Masturbation, whether it’s your favorite pastime or your favorite pastime on the low, is prolifically practiced by college-aged males. It’s definitely not a male-only thing, but this age demographic chokes the chicken with a fervor that is matched only by someone trying to outrun a bear that recently consumed a dump truck of cocaine. As people start hitting their sexual peaks around their 20s, the accompanying levels of masturbation could be described as either biblical or horrifying, depending on how comfortable you are with crusty socks.
According to a recent study produced by the productivity and research organization Stop Procrastinating, there are some disturbing trends involving masturbation in the college-aged male demographic that have serious consequences. The study surveyed 3,000 male students across the country and found that 57 percent of college males are “concerned by their lack of ability to control the amount of porn they watch,” and another 42 percent said they felt their inability to manage their masturbation habits was impeding on their ability to study. If you subscribe to the idea that most college guys tend to listen to their dicks over their brains already, it probably isn’t a hard sell to convince you that more than half are concerned about their ability to control whacking it, but it’s a statistic that emphasizes how powerful the compulsion truly is.
Plenty of things get between college students and studying, so the 42 percent figure is a little less surprising as plenty of students will do just about anything besides study when in dedicated procrastination mode. What’s frightening is that 24 percent believe that this affects their relationships by making them “confuse the idealized image of women in porn with real women, view women as objects, and stay at home viewing porn instead of going out and socializing and meeting real women.” Those are some serious problems, you’d hope it would be ridiculous that anyone determine their image of women based the average porn flick, but apparently guys are drawing very real impressions and ideas from, quite frankly, an industry that contains plenty of degrading and disturbing content. A monster truck rally would give some seriously skewed impressions to someone searching for a new car, and similarly, watching “Savage Turbo Orgy Part 2: Electric Boogaloo” is going to leave some guys with some very inaccurate impressions. While this study didn’t set out to develop strong links between porn consumption and misogyny, it certainly made that connection pretty clear, as one-fourth of men in the survey reported that porn made them more likely to objectify women.
Whether it’s contributing to an inability to study effectively or to sexism, these findings are concerning as these dynamics are affecting a relatively large portion of college guys. The figure from the study that best illustrates the pervasive power of porn is the 65 percent of those surveyed who believe that their porn habit could easily develop into an addiction. It’s not hard to see why, as any activity that produces a release of hormones can easily be incorporated into an unhealthy pattern of behavior, but masturbation plays on our obvious biological instincts and remains deceptively dangerous as a result.
In this day and age, masturbation isn’t really a big deal, and it’s for the better that we’ve departed from the intense social stigma that used to be associated with the activity, but this activity all too often develops into a pattern where it’s less of a fun time and more of an “I need a fix.” The high number of participants that reflected on their masturbation as a fleeting high followed by feelings of anxiety, depression, guilt, and a reduced desire to socialize illustrated the concept that masturbation is similar to a drug. All of these things obstruct relationships and are fuelling the sort of behavioral patterns that reinforce a cycle of loneliness and depression as guys in this downward spiral get their fix and don’t re-engage with social circles that could provide the sort of experiences and feelings they are really in search of. The reality is that masturbation in college males can be a destructive behavior just like drug use or any other hormone-induced behavior.
While we definitely wouldn’t be doing ourselves any favors by falling back to draconian attitudes on masturbation, at the end of the day it’s really no one’s business what a guy’s imagination and a snorkel can get up to. That said, there should be a dose of alarm associated with these findings. If masturbation is having these effects on college males, then maybe we need to alter our ideas about what a healthy level of masturbation is, and we might want to make sure that the demographic is educated about unhealthy patterns of behaviors and how they can arise from seemingly innocuous habits. At the end of the day, guys are going to get jiggy with their members; it’s just a matter of making sure that the jazzy times don’t end up having disproportionately negative effects on their livelihoods.