From the bizarre and beautiful masturbatory mind of Terry Border at Bent Objects.

It all started in fourth grade. We were reading ‘Julie of the Wolves’ in english class. I was reading late at night with my flashlight under the covers (yeah, I was that kid) and what should I come across but a scene detailing the first night alone of a newly wed couple. (I actually think, now, that this may have been a scene of marital rape, but what the hell did I know at the time? Nothing.) I read on, enraptured with the words unfolding before me on the page and the tingling feeling starting to creep up between my legs. I have never experienced anything like this before. It felt weird…but good. The scene ended all too quickly and, in a slight panic about what I was feeling down there, I continued on, not stopping to wonder about this unusual phenomenon. In a few minutes, the feeling disappeared, much to my relief and slightly to my disappointment.  What was this strange power these words had over me? What was that quivering feeling deep in the pit of my stomach? I had no idea, except that this unfamiliar tingle was actually quite enjoyable. After I finished the chapter, I went back to that part and read it again – and the feeling returned. And so the journey began.

(Somewhere within this time I start masturbating on a fairly regular basis in the shower where no foreplay is required to make things wet enough to get off successfully…)

Flash to 9th grade honors English class. An interesting choice of assignment. The class is split up into groups and each group chooses a different novel to read. My choice: The Girl with The Pearl Earring (by Tracy Chevalier, highly recommend it…). This story just drips with potential to bring back that, by now, familiar tingle of the nether regions. The basic premise: a young girl working as a maid for Johannes Vermeer (17c Dutch painter…) is tasked with cleaning the artist’s studio and is promptly seduced into posing for him in a very simple, yet some how very erotically described portrait. This, however, is not the sexy part. No, that comes with the introduction of Pieter, the butcher’s son who works in the market and promptly takes the girl’s virginity in a horse-poo filled alley.

Ok, I know what you’re thinking—not exactly what one might consider sexy, but again, it was all in the words.

Breast. Tongue. Pushing. Release.

Such simple combinations of letters that, when put in the right context can mean so, so much to a 15 year old. And this time, we actually had to discuss this in class. It was unavoidable. A group of 5 of us had all read the same thing, the same words, and it was pretty much the only significant event in chapter 13, it had to be discussed. Naturally, it was deemed gross and we all giggled about it. I was too ashamed to admit that I had liked it, that it made me feel so good, that I was so curious to know if it ever happened like this in real life. That I had dreamt about Pieter smiling at me in the market, whispering sweet nothings so I would follow him into the dark and secluded alley and there, we would do the dirty deed. That someone else would make me feel like these words did.

Flash to junior year when I’ve finally discovered that movies are quite often based on books and that those books are often much better than their movies…case in point: The Horse Whisperer. (If you didn’t like, whatever, it is sentimentally endearing and Robert Redford is sexy…) I picked up this book hoping for a good read, but most of all praying for a sex scene as good as the alluded one in the film—I was not disappointed. This is my first, distinct memory of masturbating after reading a book. Sure, I’d seen the scene play out on a screen, but this was something different. There was more detail and yet, there was so much left to the imagination. With the words in front of my eyes, it was so easy for my brain to visualize a cowboy’s rough, ‘working man’ hands running up and down my body, a warm, sensuous  kiss from his sun-tanned lips and wham, bam, thank you ma’am, I was finished. All this before I could even read the whole scene (which was fine by me, I just started the process over again…). Jackpot.

Ever since I discovered the power of words to have this effect on me, I have to admit, I use it often. It’s a sure-fire way to get me off and I’d like to think it gives a whole new meaning to the concept of ‘pleasure reading’.

Ballantine laughs, “What do you do for women? Make love to your fist?”
Gatlin grins. “Whatever’s handy.”

Kenneth O’Keefe, the “Absent Duke of Serutan,” from The Ginger Man by JP Donleavy:

I have been satisfying myself by hand as usual but find it very boring. However, I had written what I called “A Beginners Guide to Masturbation” in Greek to add sophistication, but gave it up in despair.

