I’m writing in response to some of my fellow blogger’s comments about Alpert’s lecture on Jewish Views of Solitary Sex. (First, my apologies for taking so long to respond with a comment about this talk!) I thought the talk itself was interesting, but what I actually found more interesting were some of the responses my classmates had to the lecture.

Many people commented on how the talk made them quite uncomfortable, especially since I think some of us did not know what the lecture was going to be about before it began. Masturbation is probably one of the most taboo topics one could lecture on — the lecture was likely entitled “solitary sex” because people feel so uncomfortable hearing or saying the word “masturbate.” I think I am unusually comfortable talking about issues relating to sexuality in both private and public settings (in large part because I participated in TCNJ’s production of Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues this year), so I personally did not really feel uncomfortable at Alpert’s lecture. However, I could tell that other members of the audience did, and I could easily see why they felt so.

One particularly interesting issue were raised by one of my classmates. Another blogger wondered: if masturbation is private and solitary, why try to justify it? If no one knows and no one talks about it, does it even need to be justified?

This raises the question: what is the purpose of justification? Is it to provide a rationale for performing an action? If so, does it matter whether the rationale is public or private? Or is it a reasoning process that helps us decide what we ought to do?

I am inclined to think the latter — though justification is often used as an after-the-fact rationalization, ideally I think we justify actions in order to figure out why we committed them, whether we should have committed them, and whether we should commit them again in the future. It seems that the question raised by my classmate rests on the opposite view, and perhaps betrays an implicit idea that the role of justification is to gain public approval, or that there are different standards for private and public justification.

If we do not need to justify masturbation because it is private, what else might we not need try to justify? For example, is it acceptable to sexually fantasize about children or family members or sheep? Do we need to justify overdosing on alcohol or legal over-the-counter drugs in the privacy of our own home? The above are private acts that affect no one else - if justification is reserved for the public sphere, it seems we don’t need it for these cases. And finally, if masturbation were frequently spoken of and became a standard topic of public conversation, would we suddenly have to start justifying it?

(Of course, I am not at all trying to draw any kind of comparison between the questions I raised and the act of masturbation — such a comparison would be very inappropriate, for abusing drugs is clearly physically unhealthy in a way masturbation is not. Moreover, I wish to remain neutral as to the moral, social, or physical acceptability or unacceptability of the acts I mentioned as examples.)

Forgive me for perhaps approaching this too much like a philosopher, and possibly taking what was probably a casual comment by my classmate too seriously. However, I think the question raises an interesting independent issue about the role of justification that is relevant to many public and academic discussions of moral and religious issues.

– Alida Liberman

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