Just keep your grubby hands to yourself

Remember moral certainty? My generation grew up with it. Onanism makes you blind, red wine makes you pissed, and a nicely knotted tie makes a good impression. Thereafter there wasn't an awful lot you needed to know. Look smart, stay sober, and keep your hands off yourself and you'd live to a ripe old age with all your faculties intact and all your grandchildren around you.

I even wrote an essay on the subject for inclusion in the school magazine. The Clean Life it was entitled and ran to 3,000 words, which was 1,000 words longer than the school magazine. But length wasn't the only reason they refused to run it. They didn't like the tone of my opposition to such socio-sexual reformers as Alice Bunker Stockham. More than that, they didn't know who Alice Bunker Stockham was.

"She advocated karezza," I told the editor, who was also our English master.

"Don't be smart with me, Jacobson," he said. "A Japanese invented karezza."

"That's karate," I explained. "A martial art. Whereas karezza is the practice of withholding ejaculation." For which he put me in detention.

On the face of it, a clean-living boy like me should have approved of Alice Bunker Stockham. A doctor and reformer, born in Chicago in the 19th century, she numbered Tolstoy among her friends, was instrumental in the spread of the teaching of home economics in American schools, crusaded for the sanctity of marriage and fidelity therein, was active in the saving of fallen women, and otherwise shared my views on alcohol, tobacco and promiscuity.

But in this one regard were we divided: she encouraged masturbation, with the proviso that you stopped before you finished - a declined orgasm, in her view, being a step to higher spirituality, and a sort of rehearsal for the coitus reservatus you were going to practise when you took a wife.

Though I had no views on the benefits of karezza within marriage - for marriage was the last thing on my mind in the third year - I did oppose it in its solitary form, believing that without ejaculation a man would not feel as disgusted with himself as he ought, and therefore would come at last to see masturbation in a rosy light, with no downside in depression and disgrace.

You can't have an expense of spirit in a waste of shame - this was my point - unless you've spent or wasted something. In a word, I objected to her because at the final hurdle she was an enemy of moral certainty - onanism makes you blind, red wine makes you pissed, a nicely knotted tie makes a good impression, and all the rest of it.

Turns out now that it was all a lie anyway. Research published in the past month alone has reversed everything we were taught. It isn't masturbation that makes you blind, it's wearing a tie. Masturbation, it turns out, is good for you. Pleasure yourself two or three times an afternoon until you're 50 and there's a fair chance you won't get prostate cancer. There's also a fair chance you'll have lost the power of speech, broken both your wrists and developed a pendulous lip, but that's another matter. We're just talking prostates for the moment.

If it's any consolation, Alice Bunker Stockham was no less wrong than I was. Because it isn't the stroking that keeps you healthy; it isn't the self-love or the daydreaming or the broadmindedness; no, it's the release of semen. Leave it in there and there's risk of carcinogenic effect on the prostatic ducts; flush it through and you're cooking with gas. So much for karezza. Ha!

But elsewhere in her philosophy Alice Bunker Stockham was definitely on to something. When she wasn't persuading men to keep their powder dry, and thus leading them on to an early death, she was lecturing against the corset, which she believed to be more culpable in the matter of "deterioration of health and moral principle" than "intoxicating drinks". Forget the drinks. We now know that unless you're blotto every other evening your heart won't work. But her argument against corseteering matches the most recent findings on the tie. Overlacing is bad for us.

Researchers in New York have discovered that knotting your tie too tightly can lead to an increase in internal eye blood pressure in just a couple of minutes. And increases in internal eye blood pressure play a significant part in the development of glaucoma. Ergo, look too sharp and you might end up blind.

Who's to say where it will end. There is always something threatening to make us blind, and there is no guarantee that this time next year we won't be learning it's taking a summer holiday or going to the pub. Nor can we be sure, just because of what the latest researchers have been saying, that the old certainties won't have their day again. Can we really be so scientifically definite, for example, that it's the tie? What if we were to discover that men who have just masturbated are so concerned to appear clean the minute after, so want to make a good impression and remove all evidence and association of filth, and so need to punish themselves for their weakness, that they find their tightest tie and symbolically hang themselves in it? What if the rise in internal blood pressure is a red herring, a mere coincidence, and it was the post-factum horror of ejaculation that caused the blindness after all?

And what if it isn't the ejaculation that helps the prostate, but the sense of outrage? Not semen that cleans out the cells lining the prostatic duct, but shame. Whoosh! That's self-disgusted of Tunbridge Wells with his channels clear for another month.

You win some and you lose some. There is no other intelligent position. In the meantime, when you next see someone in the gutter with his shirt torn to his navel, a bottle of red wine in one hand, and his dick in the other, don't waste your sympathy on him. He's the healthy one.