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Masturbation w/Dr. Darrel Ray
Masturbation is one of the most common human behaviors, and yet people are sometimes sheepish, sometimes vulgar, and sometimes completely unable to discuss it in a healthy, adult manner. We can discuss breakups, dating disasters, marriage, cheating, divorce, attachment styles, and every possible flavor of relationship chaos, but touching your own body? Suddenly everyone is twelve years old and staring at the floor.
That is exactly why I wanted to have this conversation with Dr. Darrel Ray on Sex and the Solo Girl. Dr. Ray is the founder of Recovering from Religion and the Secular Therapy Project, and his work explores how religious belief systems shape our sexuality, our shame, and our relationship with our own bodies. He also happens to be very funny, very frank, and keeps a dildo on his bookshelf.
This episode is for anyone who has ever wondered whether masturbation is healthy, whether it “counts” as cheating, why it carries so much shame, or how to begin untangling self-pleasure from religious guilt. It is also for anyone who simply wants permission to start exploring their bodies.
Key Takeaways
- Masturbation is normal, common, and not something people simply grow out of.
- Shame around masturbation is usually learned from religion, family, culture, or purity-based messaging.
- Many cultures throughout history have been far more open about sexuality than modern shame narratives suggest.
- Female masturbation has often been denied, ignored, controlled, or punished, which makes honest conversation about it especially important.
- The health benefits of masturbation can include body awareness, sexual confidence, increased genital blood flow, and better communication with partners.
- Masturbation does not automatically threaten a relationship; in many cases, it can be respectful and considerate.
- The problem is not self-pleasure itself. The problem is shame, secrecy, coercion, avoidance, or using masturbation to escape honest intimacy.
Why Masturbation Still Makes People So Weird
Dr. Ray told a story from when he was twelve and his mother walked in on him masturbating. She sat beside him and said, “That’s all right, Daryl. You won’t do it when you get married.”
As he put it, she was half right. It was all right. But marriage did not make masturbation disappear.
That little story captures so much of the cultural weirdness around this topic. Many of us were taught, directly or indirectly, that masturbation was something immature, shameful, desperate, sinful, or somehow incompatible with “real” sex. The assumption was that it belonged to adolescence, secrecy, and locked bedroom doors. Then adulthood was supposed to arrive with a marriage certificate and magically eliminate the desire to have a private sexual relationship with oneself.
That is not how bodies work.
People masturbate when they are single. People masturbate when they are dating. People masturbate when they are married. People masturbate after divorce, after religious deconstruction, during dry spells, during happy relationships, and sometimes after perfectly lovely partnered sex. This is not evidence of failure. It is evidence of having a libido and a nervous system.
The problem is that many of us learned about masturbation through shame before we ever learned about it through curiosity, health, pleasure, or self-knowledge. That first lesson matters. If the first message was “God is watching,” “good girls don’t,” “your spouse will be hurt,” or “this means something is wrong with you,” then self-pleasure can become emotionally loaded long before a person has the language to question it.
Masturbation Has a History, Even If Purity Culture Pretends It Doesn’t
One of my favorite parts of Dr. Ray’s work is that he refuses to let modern religious shame masquerade as universal truth. Masturbation has a history. Erotic imagery has a history. Human beings have been interested in bodies, pleasure, arousal, and sexual expression for a very long time.
Dr. Ray discussed ancient Egyptian creation myths involving divine masturbation, erotic imagery in places like Greece, India, and Pompeii, and prehistoric sexual figures that suggest our ancestors were not exactly clutching their pearls about bodies. Of course, we should be careful not to overstate what any one artifact or myth “proves,” but the larger point is clear: sexual expression is not a modern corruption. It is deeply, stubbornly human.
He also brought up cultures where sexual behavior was not treated as the primary source of taboo. In some societies, the rules that mattered most were about things like food, rank, ritual, or social order. That matters because it reminds us that sexual shame is not inevitable. It is taught, reinforced, and culturally maintained.
For those of us raised in purity culture or high-control religious environments, this can be incredibly freeing.
Maybe the shame is not proof that your body is wrong.
Maybe the shame is the thing worth interrogating.
Female Masturbation: The Thing Everyone Knew About and Pretended Not to Know About
Female masturbation deserves its own conversation, because women’s self-pleasure has been treated with a special kind of denial. Historically, people acknowledged male masturbation while pretending women either did not masturbate, did not desire, or should not be trusted with the terrifying knowledge that they had genitals and could enjoy them.
Honestly, the fragility of that worldview is almost impressive.
Dr. Ray talked about how academia and culture often acted as if women’s masturbation barely existed. And yet the historical record is full of hints, symbols, images, and anxieties around female sexuality. One striking example he discussed was the Sheila Na Gig: graphic female figures, often displaying exaggerated vulvas, found on churches and other buildings in Ireland, England, and parts of Europe.
