Myths and misconceptions about masturbation are common even among doctors.

Every third patient who comes to my clinic is a doctor. Medical students in our country do not receive any training in the psychopathology and psychophysiology of sex and sexual dysfunctions.

 There were months when I used to get only doctors as patients.

Telling a patient that masturbation is normal is not enough. He needs to be CONVINCED that it’s normal.

So I begin by asking them if sexual intercourse is harmful. They would reply, “No doctor.” Then I tell them what the penis does in a woman’s vagina, it
does the same in the folded palm during masturbation. It helps to makes the transition to partner sex easier.

Meaning, if you know how to speak Hindi, you can learn Marathi faster or if you know how to speak English, you can learn French faster, because the script is the same.

So then they ask me “doctor what about excessive masturbation?” I tell them there is no such thing called excessive masturbation or that you are in no way going to weaken your penis through excessive masturbation, just like the way your tongue doesn’t become weak if you talk too much or become strong if you keep quiet. The immediate question then is, “but doctor, how can you compare tongue with penis?”

So I explain the similarities one by one: Tongue is highly vascular (made up of blood vessels), penis is highly vascular; tongue does not have bone, penis does not have bone (the penis is like a rubber, so no question of fracturing it either); tongue is centrally located, penis is centrally located.

It takes some time to do the convincing, but out of the 55,000 patients I treated at KEM hospital over four decades, nobody has come back to me again with misconception over masturbation.

(Continues)

(In conversation with Sangeeth Sebastian, writer and founder of Vvox, a sextech platform. The biography is a part of an AKADialog initiative to capture the lives of newsmakers.)