The greatest discovery

“Every sperm is sacred.” –Monty Python

Everyone talks about how the media affects little girls. About how Barbi and TV shows and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit issue make them think they’re not good enough. About how they have to torture themselves mentally and physically trying to live up to some inflated and insane ideal of beauty. In fact, just this week I saw (yet) another article about the impossible proportions of Barbi’s figure. What a scoop! Oh, it’s so sad. If only there was some way to stop this Barbi juggernaut from destroying young girls’ psyches. If only there was some way that parents could stop their children from getting these dolls. But how I ask you, how?

Believe it or not, the holy trinity of Van Damme, Schwarzenegger, and Stallone made me—a boy!—a little self-conscious too. And being surrounded by an army of He-men, GI Joes and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and all their rippling plastic molded muscles convinced me that it wasn’t great to be short and fat. Hell, even the most vile villains like Stinkor and Rocksteady were shredded Adonises—Adonii?—whose horrifying birth defects and mutations couldn’t hide their bulging biceps and six pack abs. The only character I could relate to was Ram Man but even Prince Adam got more chicks than him. And when my dad kept pointing out that I had hooters, I felt they’d be the only real hooters I’d ever touch.

So don’t tell me women have cornered the market on body issues. I knew I was fat and I knew girls thought that was gross. I was constantly and always aware that I didn’t look like I should, that I wasn’t what the ladies were looking for. But I still tried. I didn’t actually, you know, talk to them or anything, but I did take the time to try do something cool with my hair and find the right cologne and even tried to coax a beard out of my three facial hairs. I almost bought a cool shirt one time but, again, my dad pointed out that you could see my hooters in it. I even once bought a ridiculous choker necklace with a skull on it, but somehow it didn’t work. I eventually developed a sense of humor and managed to get up enough courage to talk to girls, you know, if I absolutely had to. But shockingly, even though so many women say they want a funny guy, they were more interested in the guys who’d drop their shirts in the blink of an eye. It’s almost as if they were shallow and were objectively judging men by their physical features. Nah, that couldn’t be. Only men do that.

I knew I was screwed as far as actual screwing went. And I was ok with it. But I was still horny. Then one night, I found out I could take matters into my own hands. Literally.

I was in bed reading, probably something by Robert Ludlum or Dean Koontz, and my hand was in my pants, like it always was when I was relaxing. I don’t know if this was my natural state or a subconscious imitation of Al Bundy, but it was comfy. Normally, I just left my hand there, like I couldn’t relax without being sure everything was still where it was supposed to be. But this time, I started doing a little more. I don’t know if I was reading a particularly good scene—Koontz and Ludlum had some steamy stuff before they decided they were too good for it—but for some reason I actually started rubbing. And tugging.

It felt good, which was a pleasant surprise. This was a whole new way to entertain myself. So I kept doing it, not even thinking about it, just reading and rubbing. Then I remembered something I’d seen on TV or from the older boys in school. They’d always dismiss someone’s dumb comment by cupping one hand and making a jerking motion. Usually got a few laughs. And I thought to myself, wouldn’t that work on my dick?

So I started doing that. And it was good. So good. I tried turning my hand upside down and that was pretty good too. It even worked with my left. It was good slow. It was good fast. It couldn’t fail. Reading was fun. Stroking myself was fun. I’d found 2 great things that went great together.

A little while later, I don’t know how long, I felt something building. Something odd. But good. Almost like I had to pee, but somehow I knew I didn’t. I’d already taken my dick out of my pants for easier access—I had a lock on my door—which was good because the sensation kept building until it exploded. Literally. Sticky goo erupted all over my pants. And my book. And a little on the floor. I didn’t know what the fuck was happening. It felt good, but it actually kind of hurt too, as if I’d just blasted a bigger hole in my dick.

I was a little freaked out that something other than pee was coming out my penis, but I kept it to myself. This was weird, and little messy, but it felt right. And good. Really fucking good.

