Claim: “Most guys are not bald naturally; masturbation makes them bald.”
Verdict: FALSE. There is no evidence that masturbation in men leads to hair loss or stops hair growth.
Full Text
Baldness in men is a common phenomenon but sometimes becomes a concern when it happens at a much younger age. Sometimes, people who experience hair loss have used medical intervention to redeem it.
A former English striker, Wayne Rooney, is an example of a person who has undergone a hair transplant. It was so important to him that, two years after the first transplant failed, he went again at age 27 for a second one.
While the cause of Rooney’s baldness was known to be male pattern baldness and found to be hereditary, several other reasons exist.
However, a tweet asserts that masturbation is why most men are bald.
“Most guys ain’t bald naturally, masturbation made them bald, the more you masturbate, the more you lose hair, stop masturbating guys to keep your hairline intact,” the tweet reads.
The tweet got a combination of retweets, likes, comments and views in 159 engagements. The tweet in the screenshot below came from a user known as @JAY6th. Similar claims were made here and here, with a combined engagement of over 400. Seeing the belief is widely shared, DUBAWA deemed it necessary to verify the claim.
Verification
Baldness, according to hopkinsmedicine.org, is a state of hair loss or absence of hair. It’s also called alopecia. Baldness is usually most noticeable on the scalp but can happen anywhere on the body where hair grows. The condition is more common in men than in women.
Masturbation, on the other hand, is an erotic stimulation, especially of one’s genital organs, commonly resulting in orgasm and is achieved by manual or other bodily contacts exclusive of sexual intercourse, by instrumental manipulation, occasionally by sexual fantasies, or by various combinations of these agencies.
Looking at both definitions, it is difficult not to wonder where these two phenomena meet. In verifying this, DUBAWA dug into research and publications on the subject.
In the video here, Metromale Clinic, which has over 64,000 YouTube subscribers, published a video by a Sexologist, Karthik Gunasekaran, who says masturbation has nothing to do with hair loss.
According to Karthik, when a man masturbates, the only thing lost is semen, which has nothing whatsoever with hair loss. He states that the only thing that can cause hair loss is Testosterone, and this is not connected to masturbation.
This article published by HairMD in May 2021 revealed that no medical proof was found that masturbation or sexual activities cause hair loss. It further explained that DHT (DiHydroTestosterone), proven to cause baldness, is not produced during masturbation or sexual activity.
We also discovered a fact-check by The Cable in August 2022, which rated this claim false.
Expert opinion
A medical doctor, Frederick Unuigbokhai, in an interview with DUBAWA, stated that there is no medically proven link between masturbation and baldness.
He explained that baldness happens in both men and women and that a high level of testosterone can lead to a heightened urge for sex and which could lead to masturbation but does not result in baldness.
Click here to learn the possible causes, symptoms, treatments, and other relevant baldness information.
Conclusion
Our findings show that there is no medical proof that masturbation causes baldness. The claim that it does is a myth.
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”The researcher produced this fact-check per the DUBAWA 2023 Kwame KariKari Fellowship partnership with the newsroom of Wazobia FM and Nigeria Info FM to facilitate the ethos of “truth” in journalism and enhance media literacy in the country.”
