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What is your explanation for masturbation being taboo for most of history instead of being considered a mildly effective release valve for good Christian men who don't want to accidentally sin? After all, many observe the correlation between the sexlessness of our society and the rise of habitual porn use.
What it looks like to me is that a significant portion of "high testosterone man literally cannot resist the temptation of pussy" is male status propaganda. It's not that a powerful man alone with a woman (or a less powerful man alone with a low-status woman) fucked her because he thought/knew he could escape consequences, it's that he couldn't resist because he's just so vital. It's not that a single man wouldn't masturbate because it was low status to do something a man with pussy on tap wouldn't have to do, it's that he was too high T for it to work. And so on.
I agree that between a 60 year old man and a 20 year old woman, she has leverage. Not mind control. "He literally could not resist his ancient instincts" is fake, it's just that resisting ancient instincts is very hard and most men don't consciously want to, in a situation where they can be indulged.
I know that in the Catholic tradition, masturbation was seen as a “worse” sin than going to a prostitute because a prostitute was closer to what God intended than masturbation (which lacked the woman part of sex). Aquinas and Augustine defended the legality of prostitution because without it lust would topple society. I know the Taoists believed that if you masturbated you lost vital energy, and so did the Victorians. Not sure about other cultures.
So that’s why it was seen as wrong to masturbate. But did you mean, “why didn’t they become overwhelmed with a desire to masturbate?” Those weren’t pornographied times. You could go months without seeing a woman’s ankles. As for today, I just think high status men have a habit of not masturbating because they are instead fixated on social rewards, like the attention of women, as a primary driver of their elite behavior. If you had two Gaimans and one of them “release valves” himself every night, but the other looks forward to the attention of women acquired through his writings, the latter is going to be be motivated to write harder and faster. So top performing men in a given domain are IMO likely to just not use pornography or masturbate, though I am conjecturing here.
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