This is the problem with going to a Jewish private school. I honestly didn’t have a fucking clue what had just happened. No one had ever taught us this stuff. In biology class, we had turned to the chapter on reproduction and then some idiot had laughed and said “Hey, that’s a picture of a penis! Ha ha ha, gross!” and that was the end of that chapter. Even when we were just learning about animals, that same idiot laughed and said “When you’re talking about animals being in heat, you mean they’re hot right? David thinks you’re talking about sex. What an idiot!”

And of course we didn’t have sex education. Because if you knew about sex, you would have sex. But if you didn’t learn about it in school, you would never learn about it anywhere else. Logic!

Then again, if they had taught us that the joystick between our legs was more fun than any video game, we probably would have run home and started playing. We’d have ignored all our homework and gotten rejected by all the good colleges and the school’s image would have suffered. So maybe it was good thing they delayed this discovery by a few months so I could have one semester of good grades.

Of course, they did teach us it was evil to masturbate. Not that they explained what it was or how you did it. We were just told not to spill our seed, as if we were all gardeners.

Fortunately, like I said, I was a big reader—had plenty of time thanks to the ladies’ odd fascination with tall, dark, and handsome—and obviously I’d read my share of sex scenes. In hindsight, I’m surprised my mother let me read those books, but I guess she figured it was better I learn from books than talk to her about it. Or maybe she just hadn’t gone totally crazy yet.

So I understood the basic mechanics. I’d read about throbbing members, about guys being so hard they were numb, about approaching a cliff or being carried by a growing wave of sensation and screaming climaxes and all kinds of flowery nonsense, but I wasn’t reading anything that would describe it. And I don’t think I’d ever realized I could just do it myself. But I did the math and I realized that I’d discovered how to jerk off. And it wasn’t just good. It was fucking awesome!

Suddenly, a door had opened in front of me. And I quickly slammed it shut and locked it so I could masturbate in peace. I was a boy possessed, looking for anything I could get my hands on to help me get my hands on myself. I’ve heard of kids having to masturbate in showers, of parents raising their eyebrows knowingly as the water runs for 20 minutes, and I pity those poor bastards. Sure, soap and shampoo is nice, but doing it standing up with nothing to look at? And everyone in the house knowing what’s going on? Sad. No one had any idea why I was always locked in my room or why we went through tissues so fast, right? I was living it up with a lock on the door and a TV in my room. If it had boobs, I was watching. Terrible, terrible shows like Model Inc., and Unhappily Ever After got minor rating spikes because of the major spike in my pants. And the best was obviously Married with Children with Kelly Bundy. I still can’t hear the words “The New-“ without thinking of “The Neeeeeeeew Allande” and the Bundy Bounce. Hmmmm, Bundy Bounce.

 I eventually got tired of leaving my room to get tissues, and I was a little worried I might have to do some quick cleanup if someone knocked on my door. So instead, I’d just take care of business and then quickly roll on my side and shoot it between the bed and the wall. Genius. I just hope my parents never move that bed before they sell the house. Then again, maybe they could sell it as a modern art masterpiece. I’m actually surprised no nut job has figured out a way to color his sperm and paint with it.

I was coming of age just as Pam Anderson exploded on the scene and soon I was exploding too. Baywatch trumped everything else and when Pam did Playboy—for the 4^th time—I had to have it. I went down to the local magazine shop and did the whole skunking around thing, waiting until the coast was clear, before grabbing it and slipping it onto the counter facedown, wondering if the owner of uncertain nationality was aware he shouldn’t be selling this to a 13-year old. He wasn’t! I slipped my brown-paper-wrapped treasure into my knapsack and left just as my English teacher walked in—the holy Binity of Pam’s boobs must have been protecting me. I thanked them profusely as soon as I got home.

Holy shit. Finally, a naked woman. A bunch of naked women. So curvy, so smooth, so naked. This was like taking some starving kid from Ethiopia and dropping him off in a Vegas buffet. Mind—and loads—blown. I think I went into a fugue state for the next week. Or month. A year? No, probably just a week.

