 My Masturbation StoryI will soon be 75. Here is my history (abbreviated but still long). Early anatomical interests: Recently, I was visiting a home with a two and a third years old child. It was almost bedtime so she went to the potty and came back into the living room naked and sat on the floor with a book. From where I was sitting, I could not see her genitals, but gathered that she was touching or rubbing herself. Her mother asked her to stop and to put her PJs on but she persisted in her activity until her mother was able to get to her and dress her for bed. I imagine that I was like that when I was her age. A boy who is curious about everything else, can't help but to be curious about his penis and penises in general, especially since they are hidden out of view most of the time. My interests started at an early age. I have a number of remembrances in the back of my mind about my early development. The earliest are “still pictures” and some are out of focus. One memory picture that is in sharp focus is being with two cousins when we were three or four years old. We were behind some bushes with our shorts down comparing penises and one of us has pulled back his foreskin to reveal a bright, shinny, moist head and inner foreskin. The picture of the penis with his head bravely exposed is very sharp in my mind but I don’t remember how we got to that point, whose foreskin I was looking at, or what happened next. I have a “feeling”, without any clear remembrance, that we were discovered and scolded for being “naughty“. Another picture was being in bed between my parents one morning before they got up. Mother had no night gown on. I was probably just a little over two…perhaps about the time when my sister was born. I remember pointing at my mother's breasts and saying that there should be another one down further. I don’t remember any of the other details of the conversation except that mother assured me there wasn’t. I have often wondered if the other “nipple” I expected to find was really a penis. When my sister was born I may have stayed with an aunt who had boys in their late teens. I am curious what I may have experienced while there. Another picture from that same time period is of a young man (late teens or older), naked in the bath room (not our bathroom), toweling himself… but I can’t see his face. I was raised in a church-going family but I doubt that religion was the cause of ignorance and prudery. My grandmother was extremely prude and never went near the church. Ignorance was the order of the day. When my mother became pregnant, she was so excited that she said: “I hope it’s twins.” Her mother slapped her mouth for talking inappropriately. In the 1920s, people didn’t talk about sex, but I doubt that it was the exclusive fault of the church. An example of the degree of ignorance prevalent at the time is my pondering what caused babies. I heard that men stuck their thing in a woman’s hole and babies were made. (I never learned the words “penis” or “vagina” until I was in upper grades in high school.) I remember clearly at about 12-13 years of age, sitting on the edge of my bed holding my erection in my hand, staring at it, and wondering: “How can sticking this into a woman make a baby?” I already knew how to masturbate, but never associated semen with pregnancy. I grew up in a family that was handy with tools. My father was a carpenter and mechanic, my grandmother a professional dressmaker, and my grandfather had a small workshop in his basement. I learned to use all kinds of tools including needle and thread. My younger sister had been given a “Betsy wetsy” doll. You put water in a tiny nursing bottle and fed the baby and the water came out the back. She “wet herself”. I examined the doll and thought I could make one of those. (I was about five at the time.) I had a Raggedy Andy doll that I had outgrown so I scrounged around the junk bins and found an old shower hose. I had watched my mother patch Andy several times and I was sure that I could make a few incisions, work the hose from mouth to crotch under the fabric and sew him back up…grandmother taught me to thread needles for her because her eyesight was dim. I got the job done and it worked. It was definitely not a professional looking job…for one thing, the hose dangled a good bit below the crotch. I proudly showed my mother, grandmother and a visiting aunt what I had done. Grandmother made some comment about the hose and I was too quick to explain that it really didn’t represent his “thing”. She suggested that perhaps we could cut it off. I wanted no part of that. I don’t know what eventually happened to poor Andy, and I certainly do not have a castration complex as a result, but I think that I learned from that experience not to talk about certain body parts which certain older relatives. I may have been about four when I asked my father what my “things” were for. (I had no word for testes either.) He told me that was where my “seeds” were. This puzzled me for a while. Now Dad had a big vegetable garden at the time and I wanted to help him. He gave me lima beans, the biggest seeds he had, to plant…. I remember reaching down, feeling my testes, and thinking that my testes must be lima beans…they were the about the same size and shape. I suspect that Dad would have been willing to answer my questions, but I had developed the idea that I shouldn’t ask. As a result, many of my questions had to wait a long time for answers. Circumcision: Something that increased my