Men who distrust science and hold more conservative political views are more likely to seek to abstain from masturbation, according to new exploratory research published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. The findings suggest that attitudes and beliefs, rather than psychological dysregulation or sexual problems, are the strongest predictors of abstinence from masturbation.

“One of my students and lead author of the paper approached me with the topic. He had gotten interest in so-called reboot websites that offer support for men who want to fight what they perceive as a porn addiction and one recommendation of many of these websites to refrain from masturbation for at least a short period of time,” explained study author Roland Imhoff, a professor at Johannes Gutenberg University in Germany.

“We were interested in whether we could find out more about the underlying architecture of men’s decision to refrain from masturbating, given the previous lack of literature and sexological qualification as a perfectly healthy behavior in most cases.”

The researchers recruited 1,063 adult male participants from the social news and entertainment platform Reddit, who completed an online survey regarding the strength of their motivation to abstain from masturbation, hypersexuality, average masturbation frequency per month, sexual dysfunction, trust in science, conservatism, religiosity, and perceived healthiness.

Approximately 64% of participants had tried to be abstinent from masturbation at least once. The researchers found that stronger beliefs regarding the social consequences of masturbation, lower trust in science, more conservative attitudes, stronger religiosity, and perceiving masturbation as unhealthy were all associated with greater motivation to abstain from masturbation.

Participants who agreed with statements such as “My attempts to change my sexual behavior fail” also tended to express greater motivation to abstain from masturbation. But the motivation to be abstinent was not associated with other aspects of hypersexuality, such as using sex to forget about problems. Masturbation frequency before reduction was also unrelated to the motivation to be abstinent.

“What we observe is that the motivation to abstain from masturbation is not strongest in people who report the most serious sexual problems (like hypersexuality or erectile dysfunction) but that the stronger correlates were opinions about masturbation as harmful for productivity, harmful for the appreciation of sexual partners and as a generally unhealthy behavior,” Imhoff told PsyPost.

“The major caveat here is that we look at correlations. These data are mute with regard to causality. It is tempting to interpret the findings as saying that (objectively not well substantiated) beliefs about negative effects of masturbation cause the motivation to be abstinent. There are other possibilities, however, like these opinions being formed after the fact as a way to justify the already made decision to abstain from masturbation or a third variable (social conservatism) causing both.”

“Only after running this study we learned that there is a heated debate between protagonists running these reboot websites and other parties, sometimes defamed as agents of the porn-industry. We have no stakes in this, our study is purely descriptive, trying to understand such decisions better. Part of this is also that I feel the need to emphasize that our participants were NOT members of a reboot community but over a thousand men recruited over a non-topical subreddit. Whether these data generalize to members of reboot communities is thus open to future scrutiny,” Imhoff added.

The study, “Abstinence from Masturbation and Hypersexuality“, was authored by Felix Zimmer and Roland Imhoff.