What Tying the Knot Taught Me About Pornography, Masturbation, & Sexual Fantasy

My wedding night was a bust. The big moment of my life, the one I’d waited for for more than a decade longer than my average high school classmate ended with a manually achieved orgasm. As thrilled as I was to be having sexual intercourse for the first time, something in my body didn’t follow “Ready” and “Aim” with “Fire.” My bride had already reached the top twice and was as impatient as I was.

I couldn’t get out of the comfort zone of my fantasies, my pictures, and my familiar hand.

My new wife had already allowed me to look at certain pictures in books and on the internet. We’d talked about my sexual fantasies and explored many of my curiosities. She had almost acted indifferent to whether I masturbated or when I masturbated. So…my strategy for trying to get the lovemaking right was to either precede sex or interrupt it to go get stimulation from sexy pictures. Odd, isn’t it? I wanted sex so bad in the thousands of times I’d jerked off and when I had a willing partner I couldn’t get out of the comfort zone of my fantasies, my pictures, and my familiar hand.

Do Sex Toys Play With Your Head?

BE ADVISED. THE FOLLOWING ARTICLE IS ONE OF MY MOST GRAPHIC. IF IT STARTS TO SOUND LIKE A FANTASY TO MASTURBATE TO, CLICK HERE.

Check out our great new Adult Toy Store! Try a new adventure! Put some spice into your relationship! We’ve got costumes to (barely) cover up your honey’s naughty parts. We’ve got whips, gags, restraints, and complete outfits to fully restrain and pretend to torture the one you love. We’ve stocked silicon phallic shapes of all sizes and colors for for effective and convenient penetration and stimulation all around. And all product packaging bears the image of an average, ordinary user turned into a being of sexual perfection through the use of the product inside. Don’t you dare try to play pretend in the bedroom without having a look here.

Oh, and while you’re in the store, we’ve got fantastically tasteless greeting cards and vulgar gag gifts. Hey, nothing expresses greatest wishes for a bride’s forthcoming marriage like a greeting card sporting a naked sailor of offensive proportions making a naughty offer.

I may be wrong, but I don’t think sex between a healthy, loving husband and and a healthy, loving wife can be improved upon with accessories.

Okay, enough of the silliness. Here is the story of how my opinion of adult toy stores and sex toys went from titillation to disgust. It wasn’t long after my wife and I got together that we first checked out an adult toy store. I had been wary of such a thing previously, thinking it was too immoral for the facade I maintained, but with the approval of my beloved, I felt free to indulge. And the lure was huge.

Boys, Don’t Twist an Arm to Get a Boner

When you realize what sexual arousal and the erection (boner) that goes with it are for—to make it so a guy’s penis can push its way into a woman’s vagina—it’s easy to assume that every erection will have a predictable starting point. In other words, if you are feeling tight in the crotch, you think you should be able to go, “Oh, yeah, caught some cleavage on that Melissa,” or “What would I expect? Jasmine just brushed up against me.” So, it seems like you should be able to justify erections and ask the question, “What logical reason would there be for my penis to think that I wanted to have sex with a girl right this minute?”

“It’s a common fear: You have an erection and it’s clearly caused by something that should not be stimulating to you.”

Well, of course, things aren’t that simple. You know that. You’ve no doubt awakened with a boner (“morning wood”) and your only real desire at that moment is to urinate. You might try to focus your foggy mind on the night behind you and try to remember a sex dream of some sort, but you won’t necessarily identify a fantasy lover who got you hot and bothered in your sleep. Generally, morning wood is the hardest boner you have (takes forever to go down) and seems the least justified (thoughts that usually seem sexy are pretty lame right then).

It’s a common fear: You have an erection and it’s clearly caused by something that should not be stimulating to you. Assuming you picture yourself an attractive heterosexual guy who will snag a beautiful bride in the coming years, it’s scary to think that something you consider perverted aroused you, particularly another guy or a younger child.

A Clearer View of Sexual Intercourse

I doubt that anyone ever learned the facts of life, A-to-Z , in one afternoon-length lecture. I know my own journey of…prepare yourself… “sexual discovery” was piecemeal, ad hoc, and sort of lengthy. And it was definitely non-linear. I have a vague memory of a schoolyard playmate insinuating that sex involved a naked “boy”, a naked “girl”, and the boy’s penis doing something with an opening belonging to the girl. All I’m sure of is that at some point I understood that a married man had to aim his urine stream into his wife’s open mouth in order to produce kids. That’s why I’m now a monk, cloistered away from all females. No, but actually, I imagine that the truth wasn’t received much better. I mean, at age 10, I had the world figured out and it all made sense. And one thing I was sure of was that people potty in private and cover that part up the rest of the time. To suggest that men and women would fit their naughty potty parts together seemed so very wrong, an offense against nature. It wasn’t what people were designed for. Little did I know.

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).

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 Three

In the first two parts of this essay, I explored how seeing nudity and being seen nude are sometimes quite appropriate. Yet, I’ve hung onto my childish thinking that to be seen naked is like being cut open and eyes upon you are the blood draining from your body. It’s that life-changing and earth-shattering. In this essay, I’m trying to unpack my thinking and rewire my brain to make the mere state of nudity less of a hot button. That should help me put pornography and sexual fantasy in their proper perspectives.

As an adolescent, I was the boy least likely to have sexual intercourse. If I’d learned nothing else from Sunday School, I was pretty sure I was not allowed to go all the way with a girl. So, one of my fantasies to masturbate to was that I was stripped and forced into a small room with a girl whom my classmates used as the butt of ugly jokes. Of course, she was naked, too. In my thinking, male and female naked in a room together necessarily meant there would be sexual intercourse. It was a given and I’d have no choice about it. I didn’t have to imagine threats from my captors or weapons aimed at my head. Boys weren’t supposed to see vaginas. Girls weren’t supposed to see penises. If such a thing happens (a boner is a given), we have liftoff.

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.