Auto-eroticism in the form of self-abuse is not an easy problem to tackle. The usual policy adopted towards boys is most immoral. Well-meaning but hopelessly vicious purists, write terrifying pamphlets or deliver lectures in which they declare that this practice will inevitably lead to lunacy, paralysis or even death. The result is that the boy is scared into an ineffectual attempt at repression, which, so far as it is successful, sets the sex-impulse at work into morose channels and makes him a liar or a thief. Or he may be impelled to inquire for himself. He finds that, so long as self-abuse occurs infrequently, it does not bring about these dire evils, and accordingly he assumes that all moral doctrine is hypocrisy and often falls into the opposite extreme of constant self-abuse, with the result that actual physical and mental deterioration sets in.
What is really the truth?
The first consideration is that frequent and unregulated abuse does cause physical harm. The margin of frequency which will escape this harm varies with the individual. But, with growing boys, the practice is perhaps more dangerous than after physical maturity. The whole reserve of the physical constitution appears to be needed while the body is developing.
The difficulty of this problem is its complications. There are several entirely conflicting influences which must be weighed one against the other.
We have seen the physical danger, and, since morality must not be founded on a lie, we must freely admit that the physical danger may be eliminated by limiting the frequency of the practice. It may then be physically harmless. There remain, however, at least two causes which make for a misuse of the sex-force, that is—for immorality. The first is that it is usually the result of mental weakness, sheer inability to overcome the inclination. The mind, the will, must be supreme in its own house. Until that is done little else matters. And it comes, therefore, to this, so far as this particular consideration is concerned, that it is better for a man deliberately to regulate himself by programme to certain times, than to keep up an ineffectual struggle, or to obey whenever the inclination arises.
For, in both these cases, remorse follows. And this is as great an evil as the failure of will; indeed, it is failure of will. Remorse is not penitence. It is useless thereby to regret what has been done. A man must simply own to himself that he has failed, make a resolution to be stronger next time, and then sweep the recollection from his mind, switching off on to other mental channels.
The second influence which makes for impurity is that by this practice the sex-force becomes literally selfish. Now, sex is fundamentally a movement towards union through love, whether it be physical or super-physical. This practice is merely a vicious circle, in which the love element, save in the perverted form of narcissism, is absent. Accordingly, there must, almost always, be evil mental results from this abuse. And, once again, we see that the real evil is not in the physical act but in the realm of thought, whether the act occurs or not.
On the other hand, we must not become such abstract moralists as to deny that in many individuals the sex-force is so strong as to press almost irresistibly towards physical expression. Even dreams, which are the normal outlet, may not be sufficient. A man who for some reason, cannot marry, will therefore argue that his only alternative is recourse to prostitution, and that self-abuse, so long as it is regulated, is morally preferable. One remedy is, as we have already seen, the transfer of the sex-force to higher channels, so that all the glow and energy of sex is energized in devotion to a group of persons, or to a religious or humanitarian ideal in concrete labour. For sex is primarily creative, and if it is not creating physical children it may have, and should have, a spiritual progeny—as in art and literature.
The truth is that each individual case must be treated according to its particular state of development. General rules in this instance are particularly dangerous. We can only repeat that the repression is worse than commission, that a seething mass of sexual thought is worse when it has no physical outlet; that the ideal, when there may be no legitimate outlet—and, indeed, to some extent, in all cases—is to find an emotional outlet, to dig thought and emotional channels along which the sex-force may flow, but the physical expression of which is, in the ordinary sense of the term, non-sexual.[20]
And this is quite possible.