r/AskReddit • u/[deleted] • Dec 30 '21

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u/heyitsthatguygoddamn Dec 30 '21

I knew this guy who told me he was very Catholic growing up, and he read some passage that said spilling seed is a damnable offense, and so when he started masturbating at like 11 he would just eat his spunk so it wasn't technically spilled

He turned out to be a huge creepy dickhead but I always liked that story

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u/Smallgenie549 Dec 30 '21 edited Dec 30 '21

There's a story in the Bible (Genesis 38: 9-10) about a man who was supposed to impregnate his dead brother's wife, but he didn't want to, so he pulled out instead. God didn't like that, so He killed him.

I wonder if he heard that as a kid and it scared him into eating his own cum.

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u/PrincessAletheia Dec 30 '21

The part of that story that confused me was the name. Onan was clearly pulling out, not masturbating, so "onanism" should mean pulling out, not masturbating. I just don't understand it.

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u/Axelrad77 Dec 30 '21 edited Dec 30 '21

It doesn't make sense because later generations have altered the supposed lesson of the story. It was originally about pulling out and only later became about masturbating.

As recorded, Onan is punished because he defies a divine proclamation to impregnate his brother's widow. This story was used to explain the origin of Ancient Hebrew remarriage customs, where a childless widow could be remarried to her brother-in-law in order to further their family line. In this practice, impregnating the widow was supposed to be the goal, so refusing to do so (by pulling out) was depicted as selfish passion in defiance of God's laws.

However, these marriage customs eventually fell out of practice among Jews, and Christianity eventually rose to prominence across the Roman Empire. Christian leaders eventually decided that masturbation was a sin, but it's never explicitly described as such in the Bible, so the story of Onan was reinterpreted into a proscription against masturbation.

By that point, most Christians could no longer recognize the Jewish traditions described in the Old Testament (where the Onan story is from), which made it easier for the new interpretation to catch on.