閱讀中文版：https://henryau.org/2026/09/07/sexual_ethics1/

1. Why God Designed Sexual Desire

Why did God create sexual desire? The question sounds abstract, but the answer actually shapes how we judge a whole range of concrete situations — including masturbation, pornography, and even the newer cases of realistic sex dolls and AI-powered sex robots.

Original Post in Chinese: https://henryau.org/?p=7754

Sexual desire itself is a good gift from God, not a burden to be suppressed. The following observation is offered specifically about men — the author is not confident that female sexual desire works the same way, and won’t extrapolate carelessly here. For men, without this drive, humanity would probably have died out long ago. Men are naturally prone to laziness; without something as physically urgent as sexual desire pushing them along, many would rather spend the whole day gaming or watching sports — activities that cost nothing — than go to the trouble of pursuing a woman, building a relationship, and taking on the responsibilities of marriage and family. In that sense, this drive exists, for men, precisely because God designed it to counter that inertia — it forces a person out of the comfortable little world of the self, out to risk rejection in pursuit of another person.

Giving people sexual desire and giving people the need for friendship are, in fact, the same design logic. God gave human beings a longing for friendship so that they would learn to love and connect with others — not merely to satisfy their own feeling of being accompanied. In the same way, God gave sexual desire so that people would connect with the opposite sex and love one another — not merely as an outlet for self-gratification. God’s design for sex is that a man should leave his father and mother and be united to his wife (Gen. 2:24) — pointing toward union with another person, not an action completed on oneself.

2. The Core Criterion: Does It Point Toward a Real Other Person?

If the purpose of sexual desire’s design is to connect us with another person, then the first question in judging any specific behavior is: does this behavior point toward a real relationship, or is it merely self-service? Masturbation is the best starting point for testing this criterion.

The problem with masturbation has the same structure as the problem of someone who spends all day pouring out their heart to a chatbot. A chatbot can, to some extent, genuinely meet a person’s social need to be heard and responded to — but that isn’t learning to love; it’s just feeding a self-satisfying loop. Masturbation is the same: it may relieve sexual tension to some degree, but it isn’t exercising the very thing sexual desire was designed to lead a person toward — connecting with, and loving, another real person.

This is also why masturbation is worth being wary of: it happens to be the path of least resistance for releasing that drive. The real work that ought to happen — going out, pursuing, building a relationship, paying the cost of maintaining intimacy — gets bypassed. The desire is soothed, but the original momentum that was meant to drive a person toward another person gets used up along with it. God gave this fire so that it would push a person outward; if every time it flares up a person simply extinguishes it on the spot, that outward push eventually disappears.

This same criterion can also be applied to technology products like realistic sex dolls and AI sex robots, as well as sexually explicit anime characters — the question was never “does this involve a real person,” but “does this behavior point toward a real relational connection.” These cases will each be examined in turn later.

3. Ethical Reflections on Masturbation

(1) Two Completely Different Views of “Where the Sin Lies”

Let’s focus first on masturbation as a specific case, and look at how the church, historically, has judged whether it deviates from the design purpose of sex discussed above. Most people assume the disagreement on this question is “conservative vs. liberal.” It isn’t. The real disagreement is over where the sin is located.

One position (most typically the Catholic tradition) holds that the sin lies in the very structure of the act itself — sex is meant to be directed toward another person and toward procreation, and masturbation violates that structure. Even if nothing at all is going on in one’s mind, the act itself is already the problem.

The other position (held by most evangelicals, including Jim McGuiggan, who will be introduced in detail below) holds that the act itself is neutral — much like eating a good meal alone, or listening to a favorite piece of music alone. The sin, on this view, is located in the content of what one is thinking — whether one is fantasizing about sexual immorality, or is enslaved to the point of being unable to stop.

These two positions don’t differ merely in degree — they differ in the criterion itself. You cannot persuade someone holding the first position by strengthening the arguments for the second, because they are not even arguing about the same thing.

(2) An Easily Overlooked Fault Line: Three Readings of the Same Passage

Interestingly, the same passage — Paul’s statement that it is better to marry than to burn with passion (1 Corinthians 7:9) — is used by people holding opposite positions, yet read to support opposite conclusions.

