Baden-Powell – founder of the Boy Scout movement – warned young boys on the dangers of masturbation, claiming, ‘It cheats semen [of] getting its full chance of making up the strong manly man you would otherwise be.’ It’s not certain whether he practised what he preached, as Baden-Powell is reported to have liked looking at photos of nude schoolboys with a schoolmaster friend, who was a keen amateur photographer of his pupils.
In November 2012 police were called to a Florida Starbucks after receiving reports of a woman openly masturbating in the coffee shop. A police spokesman commented, ‘No one could ever say for sure what she was doing, and I’m pretty sure the video didn’t show anything definitive but her hands went into her pants when she was wigging out.’ The accused, twenty-nine-year-old, Jennifer Piranian, told officers she wasn’t well due to ‘an infection or spider bite.’
A woman who was admitted to a Leningrad hospital with glass splinters in her vagina finally confessed to doctors that she had been masturbating with a cylinder-shaped light bulb that broke when she was using it. The girl usually used a warm bulb in a lamp to increase her pleasure. Fortunately for her, in this case, she hadn’t switched it on.
A phone-sex operator in Florida won a large settlement after filing for worker’s compensation, claiming she had suffered repetitive-strain injuries in both hands. This was the result of giving herself as many as seven orgasms a day while talking to clients.
In the 1880s castration was sometimes prescribed as a cure for serious masturbators. A contemporary account about one American patient claimed that, after the operation, he was ‘cheerful and happy’ and had, at last, ‘the prospect of good health and a life of usefulness.’
Poet Edward Lear blamed his epileptic fits on his overzealous fondness for masturbation.
In many prisons, gardening duty is popular among inmates. Not because it gives them a chance to work outdoors but because many of them use the opportunity to collect worms, which they put into a jam jar. Back in their cells, each prisoner slightly warms the jar on a radiator and inserts his penis into the jar, using it as a masturbatory device.
In the 1890s some authorities believed that women could be aroused by riding bicycles. The Georgia Journal of Medicine and Surgery claimed that ‘the pedalling machine’ could cause ‘undesirable gynaecological effects, especially when the body is thrown forward, causing the clothing to press against the clitoris, thereby eliciting and arousing feelings hitherto unknown and unrealised by the young maiden.’
For similar reasons, in France, the Académie de Medicine protested against the sewing machine.
The Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality Journal of July 1991 contains a story of an unmarried factory worker and self-confessed ‘bit of a loner’ who had taken to masturbating against the canvas-belt drive of a piece of machinery where he worked. One day a momentary lapse of concentration caused his scrotum to be caught between the drive belt and the pulley wheel. The man was knocked unconscious as he was drawn into the machinery and, when he awoke, discovered his left testicle missing. To close the wound, he used the most convenient thing to hand – an industrial staple gun.
The author of the article, Dr Gavin Matthews, who examined the man, stated that the testicle was never found and said, ‘I can only assume he abandoned this method of self-gratification.’
As a deterrent against masturbation, Chinese authorities used to recommend ‘Hard study of the works of Marx, Lenin and Chairman Mao.’
In 1897 Dr John Harvey Kellogg invented the cornflakes that share his name as an ‘anti-masturbation food’. Kellogg was a fervent crusader against the perils of masturbation and believed a meat-free breakfast would reduce the prevalence of this heinous act. If this failed to have the desired effect, he recommended sewing up boys’ foreskins with silver wire.
Spectators at Toronto’s baseball stadium found it difficult to keep their eye on the ball during a Blue Jays–Seattle Mariners game in the early 1990s. They were distracted by one of the guests staying at the Skydome Hotel, which is visible from inside the stadium. This particular guest apparently thought the windows were made of one-way glass and several thousand fans saw him standing at the window of his room, masturbating while he watched the game.
Commenting on the great view the hotel affords over the stadium, the manager commented, ‘There isn’t a more exciting way to watch a baseball game but, for some people, it’s more exciting than for others.’
British birth-control pioneer Marie Stopes didn’t know what masturbation was until she was twenty-nine.
To discourage masturbation among boys and young men in the Victorian era, there were a whole host of ingenious inventions available that were a cross between chastity belts and torture devices. Many were featured in the contemporary best-selling catalogue Spermatorrhea. This included genital cages and penis rings lined with spikes and even an intricate device that rang a bell located in the parents’ room when their son had an erection.
An 1897 book, What A Young Boy Should Know, stated that masturbation ‘causes idiocy and even death’ and cited examples of boys being put in straitjackets or having their hands tied to rings in the wall in order to discourage this heinous act.
In ancient times, men would masturbate on the altars in pagan churches. Depositing semen was seen as the ultimate gift to the gods.
Also in the distant past, Jewish rabbis forbade men from holding their penises during urination, in case it encouraged them to masturbate.
A thirty-three-year-old Swansea woman went shopping to her local Asda supermarket wearing her new Ann Summers ‘Passion Pants’, which contained a 2.5-inch ‘vibrating bullet’ inside them. Such was the intensity of the pleasure that the happy shopper fainted and banged her head on a display, knocking herself out in the process. The reason for her accident became apparent when paramedics detected the still-buzzing panties on arrival and disabled them, returning them discreetly to their grateful owner after she’d recovered.
In 1992 newspapers reported that an unnamed thirty-two-year-old woman became convinced that Donald Duck was in love with her, via signals beamed to her from her neighbour’s satellite dish.
The neighbour found her standing near the dish, masturbating, convinced that Donald was simultaneously making love to her.