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And yet, for all the diversity out there, I believe that, in one small but significant way, I am sexually unique. Before I continue, let me just say that I don't want to hear any whining later on about how you didn't need to hear this stuff -- too much information, etc. Leave now or don't bitch.

I masturbated for the first time at the age of 40. If anybody else is eligible for that particular club, send me $49.99 and I'll start up a newsletter. Aside from offering the possibility of a circus career, my unique status also provides a fresh perspective -- not only on the popular pastime of self-abuse, but on the paraphernalia that often goes with it.

One small factor contributing to my belated moral collapse was, believe it or not, peer pressure. Like onanism itself, it doesn't stop after high school. Whenever the topic of masturbation came up -- rarely over dinner, of course, but in intimate moments such things are sometimes discussed -- my revelation was almost always greeted with horrified fascination. Worse, it planted that little kernel of fear and mistrust that usually results from an encounter with The Other. Lovers sometimes looked at me differently. "I thought I knew this guy," they seemed to be thinking.

There is no doubt that public attitudes towards masturbation have done a 180-degree swivel in the space of a generation or so. Once the hairy-palms-and-blindness warnings faded away they were quickly replaced by the accepted wisdom that everybody does it and those who say they don't are lying. Which marked me, I knew, as either freak or liar.

The curious asked why I never started, as if a young boy would have to stop himself -- would have to make the decision not to do something so natural. The simple truth is that when I was a kid it never occurred to me. Adolescence brought the same fevered fantasies and wet dreams everyone experiences, but by that time I suppose my attitude was set -- if I thought about masturbation at all, it was only as something other, icky little boys did.

Next page | Submitting to private fantasies made porn make sense