Setting Captives Free is a Christian counseling ministry devoted to helping people overcome pornography, masturbation, and related struggles; its position is that masturbation itself is sin, a gateway to bondage. Their use of this verse runs as follows: if masturbation really were an option God permitted, this is exactly the place where Paul should have mentioned it but didn’t — the phrase “better to masturbate than to burn” never appears, which shows that God does not sanction this option; the only outlet Scripture recognizes is marriage.

McGuiggan reads the very same sentence in the opposite direction: Paul, he argues, is here acknowledging that “burning with passion” is a condition people commonly face, and the wording itself carries a tone of understanding — which suggests that some form of relief is understood, even sympathized with, rather than requiring a person simply to wait until their wedding day.

The author’s own reading of this passage differs from both: sexual desire is itself one of the reasons that moves a person to consider marriage. When Paul says “better to marry than to burn,” the direction of the statement is to treat this desire as a driving force pointing toward marriage itself — not toward some form of self-administered relief. This is consistent with the position taken in Section 1 above — God gave this desire precisely in order to push people outward, toward building a committed relationship with another person. “Better to marry” is exactly this design at work; it is not Paul sympathetically making room for people to find some other way around it.

The same passage, three different presuppositions, three different readings — which is a reminder: the mere fact that “Scripture doesn’t mention it” cannot, by itself, settle anything. What actually determines the direction of the argument is each person’s own assumptions about “what a human being is, and how desire should be regarded” — and it is precisely these assumptions that need to be examined.

(3) How McGuiggan Sees It, and How the Author Sees It

The author’s first serious engagement with this question came over a decade ago, reading an article by Jim McGuiggan, a well-known figure in the traditional Churches of Christ (a different branch from the author’s own International Churches of Christ), arguing that masturbation is not necessarily sin. That article has since been taken down, but the author kept a saved copy along with several comments jotted down in the margins at the time — and it’s a good place to begin.

McGuiggan’s article candidly admits that there is no single passage of Scripture that addresses this issue directly, and that reasoning from “principles” is not easy either — principles, once applied to actual cases, turn out to be as complicated as arguing a case in court. He begins with a distinction: not all masturbation is the same. If what one imagines during the act involves sexual immorality, unfaithfulness, or even bestiality, that content itself is sinful; but absent such content, he defines masturbation as something quite simple — self-stimulation for one’s own pleasure.

His central argument is an analogy: a person eating a good meal alone, or listening to a favorite piece of music alone, doesn’t need another person present for that sensory pleasure to be legitimate — so why should enjoying sexual pleasure alone be any different? He also offers a reductio: if one insists that “all sexual pleasure must be confined to married couples,” then holding hands, hugging, and kissing before marriage should, in principle, also be forbidden — yet almost no one actually holds this view, which suggests the underlying premise doesn’t hold up (though he concedes that very strict believers can hold this position consistently). For those already bound by a covenant, he holds that fidelity requires reserving hands, eyes, and heart for one’s spouse — a point he regards as beyond dispute, though he stresses that it doesn’t directly resolve the question of masturbation itself. He devotes the most space to the situation of unmarried people — citing Paul’s line about burning with passion to argue that Paul treats an inability to exercise self-control as a normal human condition, and that the church cannot simultaneously insist that sexual desire is God-given and nothing to be ashamed of, while forbidding any response to that desire whatsoever. His conclusion: he does not believe masturbation should be condemned “in principle”; its moral status depends on how it actually functions in a person’s life.

The author has several points of disagreement with this argument.

First, one distinction needs to be made clear from the outset: if a husband and wife bring each other to sexual satisfaction manually, that is simply one form marital sexual intimacy takes, and falls outside the scope of this article. What the author wants to ask about is a different situation — a person masturbating alone, fantasizing about their own spouse, while the spouse in question neither knows nor participates. McGuiggan gives a similar example — a soldier away from home fantasizing about his wife while masturbating — and the author agrees that, in terms of content, this is not unfaithfulness. But the author would add one qualification: even where the content is honest, this should only be treated as a stopgap measure for extreme circumstances (such as prolonged separation, or a spouse unable to have sex due to illness), and should not become a normalized practice outside those circumstances. Judgments about such extreme circumstances vary from person to person, and won’t be elaborated further here.

Second: the fact that something is given by God does not mean it cannot be misused — this is the author’s response to the unexamined assumption behind “why shouldn’t a God-given desire be used?”

