Sunday Morning Questions: Rubbing One Out Edition

I've written about this in the past, but I was kind of a doofus about masturbation when I was a kid. I went from dewy-eyed innocent to masturbation fiend all in the space of a single hot summer afternoon, when in my single digits I first I got the idea to go somewhere private (my family's attic, which was about a hundred degrees), to pull down my pants, and to wrap my legs around a cardboard box in which my mom's guitar had been sold, and to hump it until . . . well, I didn't know exactly what was going to happen, but instinctively I knew that something had to, because it felt so good.

When that first orgasm came, it was so unexpected and crazy that I thought I'd passed out from the heat, or perhaps had a heart attack. But if that was what heart attacks felt like, I wanted another.

So for months and months and maybe even as long as a year after that, whenever I masturbated, it was by rubbing and humping. I would straddle the rounded corner of a mattress and push and rub and hump like a rabbit until I orgasmed. Or I'd put a rug on the edge of the tub, and wrap my little legs around the cushioned porcelain, and jackrabbit my way to a climax there. I humped an old vertical support beam in my basement, and a tree trunk in the back yard, after dark. Eventually I hit on the concept of folding my pillow in half and straddling it in bed, which was the most comfortable means of all—and I stuck to that for a long time.

It wasn't until I started hanging out in the cruisy men's room on my parents' campus and saw men handling their own dicks with their hands—a totally novel concept for me—that it occurred to me that it might be digitally manipulated. It took me a long time to figure out a way to do it, though. I started out by making my index finger and thumb into a loose circle that I'd draw up and down the skin of my dick with a light touch. I'd keep that up until I was ready to blow, when I'd grip my meat with my thumb and forefinger only and quickly jerk it off. I didn't use lube (I still don't, when I'm going solo). I use a full-fisted approach now, but I've only gotten there gradually, over the years.

I bring up the topic because I was chatting with a friend who was telling me how he used to masturbate pretty much exclusively as a kid by sticking his dick between the cushions of a sofa and fucking the fabric; I also knew someone else who as a kid stuffed Kleenex into a thermos bottle and fucked it like a proto-Fleshlight.

It just goes to show you that when it comes to getting our dicks off, the most untaught among us will expend all of our creativity in making it happen.

How about you guys? Masturbate in any creative and unexpected ways when you were kids and didn't know any better?

Let's get to some responses from formspring.me.



Have you ever met someone who's read your blog before a face to face meeting with them & had them expect an intimate relationship with you & were they pissed when you wouldn't give them what they expected?

Yes.

I won't go into detail—just as I haven't in my blog—because I don't want to betray that kind of trust. Having someone feel they know me, and having someone want to know me because of my writing, is a big honor. I don't take it lightly. Having someone become infatuated with me because of my blog has happened a few times, and usually I know—and they know—that it's not me with whom they're really infatuated, but some idealized version of me, a sexual superstar, a handsome super-stud, and a tireless lover that could never exist. (Well, maybe the tireless lover part exists.)

When they find out I'm just an ordinary-looking guy who does attempt to relish the life he lives, but who also is vague about what day of the week it is, who forgets to pay bills, and who has a severe phobia about talking on the telephone, and who cusses like a redneck in expensive restaurants, it's disappointing both for them and for myself.

On one level there's not a lot of disconnect between the way I present myself in the blog and the way I am in real life. The blog is very much the real-life me. But somehow it's easier to overlook the flaws of the blog me, than when the real me is stammering his way through yet another dull ol' story.

You ween't hurt by your experiences as an adolescent regarding sex & you haven't become either a pedophile or homophobic so why do so many people seem to insist on informing you that these men you played with are monsters & pedos?

Cultures tell themselves stories, and grow to agree upon them.

Think of it this way. Half a century ago, the story our culture told about gays was that they were a menace to society, a shadowy subculture of a handful of subversive sexual demons and predators who all committed suicide from unhappiness and blackmail. We saw that theme everywhere—in our magazines, in movies, in novels and plays, on news programs. Over the years we've revised that story many times—there was a period in the eighties in which gays were well-meaning young men who came out and then died of AIDS, and then in the nineties in which we were every girl's asexual best friend.

And look at how we as a culture are revising the story today—it's all about protection, whether of gay youth from bullies in the schools, or bullies trying to take away equality rights from the grown-ups.

The problem with these stories is that we dislike it very much when someone deviates from the accepted narrative of the moment. People fifty years ago were scandalized and upset to find that there were gay men who were quite happy about their sexuality and didn't intend to pick up a gun and do the respectable thing. And in a turnabout, the dominant culture these days can be upset when finding a good man and settling down into a marriage isn't the first thing on a nice gay boy's mind. On television, you don't see prowling, sexual gay men—they're either in a marriage or marriage-equivalent, or yearning for a storybook wedding. That's a big shift in narrative.

At the moment, the accepted narrative about adolescent sex is that the young people involved are all victims, and passive innocents at the hands of horrible monsters, at that. A century ago, the cultural narrative might've been that fourteen, or fifteen was the age a girl might start thinkin' about gettin' hitched to an older swain. Even in my youth, parents grudgingly distinguished between genuine abuse and kids just messing around; now it's all lumped into the same victimized category. As I've said many times before, doing so does a great disservice to youth who are genuinely abused and mistreated, and whose stories are mixed up with the likes of horny sluts like me.

A culture often achieves progress by rewriting its narratives. On the converse, the dominant narrative can obscure and erase the very real stories of how people behave outside that accepted narrative.

When we buy into myths, or contribute to that noise, we're doing nobody any favors.

Have you ever played strip poker or a strip version of another game?

I've never played a strip version of another game for real. I suppose Doctor doesn't count?

The closest I game was challenging an online friend to Strip Carcassonne. However, we kind of just skipped to sending each other nude photos by the end of the third turn.

You seem to have an almost psychological understanding of what people expect or want from you, did you study psychology or have you always been astute & able to read a person?

Coincidentally, I was a psychology major in college.

I say 'coincidentally,' because studying that subject really didn't give me much of whatever insight I can claim to have into behavior, whether anyone else's or my own. What a degree in psychology gave me was a grasp of statistical analysis, the chance to babysit obnoxious and violent teenagers in the wards of a local psychiatric hospital, and a fervent desire not to enter an actual psychology-related career.

What is your personal policy around tipping? Do you tip every shmo who has a hand out, or do you only tip for excellence, or somewhere in between?

It's often true that some professions are, quite legally, paid well under the minimum wage with the expectation that they'll make up the difference with tip money. For that reason, I will tip wait staff and bartenders and drag entertainers a good amount, without hesitation. Not to do so is pretty willfully rude, I think.

However, if my service is bad—if I'm forced to wait an especially long time, or if the waiter is snappy or dismissive or manages to bring down my dining experience—I will leave almost no tip. (I won't leave out a tip completely; I don't want them assuming I simply forgot.) And generally I will tell their manager why.

I will occasionally tip people like ice-cream scoopers who don't traditionally earn tips if I'm in a good mood and/or they are super-cute.

Do you own something you are truly proud of?

I don't get a lot of pride in ownership out of objects. I don't buy cars to show off my tastes or (god knows) my wealth. I haven't lived in the flashiest neighborhoods in the biggest houses. I don't wear rings or jewelry or expensive watches that I show off proudly, the way some people do.

If there are any physical objects I own of which I'm proud, they're objects I've made myself—the results of my artistic career, for example. Those I can display with a lot of pride. Handmade objects I use to decorate my home? I'm proud of those. If I can make something myself that other people enjoy and that's beautiful, I'm proud as hell of it.