But that was only the beginning. We had TVs everywhere in the house but only 3 had cable. One of those was in the basement, so it wasn’t unusual for me to disappear down there on Monday nights to watch wrestling. And lucky me, they had just started amping up the sexuality. Instead of sexually frustrated gigantesses pummeling each other’s already misshapen faces, Vince Mcmahon brilliantly introduced scantily clad bombshells slapfighting and hair-pulling and mud-wrestling. Even the valets moved on from the modest, shoulder-padded outfits of Ms. Elizabeth and started prancing about in cheerleaders outfits or bikinis or just strategically placed painted handprints. So instead of being a piss-break, these matches became jack-breaks.

And then one day, flipping through the channels, I found the squiggly channels. Back then, cable didn’t have the technology to just fully block the premium or pay-per-view channels, they could only scramble them into static. Simpler times. But if you flipped back and forth fast enough, the static would resolve for a split second, long enough to see a booby. Maybe. Pretty sure they were boobies. Definitely close enough. Suddenly, wrestling wasn’t as important. Well, it was still important, but as soon as a match got even slightly boring I was back at the squiggly channels, and back at myself.

Sometimes it would be fast, but sometimes the squiggly channels wouldn’t cooperate and it would take a while. Long enough that I might have to go to the bathroom. But there was no bathroom in the basement and I couldn’t go back upstairs. Someone might actually try to talk to me or my brother might just sneak downstairs and steal my spot. Fortunately, we did have a utility sink, so I would just pee in that. It’s all drains, right? Then right back to the action.

And then, finals week. Starting Freshman year of high school, we’d finish the year with  a week or 2 of exams. One test a day and then I was home by 1:30 or earlier. With no parents around. And nothing to do. Except study. Which I wasn’t about to do. To the squiggly channels! It’s amazing my hands didn’t cramp up during the tests.

Then I realized I didn’t even have to stay in the basement. My parents were out of the house, so I could watch in their bedroom on the biggest TV in the house. Of course, I still had some free time between refractory periods and all, and I couldn’t fast forward through the  commercials of my beloved afternoon cartoons, like Animaniacs and CatDog. So I did some exploring. I don’t know why, I’d never looked around like this before, but maybe I had some kind of sixth sense, or just some kind of evolutionary memory of hidden things, so I started checking out the closets in my parents’ room. Actually, now that I think about it, I might have just been trying to find some old Wrestlemania tapes. Either way, that’s when I stumbled across the Holy Grail. My dad’s secret stash! A discreet shoebox on the top shelf of his closet filled with VHS tapes. And not just any tapes. Porno tapes! No more squiggly lines! No more clothes! Just Ron Jeremy and some of the luckiest dudes in the world plowing scores of big breasted, big bushed blondes and brunettes. Now I had some paranoia to go with my pleasure. I’d get the chair to grab the box off the shelf, memorize the exact placement of the chosen tape, do my thing(s), rewind back to the exact spot the tape had been at, replace it in the box, then wipe the carpet to erase any sign that a chair had been there. The perfect crime.

Good times. The only problem was that, as I said before, I’d been taught that masturbating was evil. Excuse me, EEEEEEEVIIIIIIIIIL! Whacking off is wasting your precious seed. Every time you cum it’s like an unborn baby holocaust. So even though I was enjoying myself, I’d still feel pretty guilty. So I’d keep trying to quit. I’d say “Ok, that’s it, that’s the last time,” sometimes as many as 6 times a day. But the siren song always drew me back in.

Then one day in Biology class, I finally learned something interesting. And useful. Sperm only lasts in the body for 6 days. That means I wasn’t actually wasting anything. So unless I was going to get married in the next week, I figured I might as well flush out the pipes. Ah, science, finding religious loopholes for over 500 years.

And the truth is, masturbating wasn’t evil. It was far from it. It was absolutely necessary for getting through high school. If I wasn’t taking care of business at home, I would have been thinking about sex all of the time at school; Masturbating cut that down to only 50% of the time. It would have made it impossible for me to talk to girls, or even be in the same room with them. Plus it calmed me down, made me a lot less aggressive. Instead of punching someone who told me to “Go fuck yourself,” I’d just say “Don’t mind if I do” and go home.