curiosity about penises even more was circumcision. Dad sometimes bathed me when mother was busy. One night when I was about five, he observed that my foreskin was tight and said that I should be able to pull it back. I couldn’t. He encouraged me to try on my own. “Or perhaps we could have the doctor cut it“ he added as an after thought. His comment didn’t frighten me, but I was concerned that my penis was “wrong”. In elementary school we had those wonderful porcelain troughs for urinals. Six or eight boys could line up along the trough and carefully look up and down the line observing each and every penis and comparing them to his own. I thoroughly checked out each penis to see if it had a bare head. I learned the word “circumcision” later. More than half of the class were circumcised and the ones who weren’t could easily pull their foreskin back. I was not able to get mine back even when flaccid. One day an uncle stopped by with my cousin Eddy…the one with whom I investigated foreskins much earlier. He told my father: “Tomorrow we’re taking Eddy to the doctors to have his teapot cut.” I had never heard the word “teapot” used to refer to a penis before, but I could tell what he meant by his glance and gestures. A few days later, Eddy was back in school. At second grade recess, the boys lined up at the porcelain trough and I made it a point to stand next to my cousin so I could see his “teapot”. The glans was exposed and there was a small bandage around the shaft. Getting my foreskin pulled back became my mission. Not a day went by without my trying to pull the skin back. It just didn’t go. Naturally, with so much manipulation, I would get an erection. I can’t imagine that those erections didn’t feel good, but my mission was retracting my foreskin and erections prevented this goal so I would wait until I got flaccid and try again with the same results. It amazes me now that I didn’t just go with the pleasure and learn to masturbate then. One day I pulled so hard that the skin split and bled. The split healed quickly, however, and a week or two later I was back to my task of exposing my glans. This went on all through elementary school. My quest became such an obsession that I used to dream that I had successfully retracted my foreskin. I remember waking up after one exceptionally vivid dream, turning on the light, and checking my foreskin. It was still tight and would not go back. I was disappointed. In junior high school, we had gym classes and sports and had to change and shower in communal showers. I had never even thought of penis size as an issue. I was both the youngest and tallest in the class. My penis matched my height, but I had never considered comparing penises for size. Looking back, I realize that many of my classmates had much smaller penises than mine, but I envied their exposed glans. Finally, part way through seventh grade, I prevailed and the skin stretched enough to allow my flaccid glans through the opening. Of course, I got an erection almost immediately and the glans was trapped by the tight foreskin. Somehow, I knew that if I squeezed the glans, it would shrink quickly and I was able to get the glans back in the foreskin. I repeated this a number of times each day and very soon the foreskin was stretched enough so that I could easily retract it before going into the locker room where all the rest could see my “normal” penis. All during those years I longed to be circumcised so my penis would be “normal”. If I had gone to Dad and told him I had a problem, I’m sure he would have gulped and turned red, but I know that he would have tried to help me solve my problem. Although he was uncircumcised himself, I doubt that he would have been against circumcision. Or he could simply told me that being uncircumcised was cool. He probably had problems knowing how to be a father because he was orphaned at the age of twelve and had no male role model for helping a boy through puberty. But he was a caring person and I’m sorry that I didn’t trust him enough to ask for his help. It would have saved me years of feeling shy and insecure. I saw my father naked only a few times. Once, late at night, he getting ready for bed. My room was down the hall from my parents’ room and the doors were opposite each other. We usually slept with the doors open in the summer. I was in bed with my lights out ready to go to sleep. His door was open and he was walking naked towards the door to turn out the light in his room. I could see him clearly in profile with a semi erection and then straight on as he turned in my direction to turn out his light. It was a healthy looking, uncircumcised penis, like mine only larger. I was satisfied that as I grew I’d probably be just like him. The irony is that, years later when I began having prostate problems, I went on-line and found an incredible amount of information about prostates as well as links to other things. Penises are close to prostates both alphabetically and anatomically. Never having outgrown my curiosity about penises, I spent hours reading on the internet and discovered men who were disappointed or even angry that they had been circumcised. Some went as far as stretching their foreskins in order to “uncircumcize” themselves. I reasoned that my glans may have become less sensitive due to keeping it uncovered most of the time. If my foreskin were longer and kept my glans covered, perhaps I would regain greater sensitivity and be more successful in masturbation. By this time, I was not able to