How Many People Masturbate? Stats by Age and Gender

Most adults masturbate at some point in their lives, and a substantial share do so regularly. The most consistent finding across national surveys is a pronounced gender gap: in any given month, roughly three-quarters of men and about a third to two-fifths of women report having masturbated. Those figures shift with age, relationship status, sexual orientation, and cultural background, and they almost certainly undercount reality because people tend to under-report stigmatized behaviors in interviews.

The Gender Gap in Self-Reported Masturbation

No matter where researchers collect data, men report masturbating more often than women. In a large British probability survey, about 73 percent of men and roughly 37 percent of women said they had masturbated in the previous four weeks.¹ A nationally representative U.S. survey similarly found that significantly more men than women reported both lifetime masturbation and past-month masturbation, and that men reported higher frequency overall.²

Whether that gap reflects actual behavior differences, different comfort levels with disclosure, or some combination is an open question. Women face more cultural messaging that frames masturbation as unusual or shameful, and survey methodology experiments show that the way questions are asked changes what people admit to. The gap is real in every dataset, but its true size is debatable.

How Patterns Change with Age

Masturbation typically begins around puberty, though the timing differs between sexes. In boys, the onset of masturbation tracks closely with pubertal development, suggesting a strong hormonal trigger. In girls, that link is weaker, and the start of masturbation appears less tightly tied to the biological clock of puberty itself.³ This early divergence sets up a pattern that persists for decades.

A population-based longitudinal study tracking people from late adolescence into their mid-thirties found that women’s masturbation frequency gradually increased until roughly their early thirties, then dipped slightly. Men’s frequency, by contrast, stayed largely stable across the same age span.⁴ In plain terms, many men start early and maintain a steady rate, while many women ramp up through their twenties and peak around thirty.

The picture among older adults is less studied but far from blank. A survey across four European countries found that between 41 and 65 percent of men and between 27 and 40 percent of women over 60 had masturbated in the preceding month.⁵ The wide ranges across countries suggest that cultural norms and health status matter at least as much as age itself. The takeaway is that masturbation does not simply vanish after a certain birthday; it remains common well into later life, especially among men.

Relationship Status and the Desire for More Partnered Sex

A persistent myth holds that masturbation is mainly a substitute for partnered sex. The reality is more complicated and differs by gender. In the same U.S. nationally representative survey mentioned earlier, both men and women who wished they were having partnered sex more often were far more likely to report frequent masturbation. Among women who wanted much more partnered sex, the likelihood of frequent masturbation was roughly four times higher than among women content with their current frequency; the pattern in men was similar, with about a four-and-a-half-fold increase.²

But that does not mean people who have plenty of partnered sex stop masturbating. British survey data shows an intriguing gender split: men who reported the highest frequency of intercourse were actually less likely to have masturbated in the past month, fitting the substitution idea. Women with the highest intercourse frequency, however, were more likely to report recent masturbation.⁶ For many women, masturbation appears to run alongside an active partnered sex life rather than filling a void left by its absence. Researchers speculate this may reflect the fact that women are less consistently brought to orgasm during partnered encounters and use solo activity to supplement that experience.

Sexual Orientation Differences

Sexual orientation adds another layer. A study published in Psychology & Sexuality found that gay men and gay women tend to begin masturbating earlier than their heterosexual counterparts. Beyond the age of onset, the patterns diverge between gay men and lesbian women. Gay men reported higher solitary sexual desire, more frequent masturbation, and more intense orgasmic experiences compared to heterosexual men. Lesbian women, on the other hand, reported the lowest scores across all these measures compared to heterosexual women. The researchers found no significant differences in most other masturbation parameters when comparing gay and heterosexual individuals as a combined group, but the gender-by-orientation interaction was clear.

The reasons are not fully understood, but they likely involve a mix of partner availability, sexual script differences, and the role of masturbation in sexual identity development. For many gay and bisexual adolescents, masturbation is the earliest form of sexual expression, sometimes preceding any partnered experience by years.

Why These Numbers Are Probably Too Low

Every survey on masturbation should come with an asterisk. Social desirability bias, the tendency to give the answer you think the interviewer wants to hear, is a known problem in sexual behavior research. An interview-mode experiment in Malawi demonstrated that the method of data collection meaningfully changes what people report about sensitive sexual behaviors, particularly among men. When respondents could answer through an audio-assisted computer interface rather than face-to-face with a human interviewer, reports of stigmatized behaviors increased.⁷

Masturbation is exactly the kind of behavior affected by this bias. Even in countries where it is broadly considered normal, many people feel embarrassment discussing it. Women in particular face a double stigma: they are less likely to talk about any sexual behavior in an interview setting, and cultural scripts often frame female masturbation as less normal than male masturbation. The result is that the gender gap in the data is probably somewhat exaggerated compared to the gender gap in actual behavior. The real numbers for both sexes are likely higher than anything a survey captures.

Generational Trends Are Shifting Upward

Masturbation rates are not static. Comparing two waves of the British National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, collected roughly a decade apart, researchers found a statistically significant increase in reported past-month masturbation for both sexes. Among women aged 16 to 44, rates rose from about 37 percent to about 40 percent. Among men in the same age range, rates climbed from roughly 73 percent to about 78 percent.⁶

Whether people are actually masturbating more or simply more willing to say so is impossible to disentangle completely. Both forces are probably at work. Greater cultural openness around sexuality, more accessible sexual content online, and a shift in how younger generations talk about self-pleasure all contribute. The practical upshot is that researchers can no longer treat masturbation prevalence figures from the 1990s or early 2000s as current baselines; the numbers keep drifting upward with each survey wave.

