Masturbation Among Malaysian Young Adults: Associated Sexual and Psychological Well-Being Outcomes

Abstract

Despite being a common sexual practice, not much is known about masturbation within the Malaysian context. The current study examined the masturbation practices of a convenience sample of Malaysian young adults, and how one’s reported experience of masturbating and frequency of masturbation is associated with sexual and psychological well-being. Satisfaction with sex life, satisfaction with life, depression, anxiety, and stress were measured as outcome variables. Responses from 621 participants (M = 22.1 years, SD = 2.4 years) that were collected through an online questionnaire were analyzed. Results revealed that most participants (77.7%) had masturbated at least once in their life. Sexual satisfaction and psychological well-being did not differ between those who reported masturbating before and those who did not. Among those with masturbation experience, higher frequency of masturbation was associated with less sexual satisfaction and more symptoms of anxiety and stress. Masturbation frequency was not associated with life satisfaction or reports of depressive symptoms. Gender, frequency of partnered sex, availability of a sexual partner, and religiosity did not moderate the relationships between masturbation frequency with sexual satisfaction and psychological well-being. Although the limitations of the current study impede generalizability, masturbation was found to be a common behavior among the current sample. Causal inferences cannot be drawn from the significant associations found in the current study, as the findings indicate such relationships may be bidirectional.

Relationship between Solitary Masturbation and Sexual Satisfaction: A Systematic Review

“…In relation to the obtained findings about the relation between solitary masturbation and sexual satisfaction, the studies that jointly considered men and women pointed out a negative relation between solitary masturbation and sexual satisfaction [55,57,62,68] or no relation [57,66]. Despite some studies including gender as a covariable (e.g., [57,62]), the results must be cautiously considered given the known differences between men and women in the various parameters associated with masturbation [26,74,[86][87][88][89][90].…”

“…Five studies (22.7%) examined the relation between masturbation and sexual satisfaction in men and women together. They revealed a negative relation [55,57,62,68] or no relation [57,66] between both variables.…”

“…Seventeen of the twenty-two papers included both men and women samples [12,15,16,37,41,[46][47][48][49]55,57,59,62,[64][65][66]68], while four papers were conducted exclusively with women [36,40,42,44] and one with men [53]. Three studies reported exclusively heterosexual participants [47,48,53], and six also included populations of other sexual orientations (e.g., gay or bisexual) [16,41,42,46,55,66].…”

“…Regarding the response scale, except for two studies in which presence/absence was evaluated dichotomously (i.e., having masturbated vs. not having masturbated) [15,66] and one in which the response was free (i.e., indicate the number of times) [36], in the remaining papers that specified it, Likert-type response scales of three [59], four [55], five [48], six [16,41,49,68], seven [12,46,57], eight [53,62], nine [42,44], and ten [64] categories were used.…”