so to speak, is only temporary but is as yet inexplicable. The homosexual offenders vs. minors suffer a “homosexual depression” simultaneously with their “coital depression.” The subsequent revival of sociosexuality and the return of masturbation to its position of lesser importance is probably the result of a continued dwindling of the sex drive: when the need for orgasm is no longer imperative one can wait for sociosexual expression.
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