You are right, I could have worded this response much better.

I agree, sex and masturbation are natural and normal and we shouldn’t be judged for doing it.

I should have started with the advice that she talks to her partner about their different sex drives and they find a way to deal with it together. I agree absolutely with what you said:

“One spouse shouldn’t have to sneak off in secret to relieve themselves if the other isn’t into sex that night. What I’m saying is that the spouse who needs an orgasm should be able to be open about it, and maybe there might be levels of intimacy in which the other spouse could be involved, helping, or just being there with them. But perhaps the other spouse would rather not be privy to it if they’re not in a sexual mood. It’s up to them.”

I stand by my comment that there is a problem for this couple though. The problem isn’t that she wants to masturbate, but the fact that she feels she needs to hide it and that she is unable to sleep without doing it every night. It’s that that needs to be dealt with in order for them to have a better relationship and happier sex life.

Madame X’s answer was the biggest load of judgmental crap I’ve ever heard. So it’s OK in our twisted Puritanical culture to booze it up or swallow a bunch of pills in the evening to get to sleep with the stress of our modern and married lives, but when someone finds a natural, intended way for the body to relieve its own stress, you JUDGE them? You say they’re doing something wrong in the relationship, and they have to cut back something therapeutic and beneficial in order to conform to a confining notion of married sexuality?

And you know nothing about physiology and stress. My God, what you’re saying could harm people.

One spouse shouldn’t have to sneak off in secret to relieve themselves if the other isn’t into sex that night. What I’m saying is that the spouse who needs an orgasm should be able to be open about it, and maybe there might be levels of intimacy in which the other spouse could be involved, helping, or just being there with them. But perhaps the other spouse would rather not be privy to it if they’re not in a sexual mood. It’s up to them.

BUT IT’S NOT A PROBLEM IN ANY SENSE OF THE WORD to need this or to engage in this release. It’s like eating or urinating or defecating. Some spouses do all of those things openly, sometimes together. Others do not. It’s just a bodily function, and it’s an individual and personal choice about how intimate people wish to be.

Only the religious zealots and otherwise narrow minded have made it a big deal, a judgmental crisis, when one gets some pleasure from a bodily function that it may only be invoked in a patriarchal-dominated and regulated ritual within a marriage.

What a load of crap.