Do you say "please yourself" in a non-sexual context?

In an English grammar textbook, I found this example sentence:

Dinner's at 8 o'clock, but there's nothing planned for the afternoon, so you can all please yourself until then.

I googled please yourself and it seems to mean masturbation in some contexts. Do native English speakers use it in non-sexual contexts like the example above?


Please is simply a verb that means give pleasure. There is nothing to forbid the word from being used in a non-sexual context, and this is usually the case.

Please yourselves by browsing the books on the shelves.


In British English, please yourself is always non-sexual. The sexual variant is pleasure yourself.

Joshua Drake has commented that it's different in American English, which might explain the OP's Google results, and KitFox's book quotes. Happy to edit this answer to reflect dialectal differences.


Most commonly, it is used in a non-sexual context. "Masturbation" is kind of a specialist use of the phrase, and certainly doesn't apply here. Googling "please yourself" may have given you results that were unreasonably skewed.