maintain an erection long enough to have intercourse and my wife had trouble masturbating me when I was flaccid. So I spent a couple years stretching my foreskin to the point where it now covers the glans even when erect. Now I am glad I have a foreskin and that my father didn’t have me circumcised. The M word: I find it interesting that the few wet dreams I had (~11or 12 years old) were not really sexual in nature. The first one I had was a dream in which I thought I had to urinate and I was looking for the men’s room. My father helped me find it and we were standing at the urinals as I began to urinate. I woke up wet, but not with urine. At this point in my understanding, I had no concept of the movements of sexual intercourse. I had heard that men put their penises in women, but I assumed that was just crude joking. Further, if men did indeed do such a thing, I had no understanding that it was any different from a man at the service station holding a nozzle in the gas tank to fill it. Hence my dreams usually centered on trying to find a place to urinate. The first time I was able to retract my foreskin and expose my glans, I was so excited that I wanted to run like Archimedes through the streets naked, shouting: “I’ve found it!” Fortunately, the prudery of the day won out and I contented myself with exposing my glans in the locker room and walking slowly to the shower room so everyone could see my “normal” penis. I constantly had erections at school. I wore briefs so that I could keep my erection up tight against my abdomen rather than stick straight out and be noticeable. I played with myself a lot at home in private. It felt good, but I felt that there must be something more that I was missing. I remembered the times six or eight years earlier when my cousin and I would expose ourselves and play with each other. Maybe he would know more. He lived in the next little town so I phoned him to see if he wanted to bike over for a visit. I wanted to show him my penis with the exposed head but it had been a number of years since we played together and I didn’t know how to bring up the subject. I decided to be in the bathtub taking a bath when he arrived. I answered the door with a towel around me and told him to bring a comic book into the bathroom and read while I finished my bath. It worked! When he saw me naked, he brought up the topic of penises and suggested several things we could do together. That afternoon I had my first orgasm and first ejaculation. His penis had grown since I had seen it at the porcelain trough in second grade. He had pubic hair and a large penis. His glans had a rough-textured appearance contrasted to mine which had a smooth, shiny look. That afternoon, he answered many of the questions which had been plaguing me. It was nice to renew friendship with my cousin who had moved away in third grade. Now that we were older and could ride bicycles to each other’s homes, we masturbated together a number of times during the next several years. Eddy was a good teacher and I still appreciate his help in my coming of age. Once in high school, several of us got together after school and went in a vacant garage across from the school for a circle jerk. I can’t remember which class mates were there, but I do remember that I came in last! One boy in my class who was a year older than the rest invited me to his home after school. I had noticed in the locker room that he was tanned, had dark, curly pubic hair and one of the bigger penises in the class. He was circumcised like the majority of the class. When we got to his home, we sat in his living room and he asked to see my penis with an erection. I opened my pants and played with my penis until it was hard. He examined it and commented that it was a nice sized penis and would make any woman happy. I had not even begun to think about women at the time. I never thought to ask to see his penis, though I am sure he would have been willing if I had asked, and might possibly even masturbated together. I have wondered since then, why I didn’t ask. I suppose the answer is the reticence to talk about sex that was the norm at that period in time. One day I received an invitation to spend a weekend with a boy I had met at camp when we were in elementary school several summers earlier. We hadn’t seen each other for several years and had both grown considerably. We were in his bedroom waiting for supper and he said: “Put your hand in my pants and you’re in for a BIG surprise.” He pulled my hand to his fly which was opened and, indeed, his penis was big. It was so big that it was grotesque. He wanted me to put it in my mouth, but I refused. We masturbated together before going to bed and a couple more times during the weekend. He lived a good distance away which required a two hour train trip for me to get there. The next time we met was about two years later when he invited me to the beach with his family. It was about the same scenario. He wanted oral but was willing to settle for mutual masturbation. When I was about sixteen, my mother told me about a daytime concert in the large city nearby. I caught a train into the city and went to the concert. At the concert, a middle aged man came over and sat next to me. He started a conversation and reached over and felt my calves. He complemented me on the muscles in my legs and said that he was a “physiologist” and asked me some questions about my walking and exercise habits. He then took my hand, put it against his calf, and told me to notice