In defense of Jeffrey Toobin !!!! [View all]

[Miigwech]

How many times a day does a man masturbate? So what! His only crime was he didn't know how to use Zoom correctly. So have your giggles puritanical America. I remember when our first Black woman Surgeon General, M. Joycelyn Elders, was fired because she suggested that young girls learn about masturbation in sex ed .... because she made too much GD sense for the RW fundies ... maybe someone should have asked amy con-me BARRett if she agreed wit scalia on masturbation? So maybe masturbation too will become a crime? Jeffrey ... come back on the TV and hold your head up high (not saying the head that should remain unseen).... you have nothing to be ashamed of. Maybe you could lead a new movement, who knows?

Masturbation Is at the Root of the Culture Wars

"Tell me how you really feel about masturbation, and I can more or less predict how you'll feel about the more frequently debated 'sex war' issues."
The view of masturbation as benign and beneficial is a new one. The Judeo-Christian tradition has long been hostile towards self-pleasure, at least for men. The Talmud compares spilling seed to spilling blood; the Zohar (the central work of Kabbalah) calls it the most evil act a man can commit. The traditional Christian view was no more tolerant; Catholic and Protestant authorities framed masturbation as a deeply sinful (though forgivable) waste of precious semen. Women were left out of these prohibitions for the obvious reason that most male religious authorities didn't consider the possibility that women were capable of or interested in giving themselves orgasms.

The campaign against masturbation became medicalized in the middle of the 19th century. Health reformers like Sylvester Graham (of the cracker) and John Harvey Kellogg (of the cereal) warned against the feminizing and enervating effects of male masturbation, describing it not as a sin but as a habit that could rob boys of their vital life force. At the same time, doctors began to warn of something theologians either hadn't considered or dared to mention: the dangers of female self-pleasure. Beginning in 1858, Dr. Isaac Baker-Brown—the president of the Medical Society of London—began to encourage surgical clitoridectomies to prevent hysteria, epilepsy, mania and even death that would surely follow as a consequence of the stimulation of the clitoris.

. At the same time, Granville, Baker-Brown, and their peers worried that a woman who learned to give herself sexual pleasure might pursue self-sufficiency in other areas. At a time of rising male anxiety about feminist demands for suffrage, female masturbation became an unsettling symbol of women's independence.

More than a century later, masturbation remains a cultural battleground. Many progressives were bewildered by Antonin Scalia's blistering 2003 dissent in Lawrence v Texas, in which he warned that state laws against evils such as "adult incest, prostitution, masturbation, adultery, fornication, and bestiality" might be invalidated as a result of the decision. Why, liberals wondered, was masturbation included on that list? The answer is simple: masturbation remains not only a grave sin in the eyes of the Catholic Church to which Scalia belongs, but its acceptance as benign and healthy is perhaps the foundational error of modern sexual culture.

The contemporary catechism of the church doesn't mention the waste of seed. Rather, heavily influenced by the late John Paul II's "theology of the body," it insists that our sexuality is intended for one purpose: "the relationship of one person to another, in the complete and lifelong mutual gift of a man and a woman." Evangelical Protestants often make the same case; the anti-porn ministry XXX Church teaches that "It is a selfish act that pleases no one but you. God created sex to be between a man and his wife. Not a man and his girlfriend and not a man or woman with himself or herself."


As religious conservatives see it, the great mistake we make when we masturbate is to claim our sexuality as ours alone. All sexual activity must be about "mutual self-giving" between a husband and a wife, the church claims, arguing that masturbation is "an intrinsically and gravely disordered action." Since masturbation is the first sexual act in which most people voluntarily engage, it is in a very real sense the original sexual sin from which all the others—based as they are on this mistaken sense of autonomy—flow. On the right, opposition to the idea of masturbation as an acceptable practice is growing rather than declining. Dr James Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, long claimed that the practice was essentially benign. Since his retirement, the organization—a flagship for social conservatism—has changed its tune, now arguing firmly that "self-gratification is inconsistent with the purpose, goal and basic nature of sex.

https://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2013/05/masturbation-is-at-the-root-of-the-culture-wars/276110/
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At her first news conference after being appointed director of the Arkansas State Health Department by then-Governor Clinton in 1987, she was asked whether she supported giving out condoms in public schools. "Well," she said, "I'm not going to put them on their lunch trays, but, yes."

In a January 1992 remark that offended Catholic leaders and other foes of abortion, she told them to "get over their love affair with the fetus."

In January 1993, describing the need for sex education, she said, "We've taught our children in driver's education what to do in the front seat, and now we've got to teach them what to do in the back seat."

Last year, Dr. Elders was the subject of a letter to Mr. Clinton from then-Archbishop William H. Keeler of Baltimore, who decried her "contemptuous" depiction of the church. In her remarks, Dr. Elders had attacked the Roman Catholic Church for remaining "silent" about everything from slavery to the Holocaust.

"Look at who's fighting the pro-choice movement," she said. "A celibate, male-dominated church."

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/bs-xpm-1994-12-10-1994344068-story.html