There is this “movement” or game and it has been around for awhile… I'm not really here to talk about that, though. I'm here to talk about the original…
Throughout the mid-19th century and well into the 1960's, a movement started by quacks doctors and ended around the time of Dr. Spock, masturbation was more than demonized. Children were tied up at night, their genitals fitted with spiked torture devices, and otherwise caused great pain to keep them from jerking off. We like to look back at this and think that it's a horror show, and completely uncalled for, but I'm going to propose something a little different here…
My hypothesis is a little difficult to prove, but I think that masturbation becoming a “problem” coincided with a dramatic improvement in overall public health. The panic began in the 1850's, right around the time that Western Europe and North America started to mechanize farm production, food preservation, and transportation. For the first time, for a lot of people, nutrition wasn't nearly the issue that it had been. People were able to eat well every day, even if their diet was mostly beans and bread. This was a huge improvement over the previous centuries' diet of mostly just bread. Malnourished adolescents tend to show little interest in sex and the sudden appearance of not-starving children and their resultant constant jerkin' it had to come as something of a shock to their parents… You'll also note that the obsession was mostly confined to the middle class that could afford luxuries like “meat” and “school1).”
Sex, even the solo variety, requires an outlay of bodily resources. Prior to this time, it was uncommon to have excess energy at all, even among young people, just because of poor diet…