Fritz Bachen – The Consumer Psychologist

WHY PEOPLE BUY, WHAT THEY BUY

Stop Abusing Masturbation: Why we should get it out in the open

Opinion


About the only thing I ever got told about masturbation at school was that a) 95% of guys did it, and 5% lied, and b) around 66% of woman masturbate. This is silly, and I find it extraordinary that something that gives so much pleasure to so many people is not more openly discussed.

Recently Psychology Today has written an excellent article on masturbation. Among the highlights are the fact that the Spanish government ran a campaign encouraging its citizens to masturbate ‘Pleasure is in your own hands’. Further, the article talks about the dangers of masturbating such as picking up bad habits i.e. masturbating about inappropriate fantasies. This is a topic worth ‘outing’ in and of itself. Although not mentioned in the article, it’s likely that people who commit sexually deviant / illegal / harmful acts have masturbated about the act 100′s or 1000′s of times previously, conditioning them to eventually commit the act they are fantasising about. Further, they’ll relive the act over and over again through masturbation, in turn conditioning them to do the act again. The more masturbation is discussed, the less likelihood that people will a) feel guilty about it, or ) pick up such bad / harmful habits.


However, masturbation obviously also provides a lot of ‘joy’. Most of us (I assume) have gotten a grip on the art of masturbation and practice it frequently.

I’ve long seen masturbation as one of the last untouched bastions open to us in advertising / marketing. We presented an idea once to a client that clearly communicated the brands proposition, and would no doubt have got ‘cut through’ – through it’s use of masturbation (albeit somewhat veiled). They didn’t buy it. However, why shouldn’t masturbation be a topic of communications. Masturbation is fun, enjoyable, aspirational, a part of daily life (or near enough to it), and is a very, very strong conditioner of human behaviour.

Masturbation works via paired association. Think about something, couple that thought with pleasure (orgasm) and whatever you were thinking about becomes more desirable. For marketers interested in behavioural change, this is a massive, but as yet missed opportunity.

Anyone game?

PS Masturbation Month is in May – so this article came a month early.