The psychology of masturbation
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This episode is one from our archives. Just a heads up, today's episode deals with a lot of sexual content. Specifically, we're talking about masturbation. So if you have little ones listening in, proceed with caution. You know Corn Flakes, the breakfast cereal? Plain, crunchy. You wouldn't call it delicious, exactly, or something you're likely to crave, but you know, they're perfectly nice and unremarkable. All of these qualities, they are very much the point of Corn Flakes. They're by design. And you'll understand why once you learn about the bizarre beliefs of one of its co-creators.
It is such an incredible story and one that is such a good icebreaker at a party. Now, Kellogg was a Seventh Day Adventist.
Kellogg being Dr. John Harvey Kellogg. He and his brother founded the Kellogg's Breakfast Company.
He had this idea of bodily pleasure being connected to sin. And so one of his theories was that sugary, tasty food increased one's libido and made one quite horny and in need of a sexy hand.
Just so we're clear, sexy hand as in masturbation. She means masturbation.
Foods that were bland, on the other hand, could quench your need for sexual reprieve. And was this based on any evidence at all? Absolutely not. It was based on his wishful thinking. But that being said, do you know anyone who has ever felt turned on after eating a bowl of cornflakes? I mean, no.
How did John Harvey Kellogg link bland diets and Corn Flakes to stopping masturbation?
No, maybe there was some logic to it.
Yeah, right.
So the idea was that cornflakes, because they were bland, would stop people's urges to masturbate. Now, in the interest of total accuracy, this might not have been the original exclusive purpose of Corn Flakes. There's evidence the cereal was actually created to help with indigestion, a less exciting origin story. But John Kellogg was also quite vocal about his beliefs that bland diets helped stop sexy urges, specifically masturbation, and Corn Flakes was part of that diet.
Corn Flakes, you know, caught on. And I think that the success of Corn Flakes and the Kellogg's brand in general stands as testament to how widely publicized and popular methods of anti-masturbatory meals and methods were at the time. It was something we were really concerned about.
This is All In The Mind. I'm Sana Khadar. For as long as we have existed, we have probably masturbated.
We are a primate. We are a large ape, to be specific. So a lot of the reasons that humans might masturbate are probably rooted in our evolutionary history.
And for many people, masturbating is their first sexual experience.
So that's why masturbation is very important. And I continue to use, in my clinical work, taking a thorough history of masturbation.
And despite what Kellogg and his ilk thought, masturbation hasn't always been considered deviant or disordered behaviour.
It was seen as a social good. It was something that you could pour your sexual energy into to stop you committing adultery.
And yet it's also true that many people still have hang ups about it.
As a psychosexual therapist, you get to see a lot of people thinking they have something abnormal.
So today, from disordered behavior to good for you, we track our evolving attitudes towards masturbation in this episode and delve into the shame and confusion that can still exist. Before 1712, the word masturbate didn't exist, although the behaviour sure did.
If you go back to different civilisations all throughout history, like ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, masturbation wasn't just considered something that was normal, but it was actually considered a social good. In places like ancient Greece, they had these conceptions that masturbation was something that we should practise because it was able to... satisfy our sexual needs. And if our sexual needs are satisfied with or without a partner, that would stop us doing things like committing adultery, which was something they were really trying to fight against at the time.
This is Esme Louise James, PhD candidate, sex historian, author of Kinky History and TikTok superstar.
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