I decided I couldn't spare time to read in detail your entire treatise on overcoming religious anti-masturbation dogma (Flipping Off the Pleasure Police), but I'm grateful for your having shared your experience. I could identify with so much of it although my insane childhood was spent in a Seventh-day Adventist home and community.

Looking for some sense of connection (a detailed lexicon of paraphilias in my case) I stumbled onto John Money's Destroying Angel, a book about the lingering effects of the Victorian anti-masturbatory hysteria. Particularly, Money dissected this hysteria in my childhood church among two of its prominent early leaders: John Harvey Kellogg and Ellen G. White.

I believe that having parents too damn concerned that I never pleasure my genitals from my earliest memories led to my being clueless for most of my adult life as to my sexual best interest. It was a self-hating setup for abuse. I am learning to accept sexual pleasure when it is in my best interest. Thing is, I believe that sex, like intoxicants, can be a way to deny one's own reality. That's what I had been doing through compulsive masturbation.

When they instruct parents to attempt to keep their children from discovering self-pleasure, those Victorian moralizers seem to me to have been assuming a codependent role in perpetuating sexual self-hatred through compulsive masturbation. If instead they had been willing to talk about their own feelings with their children instead of taking care (control?) of their children's sexuality, possibly they could have fostered an atmosphere of trust in which masturbation could have been about pleasure instead of addiction. It's tragic they degraded themselves and their children so. I saw it happen between my parents and me.

It wasn't until I was able to open up about my own experience among other recovering sex addicts that I began to reclaim a sexuality of my own. And I believe that work will go on for the rest of my life; it will always be a matter of progress and yet-unfinished tasks. But it's essential.

—an appreciative reader

[Webmaster's note: Thanks for your thoughtful letter; I appreciate what you had to say. I admire Money's work and will check out this title. I was interested the other day to read that today, in America, there are more people who call themselves "former" Seventh-Day Adventists than there are current Seventh-Day Adventist church members. Hmmmmm! I do make reference to Kellogg in my tome which you partially read. I have concerns, though, about the pop therapy opinion that classifies a strong interest in sex (and/or masturbation) as an addiction. Those notions were initiated by avowed Evangelical Christian therapists in the '80s and unfortunately they persist. Most non-denomination-aligned reputable therapists reject the addiction theme nowadays. ~Dave]