So things were good. So good that I was actually sad when school ended. Because it was time for summer camp, a desolate desert with no TV, no Playboys, no privacy. Fortunately, I still had my memories, and my imagination. I didn’t realize it until then, but I’d just spent 6 months stockpiling what we men call “The Spank Bank,” a mental repository of pornography, a veritable Fort Knox for getting your rocks off. Every time I’d made a deposit into some socks or tissues, I’d also deposited the memory of what I’d been watching. Even if I just happened to see a beautiful woman walking down the street, or one of my more attractive classmates bending over to pick up her books, that image went into the bank too. By the time I got to camp, the Spank Bank was bigger than the warehouse from Indiana Jones, but organized better than the most obsessive comic nerd’s basement. Binders full of women, their images lovingly bagged and boarded and saved for further use, organized by size, shape, color and activity. And just as astronomers have categorized every type of star, I had images of nearly ever body shape, so I could look at any girl I lusted after, match her face to a naked body with approximately the same ass and tits, and get to work. When the time came, I’d put on a mental smoking jacket, light a mental cigar and pour a mental glass of whiskey, then peruse the aisles to fuel some mental manipulation. Or, I’d just dive in to my Porny Vault like I was Scrooge Mcduck.

But where to do it? I didn’t have a lock on my door. I didn’t even have a door. Just a bed surrounded by 20 other beds and guys probably thinking the same thing I was. The shower wasn’t an option because everyone would know, and we didn’t have that much hot water. Same thing with the bathroom stalls, which had doors low enough that a suspicious counselor could bust you, and the other campers were just as likely to throw a bucket water over the top—which had nothing to do with stopping you from masturbating, it was just considered the height of hilarity. So what to do?

I had to add a new wing to the Spank Bank, a small one that contained a large-scale map of the camp, like they have in the War Room in movies. It was marked with the location of every bathroom in the camp and its potential for pulling it. Did it have real doors? Was it secluded? Was it likely to stink?

Once I had my list of whackable washrooms, it was just a matter of finding my way there. Everyone must have thought the camp food was giving me the runs. Every time we were traveling the long road to or from the cafeteria, I’d disappear into an isolated bathroom behind one of the classrooms. If we were in the library, I’d just have to go to one of the nice single-room bathrooms. It wasn’t as nice as the basement or my bedroom, but it got the job done without worries. I imagine this is how people develop Germanesque fetishes around poop and golden showers. It took years before I lost the Pavlovian response to bathrooms. Sometimes just the right smell of fart would give me a boner.

Of course, sometimes I couldn’t get to one of the good bathrooms. It was raining or I was tired or the mood would strike me late at night, while I was in the bunk with no way or excuse to get to one of my happy places. I could try the bathroom in the bunk, but the risk was too high. I needed to add another arrow to my quiver. I’d already learned how to focus enough to see these images in my mind, to make them so vivid and real that I could masturbate to them. But could I take that to the next level? And so I’d lie in bed, looking like just another sleeping kid, my eyes closed and my arms harmlessly at my side, but with a handful of tissues surreptitiously stuffed into my pants. And in my mind I was in the Spank Bank. Fucking. Just going from one vault to another and fucking the lovely ladies inside. I’d concentrate, building the experience, imagining the room and our surroundings, her skin and her face and her hair and her breasts, the feel of her and her caresses, maybe I’d even bring another girl to the party. I wasn’t touching myself at all, except with my mind. But I made the image powerful, so real, that it felt like it was really happening—or at least how I imagined it would feel, since I had never felt it—and eventually, I’d get a real finish. And no one was the wiser. I still looked like I was sleeping, but inside I was doing my touchdown dance. I’d just mentally masturbated! I practically had telekinetic powers.

I wish I could say that I’d used these powers of mental concentration for good, to help me study or cure cancer, but nope, just for jerking off. Even did it on a plane once. In a middle seat.