Scholars debate exactly what these figures meant. Were they protective? Fertility-related? Warnings? Sacred? Grotesque? Powerful? All of the above? We may not know for sure. But their existence tells us that female genitality was visible, symbolically charged, and impossible to erase.
That matters because women have spent centuries being told to be desirable without being desiring. Pretty but not hungry. Available but not self-directed. Sexual enough to please someone else, but not so sexual that we become inconvenient.
Female masturbation disrupts all of that. It says: I have a body. I have intense desires. I have curiosity. I am allowed to know what feels good before someone else tries to guess.
And frankly, that should not be radical. Yet here we are.
Masturbation and Religious Shame
This is where the conversation becomes more than historical or funny. For many people, masturbation is tangled up with religious shame, and that shame can be incredibly sticky.
Dr. Ray described what he calls the guilt cycle. A religion teaches you that a normal human behavior is sinful. You do the thing anyway, because you are a human being with a body. Then you feel guilty, ashamed, frightened, or contaminated. To relieve that guilt, you return to the very religious system that taught you to feel guilty in the first place.
The cycle does not stop the behavior. It keeps you attached to the system.
That landed deeply for me. I was raised Mormon, and in that culture, sexuality was not some private, personal area of development. It was monitored, questioned, confessed, and moralized. Children and teenagers could be asked direct questions about masturbation and sexual behavior by adult male leaders. If you crossed a line, even a completely developmentally normal line, the guilt could be overwhelming and there could be consequences placed upon you by your religious leaders.
I remember the sick-to-your-stomach feeling after sexual experiences as a teenager. Not because the experience itself was necessarily traumatic, but because the conditioning around it was. The only thing I could think about was confession. I had been trained to believe that relief could only come through the same authority structure that made me feel dirty in the first place.
That is not sexual morality or education. That is control.
And leaving a religion does not automatically remove religious sexuality from your body. You can intellectually reject the doctrine and still freeze when you try to touch yourself. You can stop believing in hell and still feel watched. You can build an adult life and still carry the old rulebook in your nervous system.
If that is you, you are not broken. You are unwinding training.
The Health Benefits of Masturbation
There are real health benefits of masturbation, and not just in the “well, it feels good, so please stop panicking” sense.
Dr. Ray talked about genital blood flow, especially for vagina owners, and how stimulation can help keep people connected to their bodies. He also used the phrase “use it or lose it,” which may sound blunt, but there is wisdom in it. Sexual response is something we learn, notice, practice, and maintain. When we disconnect from our bodies completely, pleasure can become harder to access.
Masturbation can help you understand what you like. It can help you learn what kind of touch, pressure, rhythm, fantasy, or stimulation works for you. That is not selfish information. That is useful information.
One of the strongest stories Dr. Ray shared was about a Catholic couple he saw clinically. The wife struggled to orgasm and blamed her husband for not being able to “give” her one. But when asked how she gave herself an orgasm, she was embarrassed and said she could never touch herself because it was against God’s will. Eventually, as she began exploring her own body, she learned what worked. Then she could show her husband.
That is the part many people miss. Masturbation is not necessarily in competition with partnered sex. It can improve partnered sex because it gives you a map. Expecting another person to magically know your body when you have been forbidden from knowing it yourself is a recipe for frustration.
Your pleasure is not a locked room someone else is supposed to break into. You are allowed to have the key.
Sex Toys, Pocket Rockets, and Giving Yourself Permission
Thankfully, the culture around self-pleasure has shifted in some visible ways. Sex toys, especially toys marketed toward women, are more mainstream than they used to be. Vibrators are cuter, easier to find, and less hidden away in the cultural basement. You can buy one without feeling like you need a trench coat and a fake name.
I talked with Dr. Ray about my own experience as a Passion Parties rep in college, which was honestly a perfect blend of performance, education, flirtation, and “why are we pretending this isn’t fun?” Dr. Ray shared that when he toured for his book Sex and God, he gave out pocket rockets as prizes at his talks.
That is the energy I appreciate: informed, playful, and completely uninterested in shame.
He also talked about Betty Dodson, who helped teach women to masturbate and gave generations of women permission to explore their own bodies. That word, permission, comes up again and again. Sometimes people do not need a complicated sexual revolution. They need someone to say, “You are allowed to be curious. You are allowed to try. You are allowed to enjoy this.”
Of course, buying a vibrator is not the same as undoing decades of shame. A toy can help, but it cannot do all the emotional work for you. Still, pleasure can be a doorway. Sometimes the path back to the body begins with curiosity, a sense of humor, and a very well-charged device.
