My Masturbation Journey

Despite the sexual guilt imposed on me and my partners by a mid-20th century sexual culture of secrecy and shame, I have learned through long experience that sexual pleasure is a beautiful gift we can share with people we love and care about, straight, gay, and in between.  That gift can be easily corrupted by imbalances of power between the participants: male and female, husband and wife, stronger and weaker, older and younger, supervisor and employee, professor and student, mentor and mentee, etc., etc., etc.  In writing this sexual memoir, I’ve thought a lot about how much my own desires have pressured my partners into sexual activity.  I don’t think my persuading ever crossed the line into compelling, and so I can look back without many regrets.  The biggest thrill for me has been sharing the orgasmic bliss of my partners – and reliving those moments while I masturbated.

The Biblical story of Onan, who withdrew and spilled his seed on the ground rather than meet his duty to consummate a marriage to his deceased brother’s wife, has given religious conservatives a pretext for condemning the natural, healthy, and nearly universal practice of self-pleasure and has saddled masturbation with the pejorative label of Onanism.  Not surprisingly, some ancient cultures that placed a paramount value on reproduction of the race, condemned homosexuality.  St. Paul, who sincerely believed that the Second Coming would happen during his lifetime, advised his followers to refrain from marrying.  Those attitudes and judgments were products of times and places that I have not lived in.  The Biblical values I have tried to let guide my sexual relationships are those of love, honesty, trust, and humility.

Wonderful as sex can be, we are at our most personally vulnerable when we engage in it.  We are truly naked, physically and emotionally, and we are very easily hurt.  Every boy worries about what his partner will think when she, or he, first sees his penis, just as she worries about the size of her breasts.  Performance anxiety is a major topic for sex therapists.  Our sexual practices, preferences, identity, and relationships are subject to harassment and bullying.  (I learned in junior high that being called a jerk off, not to mention a homo, was a deeply embarrassing insult.)  But that very vulnerability, at best, is what allows us to forge deeply honest emotional relationships with our partners.  When we can lay ourselves bare, in every sense, and find that we are loved and valued, we can learn to accept and love who we are.  Although I waited until marriage to engage in penetrative sex, I have no moral objections to sex outside of marriage.  My masturbation memoir is full of everything short of intercourse!  But I worry, as old folks are apt to do, that the contemporary hook up culture assumes that sex can be purely physical and misses the chance to build the kind of meaningful, trusting love relationships I have been blessed to have.

Enough with the sermon.  I’m grateful to SoloTouch for providing a non-judgmental arena for discussion of a topic that has been so widely, cruelly, and mistakenly judged by conservative churches, by governments and school boards, and by the broader society.  And I’m grateful to the SoloTouch writers who have honestly (or mostly honestly) told the stories of their sexual experiences.  The stories of learning to masturbate, of sharing the experience with friends, and of discovering the mysteries of first love, have resonated with my own memories and led to many satisfying outcomes.  Thank you.