Physical Effects. Our very lives are bound up with our reproductive organs, the testicles being wonderful laboratories for the development of a secretion which is superlatively essential in the activities of life. From the time of puberty on, this secretion is constantly being elaborated, and its function is for procreation and not for debasement by sensual pleasure. The constitutional effects of wantonly squandering it are mostly manifested in injury to the nervous system.
1. The victim is subject to loss of spirit, weakness of memory, despondency and apathy.
2. He suffers languor, irritability, headaches, neuralgias, dimness of vision, etc.
3. Anaemia and facial acne are common.
4. There is loss of manly bearing, and proneness to blush.
5. The path leads to imbecility and premature senility.
6. The countenance and demeanor stamp the onanist as an object of reasonable suspicion.
7. He is often unable to free himself from the grasp of the habit, because there is poor material on which to call for manly restraint.
8. His genitals bear the marks of his degrading practice.
9. His digestion and heart action are disturbed, and he becomes a moody, apprehensive, hypochondriacal invalid, if not a gross pervert.
10. He may suffer from diurnal and nocturnal involuntary pollutions, spermatorrhoea or prostatorrhoea. Sometimes there is irritability at the neck of the bladder with
inability to pass water or to retain it.
11. He bequeaths an undesirable legacy to his posterity, giving both his sons and daughters a proneness to psychoses and neuroses, especially in their sexual proclivities. "Nothing is so prone to contaminate under certain circumstances, even to exhaust the source of all noble and ideal sentiments, which arise of themselves from a normally developing sexual instinct, as the practice of masturbation in early years.
It despoils the unfolding bud of perfume and beauty, and leaves behind only the coarse, animal desire for sexual satisfaction. If an individual, spoiled in this manner, reaches an age of maturity, there is wanting in him that aesthetic, ideal, pure and free impulse which draws one toward the opposite sex. Thus the glow of sensual sensibility wanes, and the inclination toward the opposite sex becomes weakened. This defect influences the morals, character, fancy, feeling, and instinct of the youthful masturbator, male or female, in an unfavorable way, and, under certain circumstances, allows the desire for the opposite sex to sink to nil; so that masturbation is preferred to the natural mode of satisfaction".
Some, to whom the sexual functions and their anomalies are a terra incognita, seem to believe that onanism is not necessarily more harmful than coitus if it is kept within proper limits and not performed any more frequently; for, they argue, semen is expended in each act, and it matters not where it is deposited. Physically it might not be more injurious if only occasionally indulged in; but the psychical disaster stands ever prominently in the way, and little by little self control is lost until the habit has become, as Cicero says, "afurious task-master". Certainly every masturbator does not sink to the lowest depths, for thousands upon thousands have at some time in their lives indulged in self abuse to some extent; but the tendencies are all downward, with the chances in favor of the habit getting the mastery over the individual. Naturally enough, the longer the vice is indulged in and the earlier it is commenced, the more it destroys the morals and the finer qualities of the mind and imagination, so that it is assuredly true that these attributes the finer endowments of man suffer graver lesions than do the physical.
In this extraordinary form of sexual gratification the imagination, in adults at least, is almost always brought into play artificially with tremendous force, without which psychical process the act would be bereft of its chief charm.
However frightened the masturbator may become when he begins to reakze the results of his vice, and however much he may experience a loathing for himself, it is yet most difficult for him to reinstate himself into a normal sexual condition, because of the pathological state into which his mental, moral and physical natures have been degraded a plight most unfavorable for the exercise of self control and mastery. What he supposed to be a slender rope which bound him, he finds to his dismay to be an iron chain when he struggles to free himself.
In long continued cases the masturbator may be worried by pollutions which occur involuntarily day and night, and the spermatorrhoea may sap his vitality without the accompaniment of any pleasurable feeling. If he undertake to have sexual intercourse he may have premature ejaculation in the attempt and the act may result in a farce. Or he may have the power to perform coitus {potentia coeundi), but not the power to procreate (potentia generandi), or both may be absent.
This sort of creature is only the counterfeit of a man, and it is well that he is disinclined to marry, for such an ancestor is unfit to found or perpetuate a family.