No, masturbation doesn't actually cause blindness. But researcher Dr. Krafft-Ebing once had people convinced it did! He actually had people convinced that masturbation could cause not only blindness, but even syphilis and death... That is, until Alfred Kinsey preformed revolutionary research on the topic of sex and human sexuality. His results were breakthrough for society at the time and have made all the difference in the cultural-evolution of sex in American society. Here's what I found out from the movie Kinsey (2004), based entirely on his research.
Kinsey and his colleagues had an incredible impact on society. Kinsey taught people the truth about sex, but also the truth about sexual human behavior. People during this time period we so ridiculously conservative about sex and they held strict views about it. Many of these views were derived from religion, beliefs about abstinence, and pre-marital sex. I knew that people during this time period were extremely strict about sex and that many women didn’t engage in sexual acts until marriage. While I was aware that sexual norms were extremely strict, I never would have predicted the severity of this in the Kinsey film. No amount of prior knowledge could have prepared me for what Kinsey went through and the greatly conservative society in which he lived. Even with the knowledge I have about sex history and my understanding of conservative views during this time, I still had no idea, even to this day, about half of the information Kinsey’s study found—and this has been published for decades! It honestly makes me wonder if society is purposely keeping knowledge from the general public (or simply not educating students), especially when it comes to controversial topics. And if so, to what extent does society go to sweep things under the rug?
Even my sex education in high-school said nothing about human sexuality, spoke nothing of homosexual acts of sex, and regarded only monogamous male-female sexual intercourse and reproduction. I can only imagine how people of homosexuality felt in regards to this. Personally, I had no idea that most people fall somewhere in-between heterosexuality and homosexuality and most people would actually dispute this! Let alone admit that they too, fall somewhere in-between on the spectrum. All of our prior education about sex, even as millennials, the most up-to-date and liberal generation yet, was not educated about the true sexual nature of humans? I’m sorry but this really upsets me. It’s not right, there are still people in this world being educated about sex based on these conservative views, leaving them feeling lost and alone, abnormal, and unaccepted. That’s not fair, if this society wants to stop teen-suicides, or suicides in general, especially from the LGBTQ communities—we need to put a stop to the misinformation, miseducation, and judgmental conservative attitudes about sex and human sexuality. It is really time for this to stop, we need to grow ahead as a society. Although, Kinsey’s society was much more conservative than ours, it is decades later and we still have not grown much on the sexual timeline. I graduated high-school in 2013, yet they were still teaching us only about the reproductive sexual organs and purposes, they spoke nothing of orgasm or other sexual acts and those outside the realms of heterosexuality. We literally we not even told that homosexuality existed, though we all had common-sense that it existed, we learned nothing about it. I find that appalling and quite sad for the society we live in, which claims to be so new-age.
Kinsey’s society was no doubt, more judgmental and conservative than ours—though today I think people hold the same or similar beliefs and just aren’t so vocal and public about it. What surprised me was not only how austere these beliefs were but also the number of people who held moral beliefs about sex as fact. People weren’t just stuck in their own beliefs about sex because of religious beliefs but also societal ones. Since there was no prior knowledge about sex before the Kinsey studies, other than its reproductive purpose, people held moral beliefs about sex to be true. Adolescents and young couples were led to believe a number of absolutely ridiculous claims about sex that had no factual merit and were based solely on societal moral beliefs and norms of the time. Most of sex education was solely about the risk of contracting syphilis from sexual activity, and most women had no basic knowledge of reproduction until they were married and soon to be having a baby. All of this has changed because of the work Kinsey and his colleagues did; If I do say so myself, we owe Kinsey a serious applause.
