Opinion: O'Donnell's masturbation miscalculation

Like all novice time travelers, Christine O’Donnell is still acclimating to her new environment.

Likely hailing from the early 17th century, she has now inexplicably found herself in a world that has left her behind.

Dazed from such a radical dislodgment in time, O’Donnell can’t seem to comprehend that cultural attitudes and practices have changed with the years and that thinking and reasoning have significantly evolved.

She wanders through our glinting metropolises and gazes at our fume-belching automobiles, desperately trying to insert the ideas she knows into this new life — the ideas she can understand.

But the world has no room for these relics of the past. O’Donnell is trying to install an old carburetor in a new car, and the parts just won’t cooperate.

O’Donnell’s beliefs are obscenely antiquated and potentially harmful. In particular, her position on masturbation represents her at her most ignorant and most hypocritical.

Back in the mid-1990s, O’Donnell’s evangelical Christian group, The Saviors Alliance For Lifting the Truth, was featured in an MTV spot. In the promo, she explains why masturbation, especially during marriage, is a sin:

“The Bible says that lust in your heart is committing adultery, so you can’t masturbate without lust. ... you’re going to be pleasing each other, and if he already knows what pleases him and he can please himself, then why am I in the picture?”

There are two significant errors in her argument.  

First, O’Donnell assumes that if a man can masturbate, then he would have no interest in having sex with his spouse.

The idea that the ability to masturbate renders intercourse obsolete is so sadly naive I almost feel bad for her. For those of us who have participated in both activities, I don’t think I need to waste another word describing the different experiences each act offers.

Perhaps O’Donnell equates the two because she imagines the orgasm as the only benefit attained from sexual activity. Unfortunately, she is ignoring the thrills of the journey and the intimate connection two people can reach amidst the throes of passion.

Hangela can’t really do that for you.

Second, O’Donnell states if the man can please himself, “then why am I in the picture?”  She is effectively saying that a woman’s primary importance in a marriage is to please her partner, and if he can accomplish this feat without her, she becomes useless.  

Her argument against masturbation emphatically espouses the significance and sanctity of marriage while simultaneously debasing the woman’s role in said marriage to a subservient concubine.

Furthermore, the man’s only requirement of the relationship seems to be sex. Things like love and companionship are inconsequential.

The marriage O’Donnell reveres, the marriage bestowed to us by God, merely depends on the woman’s ability to sexually satisfy her man. Is this the holy coupling she believes God has intended?

If so, then stop reading here. But if not, then this belief contradicts the moral puritanism she is so eager to proclaim.

But as much as I berate O’Donnell and her beliefs, I know she is not to blame. Whatever curious wind carried her here is already nuzzling the leaves of some future tree. She is stuck in our world for the moment, unaware of how incompatible she and we really are.


E-mail: joskraus@indiana.edu