The holiday is observed informally rather than institutionally. There are no national parades or post office closures. Its observance happens in sex-positive communities, in healthy households, in sex education curricula, and in the quiet privacy of individual lives. For Jonathan’s Circle, where mindful self-pleasure is treated as both spiritual practice and ordinary good health, the day is a natural one to mark openly.

Whatever else can be said about the holiday, this much is incontestable: nearly everyone reading these words has masturbated, and most have masturbated this week. A holiday that names something that universal is doing useful work simply by existing.

History

May 7 was established as Masturbation Day in 1995 by Good Vibrations, the San Francisco-based sex-positive retailer founded by feminist activist Joani Blank in 1977. The choice of date was a direct response to a political moment. The previous December, U.S. Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders had been forced to resign by President Clinton after suggesting, at a United Nations conference on AIDS, that masturbation might be appropriate to teach as part of comprehensive sex education — a remark that produced an immediate political firestorm. Good Vibrations created the holiday as a public response: an annual reminder that the position that had cost a respected physician her job was, in fact, simple medical common sense.

The holiday gradually expanded into International Masturbation Day and then into the full month of May. Other sex-positive organizations, sex therapists, and sexual health advocates picked up the date and began organizing fundraisers, public education campaigns, and clinic-day promotions around it.

The deeper history of the act itself is much older and more complicated. Masturbation has been variously celebrated, tolerated, ignored, and condemned across cultures. Some ancient Egyptian creation myths describe the god Atum bringing the world into being through masturbation. Greek and Roman physicians treated self-pleasure as a normal, sometimes medically useful, part of bodily life. Early Jewish and Christian moral teaching was generally restrictive but inconsistent in its emphasis. The intense Western shame and pathologization of masturbation that many men still carry traces largely to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when the medical establishment — building on a 1712 anonymous tract called Onania — began aggressively claiming that self-pleasure caused everything from blindness to insanity to physical deterioration. These claims had no scientific basis and were eventually retracted, but the cultural shame they produced has been remarkably durable.

The twentieth-century rehabilitation of masturbation was incremental. Kinsey’s research in the late 1940s established the practice as nearly universal across genders. The sexual revolution of the sixties and seventies normalized public discussion. Feminist sex educators in the seventies and eighties — Betty Dodson most famously — reframed masturbation as a positive practice of self-knowledge and bodily authority. Good Vibrations’ establishment of Masturbation Day in 1995 was both a culmination of those decades of work and a deliberate provocation against the political forces that wanted the conversation to disappear.

Observances

There is no single way to observe International Masturbation Day. Many sex-positive retailers and educational organizations run promotions, donate proceeds to sexual health organizations, or host public talks. Some clinics offer free testing or counseling appointments around the date. Sex educators use the day to publish articles, host webinars, and push back on misinformation. Pleasure-positive Substacks and podcasts often run dedicated episodes.

For individuals, observance can be as simple as the obvious: enjoy a thoughtful, unhurried session of self-pleasure on the day, perhaps with intention rather than just as a quick release. The deeper observance is a shift in attitude rather than a single act. Many sexual health writers suggest using the day as a chance to actually pay attention to one’s own pleasure: what genuinely feels good, what kinds of touch you tend to skip past, what fantasies bring you alive, what your body is actually asking for when you slow down enough to listen.

Mindful masturbation traditions — sometimes called solo sex meditation, body-mind integration, or solosexual practice — frame self-pleasure as a contemplative discipline rather than a hurried biological function. The Body Electric school, founded by Joseph Kramer in the eighties, has trained generations of men in extended sessions of conscious erotic touch as a vehicle for healing, meditation, and community. The Stonesong tradition that Jonathan’s Circle practices draws on this lineage.

For couples and partners, the day can be an invitation to mutual masturbation — not as a substitute for partnered sex but as a practice with its own particular intimacy. Showing your partner how you actually pleasure yourself is one of the most vulnerable and useful things sexual partners can share with each other.

For those wanting a less private observance, donate to a sexual health organization — SIECUS, Planned Parenthood, the Kinsey Institute. Read a thoughtful book on sexuality. Have an honest conversation about pleasure with someone you trust.

Male Perspective

Masturbation is, for most men, the first place we encountered our actual desires — the place where, often long before partnered sex was possible, we discovered who and what aroused us. For boys growing up in environments hostile to whatever shape their sexuality eventually took (and that includes many gay men whose desires found no public reflection in the world around them, but it includes many other men too — men whose desires fell outside whatever local norm prevailed, men who simply needed privacy that adult life rarely offered, men whose religious upbringing taught them their pleasure was suspect), self-pleasure was sometimes the only available laboratory for self-knowledge. That history makes the act tender as well as ordinary; it carries memory and survival in it for many men, and ordinary continuity for others.

And yet many men still inherit substantial shame around masturbation, often quite separate from any continuing religious belief. The shame persists as a kind of cultural muscle memory: the sense that one’s pleasure is somehow excessive, immature, or a sign of failure to find a proper partner. Sex therapists working with men of every orientation routinely encounter clients who have rich and frequent solo sexual lives accompanied by a steady background hum of guilt about it. The guilt is almost never proportionate to anything real.

The Circle’s approach — mindful masturbation as spiritual practice — reframes the act in a way that takes pleasure seriously without making it grandiose. Self-pleasure becomes a place where a man can practice presence with his own body, listen for what is actually arousing rather than what he thinks should be, breathe deeply enough that orgasm is not the only goal, and emerge from a session feeling more in his own skin than when he started. It is, in this frame, a form of meditation, no less serious than sitting on a cushion and arguably more honest about the body that is doing the meditating.

For partnered men, masturbation sometimes generates the only conflict it is going to generate within the relationship: the partner who wonders why you would want it when you have access to them. The honest answer is that solo sex and partnered sex meet different needs, and a healthy sexual life usually involves both. Solo sex is an act of self-relationship; partnered sex is an act of relationship with another. Neither replaces the other. Couples who can hold both as fully legitimate tend to fight less about it.

A simple way to mark the day, alone or with a partner: take longer than you usually take. Set down the phone, close the porn tab, slow your hand. Breathe. Pay attention to what your body is actually asking for. Let pleasure be a conversation rather than an errand. The holiday is asking very little of any of us — just that, for one day, we treat our own pleasure as worth a little extra time.