Albert Lippincott, from Mailman by J. Robert Lennon:

He was nearly to the point where he would have to stop, and it was then that he heard his mother’s feet on the stairs and voice in the stairwell muttering, “Jesus fucking Christ, the kid’s been in there an hour and a half”: and rather than stopping, he redoubled his efforts, losing control of the motion of his hand, the monotony of its effort snowballing into a blinding, involuntary jitter; and instead of knocking as she usually did, his mother threw open the door; and in his sudden panic something in Mailman indeed ruptured: so strong it was audible, the explosive expulsion of life: and his mother screamed and said, “What in the hell are you doing!”

I am 13 years old and the world is my vagina. Every hole, every crease, every fold, groove, and furrow is my penis’s new playmate, a temporary tortoise shell for probing and habitation. All is warm and happy, cushioning and supple. And then I met Pantene.

Pantene Pro-V Conditioner and I didn’t meet in the shower, as one might expect for such a steamy encounter, but on the couch in my study, the two of us surrounded by bath condiments ranging from foot cream to body butter. It was just after school, and I had taken advantage of my time alone to set up a lubricant buffet, a genital-focused speed-dating arena of every non-toxic liquid I could find in order to get myself a masturbatory soul mate. Lubriderm was clean, but cautious and cold. Vaseline was sloppy, too clingy for anything quick and short term. And then, Pantene. Pantene was fluid but firm, thick but not suffocating, different, refreshing, and discrete. I ejaculated almost immediately, and it was love at first white. So why stop there? I thought as I readied myself for a quick second date. Why must the action always go down here in Palmsville? Why not swing over to her place and show her a thing or two about loving? This thought was barely even hot on my skull before I had shoved my penis firmly into her bottle, the vulnerable sides of my head scraped by her immobile hole.

Instant pain. Searing, burning, screaming pain spidered down the length of my shaft, and I pulled out, once again scraping my head on the sides of the bottle’s opening. I spit on my penis to try and extinguish the fire inside it, put it under hot water and howled to the ceiling, but nothing would stop the anguish, nothing would wash off the scars of wanton love and misplaced trust that sang from my penis like irradiated stretch marks. My penis looked like a cross between ground meat and neon, a hopelessly limp limb withered by shame and crusted by grief. Scorned beef. For the next four weeks of summer, I started every day with a shower and a pile of lotion. I kept a spare tube in my pocket for emergencies and walked like an obtuse angle whenever a lack of attention would allow. The day I awoke to a healed penis was one of the happiest days of my life, and one I will never forget. I held onto my shaft, still warm from sleep, apologized aloud, and wept. I had chosen the third hole. And I was sorry.

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Be a part of the Marchsturbation movement! Instructions here.

All erections before the first meaningful one respected the dick’s innocence. But at 13, the human male’s brain releases a surge of wrathful hormones, spawning a horned demon that rises at cockcrow, dusk and obnoxiously random times in between, possessing its pubescent victim, who must learn to exercise and exorcise (jerk and bust) the evil out of himself, daily, forever.

A few minutes after this awesome metamorphosis, the male learns that his thumb and pointer finger serve as an effective vice on his dick.  It feels so good, but it’s too easy.  He scavenges the kitchen for tools to create the ultimate fuck-machine, into which he can thrust his virginal cock.  Plastic bags, check, peanut butter, check, olive oil, check, rubber bands, check.  He concocts a delicious lubricant, which he then pours into a plastic bag, which he then seals around his dick with two rubber bands.  He slips his dick under his living room couch cushion, and after 5 minutes of doggy-style, stops, recalling the greater efficiency and practicality of his right hand.  A framed photo of his mother on the mantle catches his eye; he shudders and pulls out of the plastic bag.  He ventures to the bathroom to wash up, discovers an empty toilet paper roll on the surface of the trash can, thrusts… He’s spent the past three hours inventing new masturbation mechanisms.  The demon licks its lips.

