reverse-engineering as a form of masturbation

Someone I know online compared reverse-engineering to masturbation, stating that they were both as equally productive. After giving it some thought, I'm not sure that I disagree. There is some satisfaction to be had in the mental exercise of plugging away at someone else's code to figure out how it works. But is it really not productive? Well, I believe the reason I do it, other than for fun, and a playful mental exercise, is also for learning. It's true - in the past several year or two that I've reverse-engineered code, I've learned to approach problems of crafting algorithms for doing all sorts of things on computers and game consoles in many different ways. I like to think it has also helped my skills of investigation: some trickier portions of code I've had to look elsewhere and try to tweak things like entry variables and registers to get a grasp on what the code accomplishes.