Boys Who Masturbate: Private! Keep Out!

In my previous article, Boys Who Masturbate, I detailed how I came to learn masturbation. I discussed the fact that I had over two years’ experience before I had a clue I wasn’t the only boy in town who played with myself regularly. Even then, it would have taken a lot to engage me in any sort of casual conversation about it. It was truly a guilty pleasure, and completely taboo.

Times are different now. YouTube lets kids see and be seen doing lots of outrageous and inappropriate things (though, usually not explicit). We’re in the era where a leaked celebrity sex tape is treated like it’s automatically everyone’s right to view. Song lyrics read like detailed sex manuals (“Baby in your ear! I put it your ear!”) When I saw jokes about teen masturbation in Transformers, there was no question in my mind that at least Hollywood thinks that the target audience—boys who mostly have yet to see their own semen—are already joking with each other about jerking off. Let’s compare an example of my experience to today: My interest in and education about sex coincided with my first first sight of semen (my surprise first ejaculation.) Today’s boys seem to acquire a library full of random (erroneous?) details about feminine hygiene, blow jobs, orgies, and gay sex. The average boy probably acquires a mini-PhD in semen by the time he becomes a producer. It’s hard to fault the ones who think, “I’ve learned to drive and now I have a car. There’s nothing left to wait for.”

“It’s not hard to imagine friends prodding each other into a shared experience. I’m here to say this is a bad idea.”

Why Do Doctors Knock? (And Maybe You Should Observe Boundaries, Too)

Have you had a routine physical exam lately? I need one. They aren’t comfortable, to be sure. You know you aren’t just going to point to your neck, describe some pain, and walk out with a prescription. This is an all-in deal. I’m thinking about my last one. The crazy thing to me, though, was how they gave me privacy to exchange my clothing for a modesty gown. When the doctor knocked, it frankly seemed like a tease. What? He wants to make sure I’ve tucked and accounted to make sure no unnecessary flesh is showing? God forbid he discover what color my boxer shorts are. Oh, wait! He’s about to pull said boxer shorts down to my knees, look my penis over, handle my testicles, and then turn me around and feel inside my anus with his finger. And we both know it. So, why bother with the “Are you decent?” knock? Why bother with the privacy of someone who’s already surrendered it?  The answer is…boundaries, voluntarily-placed walls on what we do, look at, and think about at every moment in time.

Hold that thought a moment. Now consider: there was an episode of “The King of Queens” in which Doug is strong-armed into telling his wife, Carrie, the nature of his sexual fantasies. In an effort to divert attention from the fact that he imagines himself in liaisons with women other than her, he proudly reveals that these daydreams all assume that he’s a grieving widower. The funny thing, I guess, is that her hang-up then becomes that he routinely imagines her deceased. She then proceeds to fill a stack of note cards with her romance novel ideas of suitable topics for his fantasizing. As the show went into a dream sequence that started as Carrie’s suggested fantasy, but—since it was in Doug’s head—then imagined her demise in a car accident heard just off-screen, I found myself wondering how many men watching were squirming at the notion of their wife having the slightest idea what runs through their head in connection with sexual arousal, stimulation, and orgasm. If only our thoughts always met standards of TV network censors (as low as they’ve become).

What’s My Motivation?

Sex problems are complicated by 1) a nasty tangle of lies we tell ourselves and 2) bad brain wiring. Mind you, bad brain wiring is not a birth defect. It’s the systematic way you connect things. There are both healthy and unhealthy connections. They were learned and they can be un-learned. (As a negative example, if I conked you on the head every time you smelled cinnamon rolls, you’d soon fear the smell even if you were half-asleep.) Escaping from unwanted habits, desires, and thought processes requires that we shine the light of truth on why we connect things the way we do and what really motivates us to think and act as we do.

“I look at naked people in the sex act is to feel power over them.”

Save the Naked Girl!

The practical problems of obsessions with pornography and sexual fantasy are that they don’t respect boundaries. I can’t tell them to stick to a schedule or location. Unfortunately, this means that, despite my best intentions, I find myself in the “real world”, far away from my designated safe place to surf porn, daydream, and masturbate when the thoughts that serve me so well in fueling my masturbation fantasies arrive to pick on some REAL person I that I absolutely did not intend to interact, or worse, I fantasize about someone I know well and have to be around. Surely you know how weird and awful it can feel when you’ve seen someone and find yourself imagining them in some unspecified nudist situation, and then they make eye contact. Aren’t you certain at that point that your thoughts are transparent? Don’t you expect a dirty look?

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.