Third, his reductio assumes that holding hands and hugging are themselves equivalent to sexual stimulation — so that “everyone accepts hand-holding and hugging” implies “everyone accepts some degree of sexual stimulation,” making masturbation no different. But this assumption isn’t precise enough: holding hands and hugging don’t necessarily involve sexual stimulation at all — two people of the same sex, for instance, can have this kind of contact without any sexual connotation. The real criterion should not be “the category of act called hand-holding or hugging,” but rather “whether this particular contact actually produces sexual stimulation” — if it does, it should be avoided, regardless of whether the two people involved are of the opposite or the same sex. Because McGuiggan’s reductio rests on the wrong criterion to begin with, it doesn’t actually hold up.

Fourth, and most fundamentally: the author questions an unstated premise running through his entire argument — whether a person actually has some entitlement to having their sexual desire satisfied. Treating “sexual desire needs to be satisfied” as something close to an inherent right may already smuggle in a mistaken piece of logic — that a gift from God implies an obligation on God’s part. That God gives us a longing does not mean God owes us a way to satisfy it; in the same way, God gave us appetite, and that did not stop Jesus from teaching his disciples to fast and depend on God directly. Appetite for food and sexual desire are, moreover, not needs of the same order at all — go without food entirely, and a person dies; go without sex entirely, and a person does not. If even the appetite for food, on which survival depends, can be voluntarily restrained through fasting, then sexual desire, which survival does not depend on, has even less claim to being treated as something that absolutely must be satisfied. A similar confirmation can be found in other religious traditions — the celibate traditions of Buddhist monastics, for instance, are themselves living proof that a person can live a full, even better, life without having sexual desire satisfied. This is not a peculiarly Christian notion.

Fifth, there is also a problem with how the argument is built: McGuiggan uses the most unimpeachable case imaginable — a married person, separated by distance, masturbating while fantasizing about their own spouse — to support the much broader conclusion that “masturbation by unmarried people is also not necessarily sin.” But the two situations are not equivalent. In the married case, the object of the fantasy is at least a real person with whom one has a committed relationship; an unmarried person masturbating typically has no such object to point toward at all, making the act, structurally, more purely self-service. Using the mildest, most exceptional case to argue for a conclusion covering a far broader range is too large a leap.

(4) Another Argument Worth Taking Seriously: James-Michael Smith

The author also wants to give a fair hearing to the strongest argument on the other side — one heard in an online course called Disciple Jojo, taught by James-Michael Smith. The author considers this the most solidly argued version of the “masturbation is not sin” position encountered so far, and it deserves serious engagement even though the author ultimately does not fully accept its conclusion.

His argument works on two levels. The first is a critique of historical genealogy: he points out that the position “masturbation is a grave sin” is, when traced back, actually built on a rather questionable chain of evidence — a pagan ethical oath from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, extensions of the law found in ultra-Orthodox Jewish tradition, the formal condemnation issued by Pope Leo IX in 1054, and then the pseudo-science of the nineteenth century claiming that masturbation caused disease (even the invention of Graham crackers and Kellogg’s corn flakes was originally meant to use a whole-grain diet to suppress adolescent sexual desire). None of the links in this chain is biblical exegesis at all — they are layers of cultural baggage and pseudo-science accumulated over time, mistaken for the weight of doctrine.

The second level goes back to the original context of the passages most often cited as proof-texts. The story of Onan in Genesis 38 is not really about “wasting semen” at all — it is about defrauding his widowed sister-in-law Tamar of the heir and inheritance she was owed, under the obligation of levirate marriage; the text describes what he did as “evil” because of this deception, not because of the physical act itself. The uncleanness following the emission of semen described in Leviticus 15 belongs to the category of ceremonial purity (the same category as touching a corpse, or menstruation — resolved simply by waiting until evening), not the category of moral wrongdoing; the two categories are kept entirely separate within the Levitical system itself. He also cites a passage from Gary Collins’s Christian Counseling: given that Scripture addresses such a wide range of sexual behavior — homosexual acts, bestiality, adultery, prostitution, rape, incest — it is hard to believe masturbation’s absence is accidental; clearly it is not one of God’s chief concerns, since Scripture has more to say about the mistreatment of animals than about this.

Smith’s final conclusion: masturbation itself does not constitute sin; what actually needs to be addressed is what Scripture explicitly speaks to — lust in the heart (Matthew 5:27–28) — not the physical act itself.