And inevitably within the next few days, the 13-year-old searches “sex blowjobs titties babes” on Google.  In his life, the modern man probably spends more time watching internet porn than having sex.  I remember when my dad sat me down in my bedroom and gave me the birds and bees speech: “Ben, listen….”; hours before that, I had been lounging in front of my friend Kabir’s laptop in his dusty Bob Marley-themed attic watching a guy shove a wine glass up a woman’s ass with his erect penis, on a pirate ship. The shover and the victim traded groans and “Arrrr”’s as the glass vanished into an abyss of shit.

“Oh yeah, baby! Push it harder, baby!”

The common man’s sex life lexicon (sexicon) is infested with crude porn-star zingers like that: “Lemme see that pussy” and, “Oh yeah, baby, fuck me like that.”  When your new boyfriend gets you in bed and his demon starts breathing up your thigh, don’t be alarmed when he mumbles such obscenities.  It’s the porn talking.  If this is his first time getting laid in a while, he will be comparing the sex he’s having now with pornos he’s watched within the week, the same pornos that teach little 13-year-old boys how to seduce their best friend’s moms, drill holes into public bathroom stall dividers, fuck balloons, sheep, butts, and sheep butts, the same pornos that your drooling grandpa watches to satisfy his thirst for 18-year-old “virgin pussy.”

Men are pigs.  But it’s not our fault.

Then, on a Sunny D afternoon in fifth grade as my friend Kabir and I were walking back from recess, what little understanding I had of sexual behavior was decimated. “The woman’s thingy is in between her legs, underneath her,” Kabir told me, replicating a woman’s legs with a peace sign and pointing, “See? Like this. That’s what my brother told me.” But I didn’t believe him. I couldn’t. How was that even possible? My wiener stuck straight out, how could it ever access a hole buried in secret between a woman’s legs? Now my pressing pastime seemed not only wrong, but ridiculous. I was buying into lies every time I pushed into that mattress. I was cementing a flawed understanding of a practice I knew I needed to master in order to be loved. I was pulling my own leg by pressing my third one.

So I stopped. Just like that. I couldn’t gain pleasure—no matter how loosely the term had been applied in the first place—from some act that I knew to be childish, and so pressing faded away, just a larger form of thumbsucking for a larger, more bewildering thumb.

I know that I was in elementary school and at most ten years old, because we hadn’t yet moved to Wisconsin. It was in gym class, the day we had to climb a rope that seemed so long I was convinced it was rooted in the very Heavens above. Even though we were inside, this Goliath means of gym class torture continued to softly swing as if defying us small children to think of climbing it as anything but a gentle and pleasant activity. Entangled with the sense of fear being emitted by a few students, there was also an impression of unspoken competition in the air that day; I knew that climbing any less than half-way up would be complete and utter failure. Elementary sized glory and pride awaited only those who could touch the Pearly Gates at the top. When it was my turn, I started hard and fast in hopes of gaining as much height as possible before my muscles did anything unspeakable, like remember their inadequacy and stop working. But the motion of pushing and pulling myself up with the hard rope solidly and securely sliding between my legs produced such a different effect than that of muscle fatigue that I nearly let go altogether.

What was wrong? What in the world was this feeling? Was this supposed to happen? Did those suddenly insignificant people on the ground know that fireworks were exploding between my legs? Every muscle in my body tensed; I was gripping the rope so hard my knuckles turned white and my palms were chaffed by the rough cord. I had to keep climbing. I had to keep squeezing my legs as hard as possible and pushing up against the rope. I had to. But my muscles were burning, my inadequate strength threatening to end the glorious miracle happening.

“Don’t stop, just a little more” I remember begging myself.

I was so close; to what I didn’t know, but by God I knew it was big and I had to find out. The more I savagely demanded of my muscles, the more the rope slid between my legs, the higher I went and the closer I was to Heaven. Then, muscles screaming, I found I physically couldn’t pull myself up one more inch and had to stop climbing, suspended between gym class and a world of sensation I surely wasn’t supposed to know about. Something continued to pulse and throb between my legs like the persistent plucking of a bass, my breathing was ragged from an exertion only partly to do with exercise and dark spots billowed on the edge of my vision like storm clouds. I was clinging ferociously to what I now regarded as some magic vehicle to incomprehensible stimulation, hovering closer to the ceiling than the floor and waiting for the ebb of my quivering body when I finally heard the teacher yelling at me to come down. He seemed to know that I had transcended the paltry rope climbing exercise and instead propelled myself to glories yet unrealized by most, because with slightly more edge in his voice than before, he shouted that I had gone high enough and needed to come back that instant.

