First for the caveats and perspectives. 

• Masturbation is a human behavior, worthy of study and quantification like any other behavior. It’s a real thing, it’s a thing some people do. Furthermore, it’s a thing the Church has taken a position on. Therefore, it is fair game for quantification vis-a-vis Church members as long as it is treated appropriately. It has been heartening to see BYU professors, for example, publishing frequently in top sexuality journals.

 

• A lot of rhetoric around masturbation (perhaps influenced by Seinfeld’s famous competition episode) sort of takes for granted that just about everybody masturbates, so the world is divided up between hypocrites and authentic people when, as we’ll see, a significant portion of the population doesn’t masturbate on any frequent basis. Sometimes there’s this quasi-freudian, quasi-intellectual take that not masturbating bottles things up and causes mental issues, but there’s really no evidence for that perspective.

 

• There’s an ongoing effort to imply that the Church has backtracked and now has no position on masturbation simply because there hasn’t been an explicit “little factories” talk for a while, but you have to really stretch the evidence to see that.

Okay, with that, how often do self-identified Church members masturbate? I found one survey from about ten years ago that has enough members (332) that asks the question that we can do a quick analysis (at this sample size I’m not worrying about weights). 

When did you last masturbate?