Fear of masturbation was encouraged by this illustration from the book, Rescued at Last
Stop it or you’ll go blind!
I feel terribly sorry for the young men of my great grandfather’s generation: told to keep their hands above their waists on pain of a thousand terrible tortures. Not only were many young men of that era warned that “self-abuse” was immoral and likely to consign them to hellfire after death, they were also assured that the practice would stunt them physically in so many ways that blindness was probably the least of it. And to make matters worse, the people giving this wrong advice were mostly making money from the confused and worried men they…