the firmness of the muscles. Then without saying anything more, he quickly slid my hand under the trench coat he had folded over his lap. His large, erect penis was sticking out of his opened fly and when he pushed my hand on it he ejaculated. I was startled, partly because I had never felt a grown man’s penis before and partly because it took me a good bit of rubbing to have an orgasm and I was curious how he could do it so suddenly. Although I loved to masturbate and to have orgasms, I was not enthused about this encounter. I didn’t know the man, had never met or conversed with him before, and did not feel comfortable with the situation. After the concert I went to the men’s room and he followed. We didn’t speak to each other there, and while he was at the urinal, I ducked out the door and disappeared into the streets and to the homebound train. I masturbated a lot in those days. Usually while in bed using the normal fist movement. But I was a bit careless about where my semen would land. Sometimes it hit the wall, sometimes my clothes, and sometimes my bed covers. I was sure that nobody knew I did it and that I was the only person that did such a thing. Sometimes I felt guilty and tried to refrain from masturbating, but after a while I gave in. I’m sure my parents must have known that I masturbated but they didn’t let on. Mother did tell me once that when boys get to be teenagers they often get pimples. Sometimes other boys tease them and tell them that it is from “playing with themselves”, but it isn’t from that. I had very few pimples, but I appreciated her telling me not to worry. I wasn’t into size much and normally didn’t measure myself. I think one time someone told me that six inches was “normal” so I measured my penis and found it was six and a half inches erect. I was satisfied that I was “normal” and I doubt that I thought much more about it. One weekend I was left home alone. I got a medical book from my parents’ room and tried to find things about penises and masturbation. The best I could find was that “self-abuse” was bad for you and caused weakness and a litany of medical disorders. The cure for this evil practice was to circumcise any boy who did it. At this point I felt the writer certainly could not be very smart. All you would need would be some lube. I set out to experiment with lube for the rest of the weekend and set a new personal record for JO in one day. I started with Vaseline and the next time butter. I liked the butter better since it was smoother at skin temperature. I felt I had proved my point but since I really didn’t need it, I seldom used lube in those days. When I got to college, it was a very strict religious school where the president of college stood up in an all male assembly and claimed that he never spilled a single drop of his semen by self-abuse. I was sure we would get into trouble if we were caught so we had to be very careful. Using the common shower to find relief was out of the question. I masturbated a few times in a locked toilet stall but that was not really satisfactory. The fear of someone guessing what you were doing caused tension that reduced the pleasure. One way I was able to find relief in college while sharing a room with three other men was by masturbating very slowly in bed at night when I thought everyone was asleep. I used a very soft cotton handkerchief and gently rubbed the extremely sensitive glans very slowly. The sensation was intense and tended to reduce the firmness a little. I then squeezed a muscle somehow to make it hard again after each stroke. (I’ve since learned that what I was doing, was tensing the PC muscle.) I did this very slowly for about half an hour which led to an extremely intense orgasm. I would cough several times as I came in order to conceal any slight movement of the bunk bed. Unfortunately, I cannot do this any longer. The glans has lost some of its exquisite sensitivity and this technique no longer works for me. I had several singular experiences. Once in a dorm room with some friends I had an erection that was concealed by the bagginess of my trousers. While we were lounging around talking, I rubbed myself slowly and quietly so no one would notice. I had an orgasm in my pants. I’ve never been able to do that since. Another time, I was visiting a college friend at his parents home. I was in the shower (Now this was during the time we were constantly being told that masturbation was sin.) I reasoned that maybe if I didn’t touch myself it would be OK. (A handsfree orgasm.) It worked! The water played down on my erection and I had a wonderful orgasm. I have never been able to do it again either. I transferred from that college to a less strict one and shared an apartment with only one other man. I somehow managed the courage to bring up the topic of masturbation and he said it was normal as far as he was concerned. Though it was obvious that he would not consider doing it with or in front of anyone else. However, on more than one occasion I heard him in his bed after lights were out pleasuring himself. His attitude was such a refreshing change from my previous college environment. Now I could masturbate in my bed without having to worry about making obvious noises because my roommate was still awake. That semester, I visited a church in a large city and asked the younger pastor what the Bible said about masturbation. He looked at me and said that the Bible does not condemn it, everyone does it, everyone feels guilty, and everyone thinks