Bamboo Fetish

The ancient Egyptians believed that the Nile Ri ver rose each year because of the continual masturbation of the god Osiris, and that his semen created all living things. It’s unfortunate that this positive view of masturbation didn’t survive into the Judeo-Christian era.

For centuries, masturbation has been condemned and persecuted in Western society, first by religious authorities and then by those modern watchdogs of morality, the medical profession. In the eighteenth century, the moral condemnation of masturbation was reinterpreted as a medical issue: Masturbation became an illness as well as a sin. A widely influential French physician, Tissot, said masturbation destroyed the nervous system, inevitably leading to madness.

In 1834, Dr. Sylvester Graham wrote that the loss of semen during sex was injurious to health (a popular idea at the time). Men, Graham wrote, should not have intercourse more than twelve times a year. And no jerking off in between. Masturbation was especially pernicious because it led to an enormous number of terminal diseases. To reduce sexual craving, Graham advised mild foods to decrease sexual appetites. The graham cracker was the result! In 1884, this curious connection between food and sex appeared in another guise. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg created cornflakes to curtail children’s inclinations toward masturbation. Kellogg, a bit of a flake himself, wrote, “The use of the reproductive function is perhaps the highest physical act of which man is capable; its abuse is certainly one of the most grievous outrages against nature which it is possible for him to perpetrate.”

From this period on, parents told children that awful things would happen if they touched their genitals: Hair would grow on the palms of their hands, or their brains would become “soft.” Since even “good” children might masturbate in their sleep, some fearful parents enclosed children’s arms in cardboard cuffs to prevent it. Still, the warnings were ignored, and children went on playing with their genitals. The protests (somewhat hysterical) continued. William Acton, a prominent physician, wrote, “There is now in Pennsylvania—it seems unnecessary to name the place—a man thirty-five years old, with the infirmities of ‘three score and ten.’ Yet his premature old age, his bending and tottering form, wrinkled face, and hoary head, might be traced to solitary and social licentiousness.”

Between 1856 and 1919 the United States Patent Office granted patents for forty-nine antimasturbation devices. Thirty-five were for horses and fourteen for humans (horses could masturbate?). The human devices, intended for boys, were placed around his penis and consisted of either sharp points turned inward to jab the boy’s penis should he get an erection, or an electrical system to deliver shocks. We don’t know how many of these devices were actually used, or what effect they had on the children. Although masturbation in men was repeatedly denounced, female masturbation was opposed with even greater ferocity. Women who masturbated were regarded by nineteenth-century medical professionals as manifesting dangerous masculine appetites. Starting in 1858, some women were subjected to a clitoridectomy, which effectively removed all possibility of clitoral pleasure. This operation continued as a treatment for female masturbation until 1937, even though it had been discredited by the medical profession a half century earlier.

In the twentieth century, masturbation was rediagnosed by psychiatrists as a sexual perversion. Though they did not go so far as to say masturbation would lead to insanity, they did suggest it led to “abnormal” sexual development, and, some feared, homosexuality—which some psychiatrists did believe was a form of insanity. Until 1968, masturbation remained as a mental disorder in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Even today, many psychiatrists say that masturbation is not in itself a disorder—unless practiced too much. In other words, it’s accepted as a substitute for heterosexual intercourse when that is unavailable, but anyone who chooses to masturbate rather than to have sex with another person is regarded as infantile or disturbed. (Read Homosexuality and American Psychiatry: The Politics of Diagnosis by Ronald Bayer.)

The goal of all this diagnosis was to create internalized feelings of guilt about masturbatory behavior, thereby marshaling people to police their own thoughts and actions. “No self-indulgence,” says the superego (the Jiminy Cricket sitting on one’s shoulder), “or I will punish you by making you feel like shit”. Men who don’t start masturbating until their twenties have learned that lesson particularly well, but few can claim to have grown up in our sexually repressed society without any hang-ups about jerking off.

A view that seems to us much more rational, productive, and realistic is that masturbation is not a substitute to be tolerated, but a required behavior for proper psychosexual development. Only if boys and girls are permitted to masturbate freely and shamelessly will they be able to chart the contours of their own sexual desires. The physical reactions and imaginative ideation produced during masturbation allow the individual to define his or her sexual tastes and build confidence. The enjoyment derived from masturbation promotes greater acceptance of physical pleasure in general and of one’s own body in particular.

A gay man incapable of fantasizing during sex is probably not very passionate. More than likely, he sticks to a rigid sequence of acts and is frightened and bewildered by the extent of other people’s sexual inventiveness. Fantasies, therefore, are highly desirable, and masturbation is the best classroom for developing the faculty for fantasizing.

One helpful teaching aid is pornography. Some gay men are turned on by photos, others by sexy, stylized drawings, still others by stories or videotapes. Discover which media and/or styles excite you: Naked or clothed figures? Alone or engaged in sex with others? Which sexual practices do you prefer to look at? Of course, some men prefer to use their imagination to relive a stimulating episode or summon up an exciting person from their past. Perhaps they saw some really sexy guy walking on the street this morning or had a really hot sex scene with someone last week or looked at a beautiful body at the beach or the gym. It’s not unusual for vigorous and horny men to vividly recall and ejaculate less than an hour following a particularly exciting sexual encounter.

Pick a quiet time and take the pornography you’ve selected to bed with you. Create a soothing environment, with low lights and music or whatever relaxes you. Look through the pictures and choose one that turns you on. Concentrate on that picture and invent a story about it, one that also involves you. As your penis starts to get hard, continue the fantasy and begin to masturbate. If you’ve never used a lubricant, try one, such as K-Y, baby lotion, or Vaseline—everyone has his favorite. Be sure to keep up the fantasy until you reach a climax. Your stories may become as elaborate and as kinky as you like.

If you practice fantasizing while masturbating for several days, you can attempt to transfer sexual fantasizing to encounters with other men. Some partners, you’ll discover, are particularly adept at collaborating in your fantasies. They talk during sex, expanding on the things you say and do, and will even act out quite elaborate scenes involving costumes, fetishes, and let’s-pretend situations (army barracks, a locker room, the men’s room on an airplane, and so on).

Jerking off with a partner has become the highlight of some men’s sexual lives. Still, men who feel guilty about jerking off ask, “Am I doing it too much?” You’ll know you are when your body tells you. The skin on your penis shaft or glans will become chafed, or your dick may ache from being handled too much. Frequency of masturbation, like frequency of sex in general, is a measure of libido, boredom, anxiety, and a number of other factors, none of which is harmful. There can be one problem, however. Sometimes, a man will so finely tune his masturbatory technique that no one else can get him off. A partner often feels inadequate when that happens. One way of dealing with the situation is to cup your hand over your partner’s hand and use his hand to jerk yourself off. That will show him how you like it done.

Having said all this, we should point out that the function of masturbatory fantasies is not simply to rehearse for playacting with sexual partners. Many men like to keep their masturbatory fantasies private, and the things they conjure up during masturbation they would never do with anyone else. The links between fantasy and reality are subtle and complex, so sharing your fantasy with another person might not suit you at all. Of course, if a lover understands, he will recognize that the roles you play in bed do not need to be carried into the rest of your lives. For instance, many gay men fantasize being raped. They like pretending to be overpowered this way in bed, but don’t want to be raped in real life. But if you want to keep your fantasies private, fine; their only function is to redirect your focus from the mechanics of sexuality to its creative spirit and to shift your attention from meeting someone else’s expectation to fulfilling your own.