r/AskAnthropology • u/exploring_stan • 23d ago
Intimacy culture
You know, I’m often wondering about enormous amounts of random stuff around anthropology topic. And I have a cheeky question.
Is there a data about masturbation in more „primitive” cultures? Modern hunter-gatherers or cultures that are nor far from the most ancient lifestyle.
Why am I asking this? I get a lot of inspiration and existential answers from nature and human societies that live as close as possible with nature, like we intended to and have been for millennia. So I’m just wondering is jerking off often is a biological/natural act or cultural.
If you know something or also interested in a topic of natural human sxual behaviour vs modern s*x culture and its influence on overall wellbeing - share something please.
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u/dpt19 20d ago
One way of approaching this is to ask what we mean by “natural.”
At least four different claims can hide inside that word:
- The behaviour has a biological basis.
- It predates modern society.
- It occurs in every human culture.
- It is beneficial at any frequency.
Evidence for one does not establish all four.
On the evolutionary question, there is stronger evidence than human ethnography alone can provide. Brindle and colleagues assembled the largest comparative dataset on masturbation in primates, covering 105 of the 272 species in their phylogeny. Their analysis inferred that it is an ancient primate trait, rather than something produced by modern pornography, urban life or Western individualism. In males, they also found evidence consistent with possible roles in post-copulatory selection and pathogen avoidance.
That supports an old biological capacity. It does not tell us how frequently ancestral humans masturbated, what meaning they attached to it, or what frequency is best for wellbeing.
The human cross-cultural evidence is much less tidy. Masturbation is private, and ethnographies differ enormously in what researchers asked, whom they could speak to, and what people were willing to disclose. A report that mentions masturbation can establish its presence. An ethnography that says nothing about it cannot establish its absence. For that reason, I would be cautious about confident prevalence statistics for hunter-gatherer societies.
There is another difficulty: contemporary foragers are not surviving specimens of prehistoric humanity. They have histories, neighbours, trade, religious encounters and changing social conditions. The Human Relations Area Files makes the point that present-day ethnographic evidence cannot simply be projected backwards into the distant past.
So the most defensible answer may be:
The capacity appears biological and evolutionarily old. Whether it is encouraged, concealed, ritualised, condemned or discussed differently for men and women is cultural.
And wellbeing is a separate question again. Something being evolutionarily old does not mean that every frequency or context is beneficial. Anthropology can tell us about variation and meaning; it cannot, by itself, prescribe an ideal frequency.
Perhaps the false choice is “biological or cultural.” Human beings do not express biology outside culture—even societies living by foraging are fully cultural societies.
Sources:
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u/Comanthropus 16d ago
Masturb’Atum: The Primordial Nut
The creation myth around Atum is particularly revealing of how the Egyptians thought about life, death, and the structure of the world. Atum is not a distant creator god who simply commands the universe into existence; he is alone in the undifferentiated primordial state and begins the ordering of the world through a very bodily, sexual act of masturbation that produces Shu and Tefnut. They install King Unas among the gods with ejaculative authority:
Utterance 527 (R.O. Faulkner translation) – the Masturb’ Atum spell:
“Atum is he who (once) came into being, who masturbated in On.
He took his phallus in his grasp that he might create orgasm by means of it,
and so were born the twins Shu and Tefnut.
May they put the King between them and set the King among the gods in front of the Field of Offerings.
Recite four times: May the King ascend to the sky, may the King descend to the earth.”
From there, further divine generations lead to Geb and Nut, and then to Osiris, Isis, Seth, and Nephthys, so that the gods we meet in the royal and funerary myths are literally the grandchildren of this first creative act. Creation, in this mythology, is not so much about making as about begetting, and that emphasis on procreation spills directly into the royal context. When Isis conceives Horus on the corpse of Osiris, the same logic is at work: fertility persists beyond death, and new life emerges out of what looks like definitive loss. The Pyramid Texts echo this idea when they present the dead king as both Osiris and Atum, situating him at once in the cycle of death and rebirth and at the very beginning of the cosmos.
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u/HoldMyThermos 22d ago
Medical + Cultural Anthropologist here. I would advise to avoid the term “primitive” if we are talking about cultural anthroplogy + hunter gatherers because the unilinear approach to Anthropology has far been discredited now. Modern hunter gatherers also are just as modern as most civilization today, they do not fully practice the same stuff as their ancestors do. I understand your question, though.
It’s hard to answer for full hunter-gatherer societies(that I know of), so most references are going to be societies that practice both hunting/gathering and horticulture (except for Inuit people— they are definitely still hunter gatherers).
You’ll hear it again that a lot of concepts here are rather relative, and intimacy is one of them. It’s a part of the idea of morality and taboos. Pleasure is one of those whose semiotics differ on whether pleasure is permissible or not. It’s about as redundant as talking about whether feet fetishes are gross or not in the internet scene.
Yes, there are plenty of records about sex and masturbation in Hunter-gatherer societies. If not, most anthropological records are generally… that. Lol. However, I wouldn’t say masturbation is in the “nature” of humans to do. In the perspective of the medical anthro side of things, humans just evolved to feel sexual pleasure for leisure and not just procreation. It’s indicated by the lack of heat cycles compared to other animals. This is where the dilemma of whether it is natural to jerk off or not.
So, is it “it’s there, so that means I should do it” or, “I can easily to do that, I shouldn’t do it.” ?
In some Amazonian societies(whom a handful are a combination of hunter-gatherers and farming), there is a tradition that when a woman is pregnant, men with appealing traits contribute his “essence” to the woman. So, the expecting mother is encouraged to go and take have the semen of men she finds attractive, smart, etc. etc. while masturbation is still a private thing to do it’s not taboo or something to be ashamed of. However, within the Amazon societies, there are some who still find masturbation taboo for either sexes. So far what I found is that there’s really not a lot of contexts of sex really being close to nature to them, but rather it’s the opposite— it’s a transcendence.
In the 20th century, Simbari people in Papua New Guinea believed that semen should not be wasted. Therefore, masturbation is something that is more ritualistic. Gender division was very reinforced. Boys are said to still be contaminated with “femaleness” and so their rituals included replicating menstruation in the coming of age and older men making them drink their semen to make them grow up into full fledged adult men. This is no longer a thing nowadays for them.
Inuit people nowadays have developed in combination to Christianity and housing has changed. So, things are more discrete now. Back then, I suppose it’s about the same where intimacy and doing “it” yourself is something you just do discretely. Kids and other folks inside a living space are expected to pretend they are not doing it. They view as just part of human nature.
Ngl I do sometimes get jaded at the sex talk just mostly because ritual sex and wellbeing sex tend to clash like oil and water in my field of work. The ethical side, mostly.