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But masturbation directly attacks personal integrity and the body’s
capacity for self-giving, its “nuptial meaning.”
The immediate intention of the masturbator is to have a
sentient and emotional experience: the sensation of orgasm and the
accompanying emotional satisfaction. Masturbation is the choice to
have the sentient and emotional experience of sexual orgasm by the
manipulation of one’s own sexual capacity. But, as Grisez says in a
very perceptive passage:
In choosing to actuate one’s sexual capacity precisely in
order to have the conscious experience of the process and
its culmination, one chooses to use one’s body as an
instrument to bring about that experience in the
conscious self. Thus the body becomes an instrument
used and the conscious self its user. This is done when
one works and plays, and also when one communicates,
using the tongue to speak…the genitals to engage in
marital intercourse. In such cases, the body functions as
part of oneself, serving the whole and sharing in the
resulting benefits [in short, in such cases the body is
integrated fully into “personal integrity”]. By contrast,
in choosing to masturbate, one does not choose to act for
a goal which fulfills oneself as a unified bodily person.
The only immediate goal is satisfaction for the conscious
self; and so the body, not being part of the whole for
whose sake the act is done, serves only as an extrinsic
instrument. Thus, in choosing to masturbate one chooses
to alienate one’s body from one’s conscious subjectivity. 38
Such self-alienation amounts to an existential dualism between
the consciously experiencing subject and his/her body, i.e., a
division between body and conscious self. Masturbation damages
the unity of the acting person as conscious subject and sexually
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