The author considers this argument stronger than McGuiggan’s — McGuiggan relies on a philosophical analogy, while Smith relies on solid exegesis of the original text combined with historical critique; both paths arrive at the same conclusion, but Smith’s path is far more secure. Earlier, in Section 2 above, the point was made that “biblical silence by itself cannot settle direction — direction comes from the assumptions surrounding that silence.” Smith’s argument is, in a sense, a counterexample to that very point — he isn’t arguing from silence at all, but is instead clarifying what the two most commonly misused passages (Onan, Leviticus) actually mean, dismantling the common misreading that these texts support condemnation. This step the author accepts entirely.

Where the author parts ways with him is not on the exegesis, but on the next step: he takes the conclusion “the act itself does not constitute sin” as the end of the matter, whereas the author has already argued in Section 2 that even where an act violates no explicit commandment, it may still fall outside God’s design for sexual desire, and thereby constitute a non-grave but real deficiency, as a matter of principle. The author accepts every step of his exegesis; the point is simply that the question hasn’t finished being asked.

If Smith’s own logic (that what really needs addressing is lust in the heart, not the physical act) is followed through to its end, then what he calls “not sin” should, strictly speaking, apply only to the purest possible case — pure physical stimulation for one’s own satisfaction with absolutely no fantasized object involved, whether a real person or a fictional character. As soon as any object of fantasy enters the picture, whoever it may be, the situation has already changed, and needs to be judged as a matter of lust rather than falling under his original “neutral” case.

The author has also heard people propose going even further — not thinking of anyone at all, and not viewing any pornographic content, purely physical self-relief. The author, on one hand, doubts how many people can genuinely achieve this in practice; but more importantly, even if it were achieved, it would still not escape “self-satisfaction” itself — God’s design for sex is that a person should leave father and mother and be united to a spouse (Gen. 2:24), pointing toward union with another person, not an action completed on oneself. Even with the question of lust entirely removed, the direction of the act itself still runs against God’s design. This is also why the author believes that judging by “whether lust is present” alone is not sufficient to answer this question fully — the reasons for which are laid out below in section (5).

(5) The Author’s Analysis

Let’s begin by making clear the situation most people actually encounter: when masturbating, most people have a specific object of fantasy in mind. According to Jesus’s teaching, in this situation the sin is already complete at the moment the thought arises — “everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). This means the criterion was never located in the physical act of masturbation to begin with, but in whether lust has been entertained. Whether masturbation follows or not is simply a subsequent matter, not the criterion itself.

Beyond this default case, there are several variants worth treating separately, since each falls under a different judgment:

  • Fantasizing about one’s spouse — this does not constitute lust/adultery in the Matthew 5:28 sense, but still carries the self-centeredness problem discussed below.
  • Fantasizing about a real third party — whether the person is married or single, this is simply the default case described above: the sin is already complete at the moment the thought arises, and masturbation is merely what follows, not the act that additionally constitutes the sin.
  • Fantasizing about a fictional object (realistic sex dolls, AI sex robots, sexually explicit anime characters) — this likewise does not involve lusting after a real person, but is equally a matter of self-centeredness and the abandonment of any possibility of real relationship, discussed in detail in Section 5 (Technology Products and Fictional Characters).
  • Pure physical stimulation with no object of fantasy at all — the most marginal case; Smith’s “not sin” conclusion, strictly speaking, only applies here, but even so, this still runs contrary to the direction of God’s design for sex, for reasons already discussed above (Gen. 2:24).

Among these variants, the only three not bound by the criterion of lust-completing-adultery-at-the-moment-of-thought are fantasizing about one’s spouse, fantasizing about a fictional object, and having no object at all — what these three share is a problem that is not lust, but self-centeredness. The absence of a spouse to betray does not make the act relational; it remains self-directed, regardless of whether one is married or single.