they are the one in ten thousand who does it. After that, I relaxed and began to schedule masturbation sessions rather than wait until I couldn’t refrain any longer. This released me from the stress of trying to abstain and then inevitably failing. It also allowed me to plan for periods of time where I could be alone and make the pleasure last longer without fear of being caught. It was also about this time that I got a draft notice from the US government (~1955). When I went for the physical exam, I had to fill out a questionnaire which included: “Do you masturbate?” I was embarrassed by the question and automatically checked “NO”. I was glad I did when I got to one sergeant and overheard him berating the man ahead of me in line who had been more honest than I and checked “YES”. “You better stop that. Don’t you know it can make you go insane?” I doubted that he knew very much but didn’t feel like a debate. (Apparently religious colleges aren’t the only ones who get on your case about masturbating.) When I finally married, I was neither insane, nor blind. My wife and I ended up with a family of four wonderful children. There were times when my wife was not available to have sex and I stimulated myself. Actually, she also masturbated fairly often. Later, when I began to experience Erectile Dysfunction, we tried mutual masturbation with each other and we both enjoyed it. Some months ago a fourteen year old grandson stayed with me for part of the summer. His parents were having trouble with him not doing school work and taking too long in the shower at home etc. Of course, I had theories about long showers. When he arrived I told him that if he wanted long showers, We could go to the Y but that we needed to conserve water at home because of the well. He cooperated well. One day I went into the bathroom we shared just after he came out from a brief shower. I saw a small glob of thick, milky white stuff on the dark bath mat. Its crisp, clean smell identified it and took me back more than sixty years when I left globs of similar stuff about assuming no one else would know what it was. Several other times during his visit I found similar evidence that a self-pleasurer had been there before me. A few weeks later, we were on a camping trip and shared a tent. One evening after a strenuous hike, I suggested that we go take showers. The camp had individual shower stalls and plenty of hot water and we were in adjacent stalls. After quite a while under the water, I heard him start to moan softly. I had been standing so the water was stimulating my penis and when I heard that I stroked myself four or five strokes and ejaculated almost immediately without even getting much of an erection. I imagine the remembrance of myself at his age finding pleasure through self stimulation set me off. I had never masturbated in a public shower (even with private stalls) before because it takes me so long to come but this particular night I was suddenly overcome by a very quick and pleasant orgasm in the shower. When I was in junior high I had failed some classes too and I thought that my grandson’s problems might be from thinking too much about his genitals and not enough about his school work. On the way home from camping, I brought up the topic of masturbation I told him that when I was his age, I had a great deal of guilt feelings about masturbating and did not realize that it was normal and healthy. I shared with him some of the myths that I had heard about masturbation. When I told him about the white hairs that grow on palms of masturbators’ hands, he instinctively examined both his hands. I laughed. He looked a bit chagrined that he had been caught in such a trick. I quickly told him not to worry, I was caught in the same trick. when I was in junior high sixty years ago, a class mate of mine, told the entire class that myth while we were changing in the locker room. We all looked at our palms. My grandson and I laughed together and realized that some things don’t change. Masturbation is a personal thing and I don’t ask him any questions. He still thinks that no one knows that he does it. I have never let on about all the times I have found little puddles of clear, thick fluid or globs of milky white semen in the bathroom. Nor have I mentioned the groans I heard in the shower that one pleasant evening while camping. I told my grandson that nearly a hundred percent of males do masturbate at some time and if he should ever do it, he should thank God for having created him with the capability of experiencing such pleasure. I’m not sure if he has begun to take my advice or not, but I trust that as he matures, he will be able to control his desires rather than be controlled by them…that his grades will improve and that, in spite of conserving shower water, he may still find abundant pleasure in his genitals and without guilt. I now practice stimulating my entire ventral surface (belly and chest) as well as my genitals when I masturbate. I also practice trying to be relaxed and not have ejaculation as the goal. Many people find that planning a vacation is a major bit of the fun and so with masturbation. The journey to ejaculation should be a major portion of the pleasure and should not be rushed by a desire to reach the goal as quickly as possible. If I ejaculate, that’s an additional bonus to a pleasurable journey. Thank you for your helpful web site. DG (74 y.o.) Please use your back button to return from whence you came... or.... 
copyright2006 wankers.com |