I Technically Invented Masturbation
At 10, though, I didn’t feel like bragging about it.
I’ve been masturbating since my pre-teen years. Before I produced sperm. Before I knew it had a proper name and it was something people did. I had discovered it myself. I didn’t go as far as believing that other masturbating people had to pay me royalties, but I had never actually heard of anyone doing something similar. I thought it was something only I did.
My technique
I had even developed my own technique. I would lie on my belly and dry-hump the bed or the floor. I usually wore underwear or clothes for this. Especially when dry-humping my parents’ carpets.
This technique had a couple of complications, though. First, once I got an erection, the position was painful. Especially on the floor. Thus, I had to start masturbating in a soft state and remain soft throughout. The specific position made sure the erection did not evolve.
Second, when I hit puberty, the arrival of sperm caused a major complication. I had to protect my underwear. So, before I would start masturbating, I had to wrap my penis with food wrap. Yep. Then, I would proceed to dry-humping the floor or the bed, as before.
I also tried kitchen aluminium foil and I’m pretty sure I must have tried toilet paper, too. For some reason, though, I remember that food wrap was the one I most frequently used. Perhaps toilet paper leaked. Or perhaps toilet paper was the best, but I discovered it later. My memories tend to bleed into each other.
Why didn’t I use a condom? Because where was I supposed to find one? Was a 10-year-old supposed to shop for condoms?
After a few years, I learnt how most boys masturbate, using their strong hand. I switched to that and never looked back. I would masturbate and finish in a tissue. Simple.
My stimuli
Whatever the case, I would usually wait for my parents to leave the house or to take an afternoon nap. Then, I would sneak to access whatever sexual stimulus I had available.
Back in the late 80s, there was no internet porn. To masturbate, I had four options: (1) use my imagination, (2) access my father’s stash of Playboy magazines, (3) access his collection of home-brewed VHS tapes, and (4) stay up late in front of the TV and wait for a miracle.
Using my imagination worked just fine. Still, I preferred having masturbation material. I had zero sexual experience with other people and my imagination was hungry for input and external references.
My father’s Playboy stash
The Playboy stash consisted of 10 or so issues of the Playboy magazine. My parents had wedged them within a stack of PG–13 magazines of general interest, in their bedroom. I would grab one issue from the stash and run to my cave. My room. My bed. I would masturbate. Then, I would return the magazine exactly where I had found it. All that when my parents were not home, of course.
VHS tapes
To enjoy something less static, I had to access the VCR and a VHS tape. We were not the first family to get a VCR, but we did get one, while I was in primary school.
One of the cool things about having a VCR was being able to tape TV movies and TV shows that you wanted to keep. My dad had recorded several movies on VHS and labelled the tapes. They weren’t porn, so he didn’t feel like stashing them — they were right by the VCR, in plain view.
Still, I watched his tapes, making mental notes of where scenes of nudity appeared. Then, the next times, I would revisit them by fast-forwarding to the correct timecode. Yes, the correct timecode. We are talking about tapes. Remember? Be kind. Rewind.
When I say I watched the tapes, I mean in fast forward. I had no time to sit through a two-hour movie of Marlon Brando treating 19-year-old Maria Schneider like a pet. I wanted to quickly locate the scenes where she was not only objectified, but also naked. Feminism was not my strong point, back then.
Thus, I watched all tapes on fast forward, just to see if they had any nude scenes to begin with. All I needed was a few seconds of naked female breasts. I became very good at recognising nude bodies at high tape-rolling speeds.
Late night TV
Watching the same VHS tapes, though, did not allow margin for variety. If I wanted to see something new, my only option was late night TV. I would stay up late and desperately zap from one channel to the next. For hours. The hope was to come across any film with a scene of nudity.
We were in the 90s, by then. There were a couple of soft-core shows on TV, like the Red Shoes Diaries or Inside Out. Plus any other arty movie like Last Tango in Paris, where females were gratuitously stripped and objectified, in the name of male-dominated Art.
Of course, many times I couldn’t find anything. Very often, my time was up, my parents returned, and I still hadn’t found a satisfying stimulus on TV. I would hear the door key. I would quickly turn off the TV and run from the living room to my bed, frustrated. I would tuck myself in and pretended I was asleep. Then, once my parents had settled, I would masturbate using no stimulus, in the darkness. I would be furious about how things had turned out.
Improvisation
A few times, for the sake of variety, I broke the “Playboy or TV” routine. For example, whenever I found any, I used photos of female feet. This was a childhood thing only — I currently experience no inclination towards foot fetishism. Back then, though, since images of boobs were not always easy to access, this foot fetish served me well. It was much easier to access images of bare feet than bare breasts.
I occasionally used a photo of a hot auntie of mine, topless at the beach. I kept it hidden inside a book, for several years. I must have used it to masturbate hundreds of times.
Then, a couple of times, I made my own pair of boobs. That’s right. I put two balloons together and inflated them to the size of small melons. I slipped them under one of my t-shirts and laid this improvised version of an inflatable doll on my bed. Then I lied on top of her and masturbated groping her airbag tits.
Pain, shame, and guilt
So what did I learn from all that?
First, my masturbation always related to negative feelings like shame and guilt. Running to hide, being too ashamed to discuss it, fearing that it was bad for my penis’s growth, feeling guilty about hours wasted zapping before late night TV… The negatives seemed to outnumber the positives.
What were the positives, really? Comfort. Stress release. Exploring sexuality. Even as a kid, I felt the need for a sexual connection. That related to my need to be comfortable and loved.
The need to be loved. Plus, its dark side: narcissism. It manifests as highs (when getting attention), lows (when not), male entitlement (when actively seeking attention), or hurt ego (when feeling unjustly treated).
The problem is not masturbation, but what hides behind it. Can masturbation not be simply what it is supposed to be? An act of love and self-discovery? Without shame, guilt, stress, ego, addiction, narcissism, and the desperate illusion of having company when you don’t? When I masturbated with those Playboy magazines, a part of me was in deep emotional pain. He couldn’t stand not actually being with Karen Velez, Anna Nicole Smith, or the Barbi Twins. Ignoring the fun and the pleasure of it, that part cried, “why can’t you have these women for real?” That cry reverberated forever in the empty halls of my childhood’s loneliness. And it shaped quite a fucked up worldview about sex.
In the early 90s, I had a sex education book. It said that masturbation is okay, as long as it does not turn into an obsession. This both comforted and scared me. I didn’t quite understand the boundaries. Today I do. After having dwelled in the obsession and the compulsion of sex addiction, I know. Back then, though, I was only afraid that I was not normal. “Is it normal?” I would ask myself. I knew that the answer was “no.”
That was not the right question, though. Neither was the right question whether it was okay to read Playboy magazines or make my own balloon tits.
Unfortunately, nobody was there to ask the right question: “why did I have this huge void as a kid, which I tried to fill by connecting with phantasmal women and fictional encounters?”
Loneliness? Rejection?
It’s something that I’ve been looking into since my late twenties through several forms of therapy and introspection. And it’s not something that I can answer in one article, but I hope to do so through all my articles, collectively. For both the question why and the inclination to masturbation itself are parts of who I am. And my goal through all this introspection is not stopping masturbating, but separating it from all its negative baggage.
And addressing that void. As the number of my articles grows, I will explore that void and you will get a clearer picture of what makes me tick.
On top of that, writing about my issues makes me grow and deal with them more effectively. With each article, I get closer to achieving something I struggled with both as a kid and as an adult: understanding and accepting myself.
Until then, writing about masturbation allows me to do what I couldn’t do as a kid: discuss it shamelessly.
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