There is also a layer of selfishness here that has nothing to do with lust, and deserves to be raised on its own (the following uses “wife” as the example, since that is the author’s own situation, though the same principle applies equally to husbands): suppose a married person accepts that they may masturbate while fantasizing about their spouse, and uses this as a substitute for genuine intimacy with that spouse — because a spouse is not a sex toy available on demand; a spouse needs to be courted, needs tenderness, needs the relationship itself to be actively maintained, whereas satisfying oneself costs none of this and can be done on a whim, whenever one wants. This is no longer simply a matter of “not attending to the other person’s feelings while fantasizing” — it is substituting self-satisfaction for the effort a relationship actually deserves. This is a very concrete form of selfishness: the sin lies not in whose image comes to mind, but in choosing the path that requires no accountability to another person, no investment of time in the relationship, and can be activated unilaterally at any moment — thereby avoiding the real cost that genuine intimacy demands. What a spouse needs is connection and emotional bonding, not to be material used up in someone’s head and then set aside; if a person habitually chooses the latter, then even though the “object,” technically, is one’s spouse, this has already departed from the relational purpose sex was meant to serve.

The author’s position, then, is this: masturbation is not condemned by name in any single passage of Scripture, but according to the overall design Scripture reveals for sex — outward-facing, relational, directed toward another person — masturbation, as a self-directed mode of gratification, is at its core self-centered and self-serving, and the author considers it sin.

But this judgment should be placed honestly in its proper context, to avoid sounding alarmist. First, strictly speaking, classifying masturbation under the biblical categories of “sexual immorality” (porneia) or “adultery” (moicheia) is an inference rather than a direct textual classification — both terms, in their original usage, refer to sexual acts involving another real person, and masturbation does not strictly fit that definition. The author judges it to be sin because it departs from the design of sex as directed toward another person — not because it meets the definition of “sexual immorality” found in some particular passage; the two need to be kept distinct. Second, even granting that it is sin, its destructiveness is far lower than that of sexual sins that directly harm another person, betray a commitment, or violate someone’s bodily autonomy — paid sex, affairs, sexual harassment, rape. These directly harm another person; masturbation does not. Placing them all on the same scale is disproportionate.

The author does not accept treating sex itself as something shameful — sex is a good gift from God, and the entire Song of Solomon celebrates exactly this. Nor does the author accept portraying masturbation as some inevitable, all-consuming “sin of bondage” — narratives like Setting Captives Free’s “the moment you touch it, you’ve stepped through the gateway to slavery” strike the author as exaggerated, and tend, through fear and shame, to make it harder for people to honestly face the issue. But equally, the author does not accept the claim that “as long as there’s no lust, this is entirely neutral and nothing to be concerned about” — this underestimates the real effect it can have, as a habit and a mode of self-gratification, in orienting a person toward self-centeredness and weakening the capacity to connect with others.

This point matters especially for adolescents just entering sexual maturity, curious about exploring their own bodies. That stage of bodily exploration typically involves no fantasized object, and hasn’t become habitual — it is closer to simple physiological curiosity, and should not be branded with a frightening label like “sin of bondage.” What actually needs attention is whether that curiosity develops, over time, into the self-centered patterns discussed above — not the curiosity itself.

Furthermore, masturbation as an ongoing habit of self-gratification, even without any obvious lust, gradually cultivates a tendency: no need to attend to another person’s feelings or wishes, only to lose oneself in whatever imagined scenario is satisfying. C. S. Lewis put this very precisely: he describes masturbation as sending a man back into the prison of himself, there to keep an entire harem of imaginary “brides” — fantasy objects that are always available, always compliant, never refuse, and demand nothing in return, yet gradually come to replace real people. This is exactly the pattern that plays out in much actual masturbation, particularly when paired with pornographic content: not fixed on one person, but constantly swapping and accumulating different objects of sexual fantasy. The author believes that sanctification means gradually living out the character God’s children are meant to have — gradually learning to love better and become less self-centered — and this habit of inward self-gratification runs in exactly the opposite direction.

4. Ethical Reflections on Pornography

Pornography deserves to be treated on its own, because it is not the same kind of thing, in nature, as the masturbation this article has been discussing. The object in pornography is a real, existing person — not a fictional character, and not one’s own spouse — and viewing it with lust falls directly within the Matthew 5:28 criterion: it is adultery, with no room for inference — an explicit condemnation. Beyond that, the pornography industry itself generally involves the exploitation, coercion, and harm of its performers; watching pornographic content is, to some degree, consuming — and even indirectly sustaining — an industry that causes real harm to real people. This is no longer merely a private matter of one’s own lust; it adds a further layer of complicity in actual harm done to someone else. This is the one part of this article the author judges to be a clear, unqualified sin, unlike the more roundabout, inferential judgment reached regarding masturbation itself.