Health Associations Worth Knowing About

Masturbation has been studied for possible links to a handful of health outcomes, some with more evidence behind them than others.

Ejaculation Frequency and Prostate Cancer

The most-discussed link in men involves prostate cancer. A large study following tens of thousands of men over more than two decades found that those who ejaculated most frequently (21 or more times per month) had a roughly 19 to 22 percent lower risk of prostate cancer compared to men who ejaculated four to seven times per month, and this held for ejaculation frequency reported at both younger and middle-aged periods of life.⁸ This is an observational association, not proof that ejaculation prevents cancer. A narrative review of the broader evidence notes that while some studies support an inverse relationship, others show conflicting results, and no consensus exists yet.⁹ The relationship is suggestive enough to be worth mentioning, but not strong enough to treat as medical advice.

Pelvic Health and Mood in Women

In women, vibrator-assisted masturbation has been studied in the context of pelvic floor health. A clinical study found that after three months of regular vibrator use, participants showed significant improvements in sexual function scores across desire, arousal, orgasm, and satisfaction. Rates of bothersome pelvic organ prolapse symptoms dropped by roughly half, and rates of depression also decreased significantly.¹⁰ This was a single study without a control group, so the improvements could partly reflect other factors like increased body awareness or expectation effects. Still, it adds to a growing body of work suggesting that masturbation is not just sexually but physically and psychologically beneficial for many women.

Pornography, Masturbation, and Erectile Function

A common worry among men is that frequent masturbation, especially when paired with pornography, might impair erections. A study of more than 3,500 men assessed this directly using standardized measures of erectile function and found that pornography use frequency was unrelated to either erectile functioning or erectile dysfunction severity. Masturbation frequency itself was only weakly and inconsistently related to erectile outcomes in analyses that accounted for other known risk factors.¹¹ The fear that masturbation causes erectile problems does not hold up well when you control for the things that actually do, like cardiovascular health, medication use, and psychological factors.

Religion, Guilt, and Cultural Context

Religiosity is one of the strongest predictors of whether someone masturbates and, perhaps more importantly, how they feel about it. A review examining the medical, psychological, and spiritual dimensions of masturbation found that it is negatively correlated with religion and religiosity and positively correlated with pornography consumption. The same review noted associations between masturbation and depression, anxiety, guilt, and poor body image, though the direction of causation is unclear: people who feel guilty about masturbating may develop anxiety because of the guilt, not because of the act itself.¹²

The guilt angle is particularly important for women. A study exploring the influence of shame, guilt, and religiosity on women’s masturbation experiences found that women who were younger, identified as non-White, and endorsed more religiously fundamentalist beliefs were more likely to report negative feelings about masturbation.¹³ This suggests that the emotional experience of masturbation is shaped as much by cultural messaging as by the behavior itself. In communities where masturbation carries heavy moral weight, the psychological costs of the associated shame may outweigh any physical benefits.

This creates a tricky landscape for clinicians and educators. Telling someone that masturbation is “perfectly normal” may be accurate from a public health perspective, but it ignores the lived reality of people whose faith traditions teach otherwise. The evidence does not suggest that masturbation itself causes psychological harm in the absence of guilt; rather, it is the collision between the behavior and a person’s moral framework that generates distress.

Transgender Individuals

Research on masturbation among transgender people is still limited but growing. One study comparing the sexual behavior of transgender women and transgender men before medical transition found no differences in masturbation frequency between the two groups, though their reasons for not masturbating did differ.¹⁴ Gender dysphoria can make genital-focused sexual activity uncomfortable or distressing for some transgender individuals, while others use masturbation as a way to explore their embodied identity. The variability is enormous, and any summary statistic would obscure more than it reveals. What the limited data does suggest is that trans people masturbate at rates that overlap substantially with cisgender populations, and that the barriers and motivations are more psychologically complex.

An Ancient Behavior Across Primates

If you have ever wondered whether masturbation is “natural,” the comparative evidence is striking. A comprehensive analysis of masturbation across the entire primate order found that the behavior is ancient, predating the split between modern apes and other primates by millions of years. It became more common after haplorrhine primates (the group that includes monkeys, apes, and humans) diverged from tarsiers. The researchers tested two evolutionary hypotheses: that masturbation helps with fertilization by keeping sperm fresh, and that it helps flush pathogens from the genital tract. Both received statistical support in males.¹⁵

This does not mean masturbation exists in humans solely for those biological reasons. Humans masturbate for pleasure, stress relief, sleep, boredom, exploration, and a dozen other motivations that have nothing to do with sperm quality or infection avoidance. But the evolutionary data does demolish one persistent cultural narrative: that masturbation is some kind of modern aberration or a sign of dysfunction. It is one of the oldest sexual behaviors in our entire lineage, shared with species that have no concept of pornography, loneliness, or relationship dissatisfaction.

Solo Orgasm and the Pleasure Gap

One reason masturbation remains so common even among people in satisfying relationships is the orgasm gap. A large survey of nearly 28,000 women using a health-tracking app found that almost half reported reaching orgasm more frequently during solo sexual activities than during partnered sex. Only about one in five said the reverse. Clitoral stimulation by hand was the most frequent solo activity, reported by about 85 percent of participants. These figures underscore a practical reality: many women find that they can reliably reach orgasm on their own in ways that partnered encounters do not always replicate.

This is not a commentary on the quality of anyone’s relationship. The anatomy involved in female orgasm means that the type of stimulation most likely to produce it, direct and sustained clitoral contact, is not always a central feature of partnered sex. Masturbation gives people direct feedback on what works for their body, which is one reason sex therapists often recommend it as a tool for improving partnered experiences rather than viewing it as competition with them.