This topic, naturally, has stimulated quite a response. A reader writes:
Your reader wrote: "The main sin is that masturbation (with minuscule exception) involves fantasy which is a distortion or absence of reality. In other words, it is a lie." Interestingly, this was just the sort objection that clergy had to plays in the Middle Ages and in Shakespeare and Jonson's days, namely that acting or any kind of playing pretend was a distortion of reality and a lie. The idea your reader is gesturing at makes a certain kind of sense, but it is simply not applied consistently, and no one would want it to be.
I have heard such arguments before, and while they make sense from a certain perspective, this is a place where taking a more pragmatic moral stance would better serve all those humans who have to live with such moral strictures. Having grown up in an Evangelical Christian church, I have spent way too many years of my life hung up on sexuality, including masturbation.
Telling teenagers in particular that both premarital sex and masturbation are sin, while providing no outlet for their proverbial raging hormones other than the delayed gratification of an ill-prepared prepared rush into marriage in their early twenties, sets an impossible and unhealthy standard. I can remember actually hoping for nocturnal emissions which were the only unconscious, and therefore sinless, form of sexual enjoyment. It is a wonder people manage to become healthy adults after an upbringing like that.
Well, most don't. Look at the Catholic priesthood for what happens to those who take these strictures more seriously than others. Another writes:
Allow me to weigh in briefly. I would like to be utterly tactless. No person, especially, one who is self declared 'person of faith' is going to lecture me about fantasy and lies.
Another:
The real objection the Church has isn't that you are indulging in a lie. It is that you are indulging. The pleasure of any sexual activity, solo or otherwise, is a very inconvenient reality for the Church. One that priests are no better at denying themselves of than the rest of us. As much as the rational side of us might want to define sex as a utilitarian function, used only for procreation, no amount of scholarship can change the fact that it's fun, that it feels good. That, at its best, it is ecstatic. Certainly not the kind of thing you want people engaging in if you're trying to get them to forget about this world and focus on the next one.
On a personal note, my first wife, raised Catholic, had a great deal of guilt and anxiety about sex, and we had a truly awful sex life. Masturbation, although at times something of an indulgent vice, was also an activity I credit with keeping me somewhat sane through a highly frustrating time of my life, sexually speaking.
I can think of some Irish priests that maybe should have done a little more fantasizing and masturbating. Maybe not a long term answer, and certainly less fulfilling on so many levels than good sex mutually shared. But surely better that than preying on acolytes.