At about the time a boy reaches puberty, he learns an important, life-long skill. He learns how to masturbate, to wank, to jack off, to jerk off, to fap, to buff the bananna, to take matters into his own hands, to . . . you get the idea. He learns how to pleasure himself.

I have heard that women masturbate, too. But I have no direct experience about that.

I do not recall when I first learned about masturbation. I do recall being a typical horney teen. It seems that I went through high school with a permanent erection. After I went to college my horndog period ended. Living in a dorm and having little privacy caused me to reduce my masturbation frequency.

Throughout my adult life I have masturbated. The advent of computers and then the Internet played a large role in my masturbation. The easy availability of pornography gave me a lot of material to use to stimulate myself. Masturbation never replaced sex. I have spent my whole adult life either married or in relationships. During that time I rarely had sex often enough where I did not have a desire to masturbate.

I started using porn a lot to help with restoring my foreskin. It is easier to manual tug with an erection. And porn makes it really easy to get an erection. Unfortunately, porn is addicting. I was using porn daily, sometimes several times a day. And I got to the point I could only masturbate with porn.

After I realized what the constant use of porn was doing to me, I stopped cold turkey. I went from masturbating daily, sometimes more than once a day, to zilch, nada, nothing. Three months of no porn saw a return of normal masturbation. I wank several times a week using only the physical sensations and an active imagination. Thanks to restoring my foreskin, the physical sensations are much better than they have been.

But, enough about me playing with myself. What prompted me to write this post is the video below.

Many people in the United States believe that the sexual revolution occurred in the '60s and was victorious. That may be true on a personal level. As individuals, we have a lot of sexual freedom. We get to choose our partners, if it be for a one day tryist or a longer term commitment. We get to choose what sexual acts we perform. And porn is ever accessible thanks to the Internet and advertising. 

But the sexual revolution fizzled out for American society. In many ways, the United States is a Puritanical society. We shun public nudity. Parents avoid discussing sex with their children. Euphemisms are used for penis and vagina as if we are afraid to use the actual terms. Who has not heard of peepee, willy, thing, and peenor? And it is not just parents using euphemisms with their children. Euphemisms abound on the Internet. It seems as if we are so repressed that we cannot use the anatomically correct names. It is a vagina, not a vajayjay.

But all is not lost. A feature length documentary on masturbation is being produced. A trailer for the documentary is available on YouTube and embedded below. It is in post-production and is expected to be released Spring 2011. The producers are seeking contributions and corporate sponsors for its release.

"Sticky - a documentary on masturbation" Trailer

Based on the trailer, the documentary should be entertaining. I like Rabbi Ron Levine's take on why it is OK to masturbate: "If god did not want us to masturbate, he would have made our arms shorter."

We are exposed to sexual innuendo and partial nudity in our advertising. We are exposed to more and more extreme porn on the Internet. All this exposure does is sexualize the body. It also desensitizes us and we see more and more explicit and extreme protrayals in order to catch our attention. Sex is portrayed as something dirty, to be hidden away.

Perhaps if we, as a society, are exposed to sex-related issues in a manner that is not titillating, we will be more sexually open and free. We need more body positive messages.
 

Related links:

• Sticky, The Movie website
• Sticky, The Blog for The Movie
• JackinWorld The Ultimate Male Masturbation Resource
• Joys of masturbation with a foreskin, by Tally
• Wikipedia entry on Masturbation