Whether I was indeed the highest climber in the class that day or what explanation I gave myself for what happened are those kinds of details that no longer exist. The intensity and novelty of the sensations felt on that rope however, are more than enough to keep this memory alive and pulsating.

Alright, I’ve typed in “brain sex” into a google search, and this is what I got:

“Let’s look at what goes on in the brain during sex and orgasm. Although you think everything happens between your legs, the experience of orgasm actually occurs between your ears. Certain pathways are turned on, while your defences are turned off. This happens by means of chemical messengers and the nerve cell receptors they bind to.”

So, yes.  I guess while I sat there on the couch, reading about two girls getting each other off with a bright blue strap-on, I was mentally masturbating.  Imagine my shock and surprise when the big O happened.  Yeah!  I mean, how do you hide that experience?  Especially as you gasp through it and glance over and see your best friend and a sister busily skimming the pages of the other copies of playboy that we had unexpectedly found hidden in the drawer of the coffee table?

Hell no I didn’t know what the hell was going on!  Obviously didn’t say anything about the unexpected….. thing that had happened to me.  It happened, and I didn’t know how it had happened or how to make it happen again.  Actually, it took me a while (months? years?) to put a name to it.

My brain is still a powerful asset in my sexuality to this day.  Yes, my husband and I have good, toe-curling sex.  Yes, I still masturbate (it was outta control when I was pregnant… who knew!?).  And, honestly, most of the time I’m lost in my own sexual fantasy in my mind.  I’m not there in bed with my husband.  I’m a student getting it from her teacher on top of a desk.  Or a babysitter getting it from behind in the car when the dad takes me home at the end of the night.  Or a secretary taking advantage of her boss.  I mean, to this day the power of what goes on “between my ears” either makes it or breaks it for me.

And, yeah, my husband would probably be turned on by all these thoughts and fantasies if I told him about them or we tried to act them out or whatever.  But you know what??  I don’t actually like it rough.  Or from behind.  Or on top of a cold desk.  I don’t want him to dominate me or try to stick it up my butt or any of the other scenarios I play out in my head in the warmth of my bed while my husband patiently holds back his own orgasm so I can finish.  Do you think the dad giving it to me from behind in the back of his station wagon would do that?  Hell. no.

Hell. no.

“Let me ask you something,” my dad pries, grabbing my thigh, “do you masturbate?”

My mental state collapses like a cotton ball soaked in blood. I either have to answer this man or crash the car into a ditch, those are my only options. “Yes,” I squeeze out, waiting for some aneurysm or explosion, petrified.

“Good,” my dad says, as though he guessed right. There is a pause, and I can hear my sweat glands vomiting in my armpits. “You know, I never masturbated when I was growing up,” he says, “I didn’t know what it was.” I look at him, horrified, but he continues, “Oh, yeah. I mean, I had wet dreams. Sure. But I never masturbated.” It is all I can do to not just let go of the wheel and choke myself to death. But still he continues, “That’s why I need you to do me a favor.”

Acid baths. Soldered ear drums. Wailing sheep.

“Sure, dad. What?” Used diaper in a microwave. My dad turns to me, head against the window, “I want you to masturbate before every date. Every single date, an hour before you even see the girl you’re taking out, I want you to shower and masturbate. That way, you’re thinking with your brain instead of your penis. You get me?” And that’s the weirdest part of the conversation, I do. I do get him. I understand what he’s talking about and I take it for what it is, damn fine fatherly advice. Plus, at its heart, paternal permission to masturbate. Let the father train his son in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it. Amen, Bible. Amen.