I love sexy toys and products. Want to see some of my favorites AND get discounts on them? Check out my comprehensive YouTube playlist where I review everything from bed restraints to app-controlled vibrators.
Is Masturbation Cheating?
This is one of the most emotionally charged questions around masturbation in relationships: is masturbation cheating?
For many people, the answer seems obvious: no. But if you were raised in a culture where sexual expression was tightly controlled, or where marriage was treated as the only acceptable container for sexuality, masturbation can feel like betrayal. I understand that because I once carried that belief myself.
When I was married, I had the idea that masturbation was almost like going outside the relationship. I did not want my husband to masturbate, and when I found out that he did, it was painful for me. That pain was not coming from nowhere. It came from conditioning that taught me sexuality inside marriage should be contained, monitored, and mutually owned.
But your partner’s body is not your property. Your body is not your partner’s property either.
Dr. Ray offered one of the clearest reframes of the entire conversation: masturbation can be one of the most respectful things you do for your partner. If one person is sick, exhausted, stressed, unavailable, or simply not in the mood, self-pleasure can relieve pressure rather than create it.
Partners are not always going to be perfectly aligned. One person may want sex when the other does not. One person may have a higher libido. One person may need more recovery time. One person may be in the mood at 7 a.m. while the other can barely operate a toaster.
Masturbation in relationships does not have to mean rejection, secrecy, or betrayal. It can mean: I care for my own body without pressuring yours.
When Masturbation Does Become a Relationship Issue
That said, nuance matters. Masturbation itself is not the problem, but the context around it can become a problem.
If someone is using masturbation or porn to consistently avoid intimacy, hide from communication, punish a partner, or disconnect from the sexual relationship entirely, then there is something to talk about. The issue still is not “touching yourself.” The issue is avoidance, secrecy, resentment, or disconnection.
A healthy relationship does not require both people to have identical libidos. It does require honesty, care, and some willingness to understand each other’s needs. Self-pleasure can coexist beautifully with partnered sex, but it should not become a substitute for every difficult conversation about desire, rejection, insecurity, or intimacy.
Reclaiming Self-Pleasure After Leaving Religion
One of Dr. Ray’s most important points is that people are not only recovering from religion. They are often recovering from religious sexuality.
That distinction matters. You can leave the church, the mosque, the temple, the doctrine, the community, or the belief system and still carry sexual shame in your body. You can stop believing the theology and still feel guilty after an orgasm. You can know, intellectually, that masturbation is normal and still feel like you are doing something wrong.
Healing that takes time.
For some people, reclaiming self-pleasure means learning basic anatomy. For others, it means buying a toy, reading a book, talking with a therapist, joining a support group, or simply letting themselves be curious without immediately shutting down. For some, it means grieving how much fear was wrapped around something so natural.
If religious shame is part of your story, Recovering from Religion can be a meaningful resource. So can working with secular, sex-positive, evidence-based professionals who will not treat your body as the enemy.
And please hear me clearly: if you were taught that your desire was dirty, dangerous, or constantly being watched, of course masturbation may feel complicated. That does not mean your body is wrong. It means your body learned fear in a place where it should have been allowed to learn safety.
A Better Way to Think About Masturbation
Masturbation is not a moral crisis. It is not refuge for people who cannot find partners. It is not a betrayal by default. It is not proof that you are too sexual, not sexual enough, selfish, broken, immature, or doomed.
It is a way of being in relationship with your own body.
For some people, that relationship is playful. For some, it is healing. For some, it is practical. For some, it is complicated and tender because shame got there first. Wherever you are on that spectrum, you are allowed to approach yourself with more curiosity and less judgment.
Your sexuality belongs to you. Not to purity culture. Not to an ex. Not to a religious leader. Not to the old voice in your head that still thinks pleasure needs permission from a committee.
If this topic feels tangled up with shame, religion, relationship fear, or the belief that your body is something to apologize for, I hope this conversation gives you room to breathe. Listen to the full episode of Sex and the Solo Girl with Dr. Darrel Ray, explore Recovering from Religion if religious guilt is part of your story, and schedule a free intro call with me if you want support building a more secure, self-trusting, pleasure-friendly relationship with yourself.
Quotes from this episode:
“If you don’t use your mutual sexuality you will lose your mutual sexuality.” ~Dr. Darrel Ray
“Masturbation can be one of the most respectful things you do for your partner.” ~Dr. Darrel Ray
👉Go learn about Dr. Darrel Ray and his important work:
Find him on LinkedIn and tell him you heard his episode here.
Learn more about Recovering From Religion, Dr. Ray’s nonprofit support network for people transitioning from religion here.
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