| ||||
|
Arts & Entertainment
Books Comics  Health & BodyMedia Mothers Who Think News People Politics2000 Technology - Free Software Project Travel & Food  Columnists
- - - - - - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - - - - - - Also Today For a full list of today's Salon Health & Body stories, go to the
Health & Body home page. - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon - - - - - - - - - - - - Recently in Salon Health & Body Urge Urge Urge Column Complete archives for Health & Body - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
|
Coming of age | page 1, 2
Too bad. As an adult, I should have been the poster boy for self-abuse. I've had some wonderful, intense, memorable romantic relationships, but by and large they have been cartoonish little desert islands in a vast Pacific of singledom. My best friend John expressed frequent amazement at how I coped with the frustration of prolonged involuntary celibacy. Not well, in fact. I've climbed more walls than Spider-Man. And peer pressure aside, the main reason for my belated curiosity about monkey-spanking was John's repeated assurances that things would seem oh so much better once my eyeballs stopped floating. It could even help solve my romantic problems, he claimed, by removing that desperate edge, smoothing out my natural intensity, giving me that devil-may-care, "Hey baby, take me or leave me, I can always go home and jerk off" insouciance. An attractive prospect, for sure. But what eventually led me to flout biblical teachings was the prospect of genuine romantic success. Following a lovely dinner date last February I went home filled with, among other things, optimism. Things had gone well -- the immediate future looked bright. It was exciting. A little creative visualization started the process; a little Vaseline helped it along. I almost shot myself in the eye. A reign no "Seinfeld" character could ever match was at an end. Needless to say, there was no going back. The theory about increased sexual success was an early casualty -- that exciting situation never panned out after all, nor have any since. The question of whether I appear more relaxed is best left to objective observers. I don't feel so. What I do appreciate is having a way to be a sexual creature once more. The most difficult parts of my former abstinence were the seemingly endless stretches in which I became a sexual nonentity, separated from the erotic world in a frustrating solitary confinement. But masturbation had always appeared to me like a loser's last resort. Jerking off was the final confirmation that you were sexually unsalable. Now it seems like a small but treasured connection to that vibrant quadrant of life I so often miss. And that has led me to the most interesting personal about-face of all. For the first time in my life, I have become an avid consumer of pornography. In my teens and 20s I tended to keep quiet about my manual chastity, but predictably I was vocal about my aversion to dirty pictures, claiming the moral high ground loudly and often. My favorite debating shtick was to cite the scene from Kurt Vonnegut's novel "God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater," in which a fisherman is asked by an acquaintance to admire a girl in a magazine. "If this was a girl," the fisherman replies, "all I'd have to do for a living would be to stay home and cut out pictures of big fish." Touché, smut hounds. (What with my unpolished porpoise and my puritanical tastes in publishing, I was evidently quite a little tight-ass. I'm deeply sorry.) Suddenly I became a wanker, and everything changed. In the beginning, still convinced that masturbation was an occasional splash of coolant for an overheated engine, I relied solely on imagination. But soon the inclination to indulge overwhelmed any specific reason, and I began looking for ways to make it happen. Porn became a tool, like a lighter for a cigarette. It wasn't that pornography didn't affect me in the past -- I was as prone to visual stimulation as most other males. It's just that the pictures represented nothing but frustration. Staring at gorgeous women I would never meet, much less violate -- what was the point of that? Now I get it. Or I try, at least. My journey of discovery has revealed to me, among other things, that looking for pictures on the Web is often as sexy as lining up at the motor vehicle office. Complicating matters is my one remaining claim to a bizarrely protracted virginity -- I've still never owned a credit card. That can make things difficult, particularly since most porn sites seem dedicated to redefining the word "free." (My favorite message so far: "For your hot FREE tour, enter your credit card number now!") Along the sleazo cyber-trail, it has also become clear that the Web is heaven for anyone with a fetish for puerile playground lingo (and if bad spelling makes you hot, you're one lucky perv). I have not completely shaken my aversion to porn. Residual shame still clings to it -- perhaps through conditioning, perhaps because of the impersonal nature of pornography, or perhaps because remote fantasy encounters encourage exploration of the very darkest urges. Already I am hankering for those innocent times (oh, long-lost golden days of several months ago) when I dreamt up my own erotic scenarios. Sometimes, unfortunately, it doesn't work. A too-rational brain realizes that no reasonable prospects are even glimmering on the horizon -- the imagination can stretch only so far. A few lewd photos will probably always be necessary. All in all, I'm glad I started. But in spite of my ancient, newfound recipe for self-gratification, I am no less lonely. (Save your tears -- it's the well-deserved fate of a picky bastard.) This is reassuring, in a way. I would hate to think that jerking off could replace intimacy. Of course, it can't. For me, real relief from loneliness comes in only one situation -- that brief, precious window of time when I'm pursuing a woman who has not yet told me to piss off. Masturbation is not really a solution at all. It's a hobby. Like cocaine, the death penalty or cellular phones, what might seem at first to be a specific solution to a specific problem turns out in the end to be merely a habit. I continue to masturbate not for any positive effects it may have, but for the same reason the proverbial dog licks his balls -- because I can. And though momentarily I may want a bit of fantasy to sate an inner urge, what I really need is a girlfriend.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
About the writer Sound off - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Search Salon | |||
 |
 |
 |
 |
|
