Assignment task: Modern understandings of masturbation went through three stages, each of which are characterized by common dilemmas, and each of which co-exist to some degree in our current understanding of this practice. Listed below are all three stages plus their characteristic dilemmas. Which one of the three stages is the least seriously articulated stage in contemporary discourses of masturbation, even if it still plays a historically structuring role and is still occasionally articulated?
Choose the BEST answer.
a) Psychologized as normal for youth but pathologized as "arrested development" for adults, it became a shameful and embarrassing practice.
b) Liberated as self-love and self-knowledge, it is nevertheless still characterized as non-normative, rebellious, queer, addictive, and the butt of jokes.
c) Medicalized as the root of all illness and a threat to the social order, forms of control were developed to stop it.
d) The object of desire is fantasy, the practice is perceived as anti-social, and the pleasure it produces is potentially endless and thus excessive.