Heya @catdog, awesome question which I think personally we don’t talk nearly enough about. It’s funny, despite most of my friends being pretty sex-pos in their own ways, I think there are still a lot of stigmas and taboos talking about masturbation, at least amongst women my age. It’s definitely seen as a personal or private thing, but sometimes I feel that this can slip too far into it becoming a shameful thing – which it definitely shouldn’t be!
Healthwise, personally, I’d only think it was starting to get a problem if it was actually CAUSING you problems, whether physical, emotional or social, like @aunt_flo said. I feel like it’s an important part of someone’s sexual development and getting comfortable with their body – to paraphrase Ru Paul, if you can’t love yourself, how the hell are you gonna love anybody else? :p
I think when masturbation can get a bit tricky too is when we’re tying porn into it – I know a lot of people I’ve spoken too have developed kind of a ‘resistance’ to masturbating or porn, in that they get used to using porn or desensitised to increasingly graphic stuff, so it gets harder to come without it because of the chemical reward circuit we set up in our brain. But that’s not saying masturbation is the problem itself – it’s all contextual! And all porn certainly isn’t the problem either.
I dunno I feel like I’ve overcomplicated my response here ??