Some defend the pornography industry by appealing to the fact that participants are “consenting” — even claiming that watching it is, in some sense, helping them (whether the content is paid for or obtained for free). This argument doesn’t hold up: mutual consent does not mean something is morally sound, or something God delights in. Adultery and fornication, too, are very often consensual on both sides, and that has never been a reason they don’t count as sin. Sin distorts a person’s judgment and leads people to rationalize their own circumstances; someone who freely enters the pornography industry — not because they were forced or exploited, but purely for money — still has a genuine problem, and this doesn’t become a neutral commercial transaction simply because both parties are willing. But a distinction needs to be drawn here: someone driven by poverty, with no way out, into sexual slavery, is a person who needs to be helped and rescued, and should not be judged; as for those who entered the industry out of ignorance or greed, the act itself remains a genuine problem that should be named, but this does not make them any less deserving of compassion — judgment and compassion are two different things. Those who were forced should not be judged; but every performer, regardless of why they entered, deserves compassion.

One reminder worth adding: every time someone watches, it is, in effect, a vote cast for the whole industry, regardless of a given performer’s circumstances. The moment we consume, we are, to some degree, helping sustain the continuation of this. But compassion for performers is not, in the end, the main point of this section — the real point is this: we should hold a clear conviction not to use pornographic content, and not let ourselves become complicit in this whole system.

This also explains why simply viewing pornographic content without masturbating is not, in fact, any less problematic — many people assume that “I didn’t actually do anything, I only looked” means they’re safe, but if lust is present while looking, the sin is already complete at that moment, and whether masturbation follows is simply what comes after. One common self-deception is worth guarding against here: pornographic content is, by design, meant to arouse — it is not ordinary artistic appreciation. If someone claims they were watching “without any lust,” in most cases this is self-justification rather than a genuine exception, because the very nature of the material has already determined that viewing it can hardly avoid involving lust.

Masturbation combined with pornographic content also tends to develop into addiction considerably faster than masturbation alone — a point worth noting in pastoral practice.

The use of pornographic content skews heavily male — the numbers on this are fairly clear; as for how strong the connection is between pornography users and people who actually commit sexual offenses, the author is not confident enough to make a precise judgment, and would rather not speak too definitively here. But at least one point is clear and shouldn’t be controversial: storing or distributing sexually explicit images or videos of others is, in itself, a sexual offense, regardless of the reason the material was filmed or leaked — this is no longer a matter of “whether lust was present while watching,” but a direct violation of another person.

Pornography is, in fact, the more urgent problem to address — even more of a priority than masturbation itself. Many people, hoping to relieve sexual tension through masturbation, turn instead to pornography to “solve” the problem — but this is, in truth, poison, not medicine.

5. Ethical Reflections on Technology Products and Fictional Characters

The same criterion can also be applied to a case technology is increasingly bringing within reach: as increasingly lifelike sex dolls, and even interactive AI sex robots, keep coming to market, might someone argue that since these don’t involve a real person, they fall outside the problem discussed above?

The author believes the answer is exactly the opposite: these products are not outside the framework at all — they push the problem within the framework to its purest form. The criterion was never “whether a real person is involved,” but “whether this behavior points toward a real relational connection.” A realistic doll or an interactive robot goes even further than mere fantasy in removing all the friction that comes with actually maintaining a relationship — no need to court, no need to soothe, no need to attend to the other person’s real emotional ups and downs, because it is designed to be entirely compliant and entirely predictable. The kind of “bride kept in one’s head” that Lewis described has, here, become almost literally real. This is also the physical version of the same thing described earlier with the chatbot: a chatbot meets the need to be heard, but isn’t learning to love; a sex robot meets the need to be treated intimately, but likewise isn’t learning to love — and because it is more realistic, the degree to which this substitute “passes for the real thing” is even higher, making it that much easier for a person to give up altogether on pursuing a real relationship — because the gap between what one appears to gain and what one would actually have to give has been stretched even wider by technology.

The more technology advances, the sharper this problem becomes — it does not get diluted by the technical detail that “no real person is involved.”