Things were great until after high school, when I spent the year in Israel. Then the guilt started getting to me. Or maybe it was more fear. Because the rabbis were hitting the hell thing kind of hard, especially leading up to the High Holy Days when you’re supposed to purify yourself and beg for forgiveness so that G-d will grant you a good year instead of killing you. (And that hyphen in G-d? More Guilt). Plus being so close to the holiest sites in Judaism just made it feel wrong.

So I tried to cut back. I really did. But it wasn’t working. Then, on the morning before Yom Kippur—the day when G-d seals your fate—I woke up covered in sweat and also jizz. I’d just had a wet dream right before the holiest day of the year. I was ashamed. And terrified. I spent more time in synagogue that holiday than any day before or since, and then decided I absolutely had to quit.

One of the rabbis had told us that if you abstained from something for 40 days, you would never do it again. That was my way out, I thought. Just don’t masturbate for 40 days. Simple right? Tell that to anyone who’s tried to quit smoking. I made it a week, then relapsed. Made it two weeks, then relapsed again. Then I realized that I couldn’t just go totally cold jerky, and came up with a new plan. I would masturbate but not finish. That way I’d get most of the pleasure but I wouldn’t actually be masturbating. It’s all about the loopholes.

So I would take myself to the edge then pull back, then back to the edge and stop. This didn’t actually work—sometime around day 35 I went too far and couldn’t stop, then decided I was never trying to go 40 days again—but I did learn a tremendous amount of discipline. I wish I could say I used that discipline for good—to help me lose weight or something—but again, nope, just for jerking off.

So things were good again as I headed to college, and they were only going to get better. Thanks to the truth of Moore’s Law—the power of computing technology doubles every year—we were about to enter the Golden Age of Porn. Sure, the cable companies now had the power to completely block off the premium channels, eliminating the squiggly channels forever, but the payoff was more than worth it. It’s like we say on Passover:

¨ If I was still waiting 5 minutes to download a single picture of Jenny Mccarthy (un)dressed like a cheerleader, that would be good enough.

¨ If I was still waiting 12 hours to download a single clip from Where The Boys Aren’t 7, it would be good enough

¨ If I was still only able to stream Asian nurse orgy videos from free websites on the computer in the den, it would be enough

¨ If I could see a hot girl in a commercial, then go online and find naked pictures or videos of her only 25% of the time, it would be enough

All of those things would be enough, but now, there’s so much more. Now there’s smart phones, little magic porno boxes that fit in my pocket and show me naked women any time I want. On the bus, in a cab, in a box looking at a fox, in my office. And of course, technology is just going to get better. As Disco Stu would say “If these trends continue...aaaaye!”

I still try to keep mentally sharp instead of just relying on technology—I do have to deal with the Sabbath after all—but my mental focus just isn’t what it used to be. Plus, after years of porno videos on demand, the Spank Bank is bursting at the seams. It’s grown from a single enormous warehouse to a 1,000-acre industrial park and I can barely keep it organized anymore. If I try to concentrate on one scene, my mind still jumps to another and another, like I can’t stop rifling through the files looking for something better. So as I’m lying—or standing—there with my eyes closed, my mind is just flicking from one video to another, like a hyperactive 6-year old ODing on Cocoa Puffs flipping through the Saturday Morning cartoons.

Sometimes, I actually have to use a magazine, which isn’t as bad as you’d think. Sure, it can’t compare to video, but there’s a certain nostalgia to pussy on paper, a certain purity.

It takes me back, back to a simpler time, a time when Victoria Secret catalogues and the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Edition actually mattered, a time when I was so desperate that I taped the scene from White Men Can’t Jump where Rosie Perez is lying in bed and FOX didn’t notice you could see half of the side of her nipple and I rewound with my toe so I could see it over and over again until I was done, a time when it was just me and Pam and a world of possibilities.

Some people say the internet is too much. That it’s not good to have instant access to anything from anal to Zemonova. That we’ll all get desensitized and think all women are just objects.

You know what I say to those people?

Go fuck yourself.