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Megan of Jezebel says

Via néojapanisme comes the somewhat amusing history of prostitution in Japan where, in the early 1930s, anti-prostitution advocates pressured the government to outlaw its brothel licensing system in the hopes of eliminating prostitution. One member of the Diet, Yamazaki Dennosuke, spoke out vociferously against eliminating prostitution arguing that, since a man needed to get his rocks off no matter what, prostitution was safer than jerking off, because masturbation causes upper respiratory infections. That, obviously, was a bigger danger than STIs or getting caught by your wife. Cough

She said it here.

Yes, almost 100 years later this sounds completely lame, but from at least the early 1800s to well into the 1900s it was a generally-accepted medical belief (backed up, no less, with all kinds of “studies”) not only that masturbation caused insanity, tuberculosis, and hairy palms but that ejaculation itself (“even in marriage”) was as “devastating” to the body as losing a pint of blood. Ejaculating “as often as” twelve times a year was widely considered, among doctors and their patients, to be a sure path to an early (I mean early as in one’s 30s or 40s) grave.

Masturbation, a.k.a. “self pollution” at least for men (authorities were silent on its effect on women, which they might not have believed in anyway, until further into the 1900s) was about as bad as it got. Thus the twisted-to-us logic of preferring the risk of infidelity fallout and STIs.

One of the biggest lessons, by the way, isn’t so much that people will say anything to justify their sexual behavior (or, too often, their opposition to anyone else’s.) It’s that you have to be really, really careful about making proposals based on “normal, healthy sexual behavior” because that often changes, sometimes diametrically, in less than centuries.