There is also a common defense worth addressing: using sexually explicit anime characters as the object of masturbation — some argue this can’t harm any “real person,” since the object doesn’t exist at all; it’s fictional. This defense doesn’t hold up within the framework laid out here: the question was never “whether harm is done to that object,” but “whether this behavior points toward a real relationship.” Anime characters belong to the same category as realistic dolls and AI sex robots — entirely compliant, always available, never refusing, demanding nothing in return, reducing the opposite sex to a pure tool for one’s own satisfaction, rather than the object God designed to be respected and pursued. The claim that “it doesn’t harm a fictional person” actually sidesteps the real issue: the purpose of God’s design for sex was never merely “as long as you don’t harm anyone” — it was to lead a person toward connection with a real other person, and fictional characters remove precisely that possibility of connection, pushing the act to the purest possible form of self-service.

6. What Sex Is Meant to Be Within the Blessing of Marriage

Everything discussed in the sections above concerns problems that arise once sex departs from its design — but this article wants to close with a positive picture, rather than end on a list of sins.

1 Corinthians 7:1–8 confirms the purpose of God’s design for sexual desire from another angle. Paul says that a husband’s and a wife’s bodies do not belong to themselves alone, but to each other — a statement that was quite radical in the patriarchal society of the time, because it frames authority as mutual and reciprocal, not belonging to one side alone. Equally worth noting is the direction of Paul’s language: he speaks of giving the other person what is due them, not of taking from the other person — within marriage, the body is not a bargaining chip to be traded or claimed, but something offered to the other within a committed relationship. This is the same logic already discussed above — that sex is not an outlet for self-service — except that here Paul frames it as a concrete ethical instruction for marriage.

The Song of Solomon, in its entirety, confirms the same thing from another direction: in unrestrained, poetic language, it celebrates the beauty of physical longing and intimacy between husband and wife, and is widely understood as God’s own approval and blessing of this kind of intimacy. The sexual pleasure this book describes was never merely for procreation — it is mutual enjoyment and mutual service, which is simply another expression of the same logic found in 1 Corinthians 7: giving, not taking.

The question this article has been asking was never “is sexual pleasure itself bad” — it was “has this pleasure been placed where God designed it to be: mutual giving, rather than self-service.” Masturbation, pornography, and technology products are problems not because sex itself is a problem, but because they substitute self-service for the very place God intended people to arrive at — mutual giving and union with another real person.

7. Conclusion

The whole article can be summed up in one sentence: God created sexual desire to lead people toward real connection with another person, toward mutual giving — not to provide an outlet for self-satisfaction. Judged by this criterion: masturbation is not condemned by name in any passage of Scripture, but it is, at its core, self-centered and self-serving, and the author considers it sin. Pornography is also sin — its object is a real, existing person; choosing to watch is, in itself, already driven by lust, which amounts to adultery, compounded by the fact that it generally involves the exploitation of performers, and even where a performer participates willingly, this does not amount to a morally sound justification. But neither of these is the same as sexual sins like paid sex, affairs, sexual harassment, or rape, which directly harm someone in real life — those involve actual harm inflicted on another person, whereas masturbation and pornography, though equally sin, are not acts of harm committed against a real, identifiable individual in the world — this is a difference in kind, not a claim that either one deserves to be taken less seriously. Sex dolls, AI sex robots, and sexually explicit anime characters are all judged by the same criterion: the question is not whether a real person is involved, but whether the act points toward a real relational connection. What this article ultimately wants to say is this: we should hold a clear conviction not to use pornographic content — and, more worth remembering still, that the place sex was always meant to lead us to is mutual giving and union with another real person. That is God’s original, and best, intention in creating sexual desire.

References

  • Jim McGuiggan, What About Masturbation?, originally published at jimmcguiggan.com (page since taken down; preserved in the author’s personal archive)
  • James-Michael Smith, Disciple Jojo course, session eight: Masturbation and Christian Ethics
  • C. S. Lewis, personal letter (collected in The Collected Letters of C.S. Lewis, Volume 3)
  • Setting Captives Free, Masturbation: Doorway to Slavery
  • Gary R. Collins, Christian Counseling: A Comprehensive Guide
  • Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraphs 1857, 2352
  • Eve Tushnet, “What Could Possibly Be Wrong with Christian Masturbation?”, Christianity Today
  • Jordan Monge, “The Real Problem With Female Masturbation”, Christianity Today
  • Marlena Graves, “Getting to the Root of Female Masturbation”, Christianity Today
  • Brian Kissinger, “5 Myths About Masturbation”