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When specific masturbation does occur in preadolescence, it is almost invariably continued into adolescence.

For most males, of every social level, masturbation provides the chief source of sexual outlet in early adolescence. It is at that period that the activity reaches its highest frequencies. For those males who subsequently turn to socio-sexual contacts for their pre-marital outlet, masturbatory frequencies will never again be so high.





Figure 136. Masturbation: individual variation in frequencies,
at ages adolescent-15, 16-20, 21-25 and 26-30, for three educational levels

Showing percent of each population (vertical line)
which masturbates with each type of frequency (horizontal line).





Masturbation and pre-marital intercourse are the only types of sexual activity which show something of the same range of individual variation (Table 49, Figure 136) as is shown by total outlet (Chapter 6). There are males who never masturbate. There are a few males who masturbate only once or twice in their lives; and there are others who have frequencies that may average seven to fourteen or twenty or more per week for long periods of years. There are males whose high frequencies extend from preadolescence through all of the pre-marital years, and males who may maintain average frequencies of three or four a week through the marital years into old age. There are a few males who are still masturbating at seventy-five years of age, but there are no older ones in the available record whose masturbation results in orgasm. Some males may masturbate several thousand times as often as some others in the population. The statement about lack of harmful outcome still applies to these most active cases. In the present records, the highest-rating males were masturbating with average frequencies of 23 per week in early adolescence. These maximum average frequencies drop to 15 per week by twenty years of age, to 6 per week by fifty years of age, and to once in two weeks at sixty years of age. It is about then that the older males are most inclined to warn the adolescent boy that masturbation will certainly harm him if he does it to excess.

For the active population, average frequencies of masturbation in early adolescence are nearly two and a half (2.4) per week, but a goodly number (17%) of the boys at that age may average four to seven times a week, or oftener (Table 51). A much larger number of the boys reach these higher frequencies on occasion, even though they do not regularly average such rates.

From the early teens, the frequencies of masturbation drop steadily into old age. They drop more abruptly in the lower social levels, where there is the most intercourse, and less abruptly in the upper social levels, where there is less intercourse before marriage.

In all groups, masturbation after marriage occurs only with reduced frequencies (Table 82). It occurs most often among the married males of the college level, where 69 per cent is ultimately involved, and where the frequencies may average about once in two weeks in early marriage, dropping a bit in the later years. It is, however, much less frequent in the marital histories of the lower levels. Less than a third (29%) of the grade school level, and less than half (42%) of the high school level, ever masturbate after marriage, and then the frequencies do not average more than once in three weeks. In most cases, the experience after marriage is confined to those periods when the husband is away from his wife. Some married males will go for years without masturbation, but come back to it as an outlet when they are separated from their wives for some period of time, as many men were during the recent war. This was most often true of the college male. Sometimes masturbation in the marital histories is the product of the fact that the wife does not want as frequent sexual relations as the male would like to have, or that periods of pregnancy, menstruation, or illness interfere with the regular intercourse. There are, however, some males who deliberately turn to self stimulation as a source of sexual variety, and who masturbate irrespective of the amount of marital intercourse they may have.”

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