Friends in my class say they’ve never masturbated. But certain sites state that just about every boy in puberty engages in masturbation.
Now I don’t know who to believe and I wonder the percentage of the number of men masturbating.
Answer
According to the authoritative studies by Alfred Kinsey and his team (USA), the percentage of adult men who have ever masturbated is 92%; for women this is 62%. A similar 2007 UK study found that 53% of men surveyed reported having masturbated in the past week; 18% of female respondents. According to a 2004 Canadian study, which relies on respondents who self-registered to participate (which makes the results less reliable: it is likely that sexually active individuals in particular volunteered to participate), 81% of men between the ages of 10 and 15 years with masturbation. In fact, according to the same study, the frequency of masturbation among men decreases as early as the age of 17, although according to that study most men also practice self-gratification daily or several times a day in their twenties, and in many cases continue to do so even if they are much older.
I get this data from the English Wikipedia article “Masturbate”, which has an extensive citation; the Dutch article on the same subject lacks source references, making it scientifically unusable.
Answered by
Prof. Gert Buelens
English and American Literature American Studies Gender and Sexuality
http://www.ugent.be
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