But Isn’t Masturbation Normal and Natural?

My advice for quitting the habit of solo masturbation was recently challenged with the claim that masturbation is normal and natural and beneficial to sexual well-being.

I agree with this assessment of masturbation. It is normal and natural. I don’t think it’s any accident of design that a human’s hand is perfectly positioned to massage his or her own sex organ. I think our sexual well-being requires some level of awareness of our sexual functioning. In fact, I believe it’s only logical that all people, both male and female, discover self-pleasure as children. But I don’t think masturbation works well as a lifelong habit. I think we are best served by growing out of the practice.

There’s a level of higher functioning not far above you. All you need to do is look up and start climbing.

Can a Boy Ever Know Enough About Sex?

I was in sixth grade when they separated us boys and girls to show us sex education films, one for each gender. My classmates already knew me to turn red and turn away from naughty talk and off-color jokes, so when a few of them taunted me with “Did you learn anything?” after the film was shown, it was not out of sincere interest in my education. I remembered enough details about the movie to find it in recent years. It is Boy to Man (Part 1, Part 2). In retrospect, it was so dry and clinical, it probably shouldn’t have embarrassed me as much as it did. With an internal drawing of the erect penis—the external part of the shaft located almost all off-screen—the newscaster voice says, “During masturbation, a boy may handle his penis to cause an ejaculation.” Masturbation? Handle? Ejaculation? It was all lost on me. The trauma of the subject matter simply overwhelmed me and I avoided absorbing the intended medical information. Frankly, it wasn’t until that summer, in the camp shower, that the sight of my friend’s naked body woke me up to the fact that my dad’s type of “penis hair” could arrive at age 12!  Mine came in the months that followed. With it came my curiosity. No, I didn’t want to participate in a classroom viewing of Boy to Man II: Juicer Stuff, but I had my eyes open for as much sex information as I could lay my hands on.

Boys Who Masturbate

As it turns out, I did not invent masturbation. Oh, sure, you knew that. Well, frankly, I know I’ve known it for a long time, myself, but when I first discovered what a fantastic feeling it was to hold a piece of wood in my lap while I worked on it with an orbital sander, I may have actually thought I was onto something revolutionary. Of course, I soon realized I could produce the same fluid with my hand. I may have realized it wasn’t a capability unique to me by the time I’d identified the word “masturbation” in a book at the city library. (Holy Hot Dog, Batman! There’s a word for what I do in the bathtub!) Still, it was an enormous revelation when during Driver’s Ed, in the summer after my ninth grade year, a guy bragged about asking a Special Ed. kid if he’d masturbated yet. Yet? Like it’s a given and only the timing is variable? Wow! I’d only waited two years for that news bulletin.

I Couldn’t Believe My Own Eyes

I guess it’s no rare event when you see a movie or TV show and think, “Well that wouldn’t happen in real life.” I guess that’s often okay. But then again, and especially for kids, certain movies and TV shows become permanent fixtures in your head. Some of them inevitably become significant data in your gut feeling for what normal people do, think, or believe. Now that’s scary.

Okay, I just introduced a topic which could fill a book, but my focus today is to sound off on some short clips of three TV shows and a movie. In these clips, children about 10 to 12 years old are discussing or viewing  or acting out material that, for me, would have been very sexually charged. In all these cases, the material is used as a throwaway comedy bit. That is, the presence of these sexually-charged materials or behaviors has zero impact beyond the short scene that contains each of them. It’s that sort of denial of personhood in others that helped to empower my sexual fantasies and enjoyment of pornography. (There, I tied this into the overall theme of this blog site! Moving on…)

Undressing Nudity, Part Two

Continuing from Part One…

In the years before my 11th birthday, I was very comfortable with my understanding of nudity: it’s a bad thing to be and a bad thing to see. When I was nine-turning-ten, my family drove to Mexico City for a convention. We we were with a large group of RVers and had a government guide. In the little villages along the way, I saw poverty conditions I hadn’t witnessed before or since. I saw half-naked kids (the lower half!). I know I saw at least one squatting in the street to take a dump. You don’t forget that. When I entered seventh grade, nudity became a part of my life, but only because donning jockstraps for PE and showering afterward in a square, partionless room was forced upon me. I coped with it as well as anyone else seemed to, but I almost daily got a boner thinking about how embarrassing it was going to be. A year later, I saw Superman: The Movie and witnessed the unconscionable: voluntary nudity. Now I read that Superman was about some visitor from a distant planet capable of saving Earth from disaster and such, but at the time it was the “movie with the naked boy in it.” I grant you he was only four (or nearly four), but the young Superman standing in the crater that his escape pod had made was wearing only a smile. That floored me. Screenwriter, parents, director, producer, theater owner, and I don’t know who else all decided that it was okay to put a penis on the movie screen. I saw no justification for it.

Undressing Nudity, Part One

I have a real hang-up with nudity. When I was a kid, it was a scary, unnatural, disgusting thing. Then when puberty hit, it was still scary, but I strongly associated it with sexuality. As I’ve matured, I find it easier to be casually naked. Better yet, I’m not bothered that my kid is comfortable seeing and being seen naked. Still, I recognize that I have deeply-entrenched associations with nudity. They are not healthy and I want to address them. In fact, I believe my obsession with it is core to my problem with sexual fantasy and pornography.

Porn Cornucopia, Uptopia

Catchy title, huh? Yeah, I thought so, too. But, like a lot of advertising. It’s not true. In fact, it’s kind of the opposite. More is not better. The first flash of nudity, the first hint that crotch shots are on the docket, the first photo that has you saying, “Oh, my God. How do they even do that?” Those are exciting. Those are the moments where you’d sell your soul for an endless run of near-orgasmic stimuli. The reality is that the stuff—whatever it is—gets old pretty quickly. You might look for more and more of the same, but it has to be different in some way or it’s dullsville, same-old, same-old.