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You’ve got a real challenge, I agree, and there are lots of men like you. There is a guy who comes to Rain City Jacks almost every event and he has retrograde ejaculations, which also produce no visible semen. He makes more noise than almost anyone I know and every regular at the club knows him by his orgasm sounds…He has no personal energy around his non-productive orgasms, although he does have the intense ejaculation response… just no semen. He is very likeable and sweet and that is why everyone likes him. Nobody gives a shit about his ejaculations and it doesn’t prevent anyone from playing with him.

What I think (and this is truly just my opinion. I’m no expert) is this: Talk to a good therapist about your own unhappiness with the situation and don’t limit yourself to playing only with “guys with my issue.” There is no reason on earth that you should feel guilt! What you have is an opportunity for a new level of self awareness and self acceptance, a new way to come out and find a more authentic life where you are exactly who you are and you find and claim your piece of joy in life. 

I don’t think other people are the issue. Be gentle with yourself but make a solid decision that you’re going to love yourself, love your body, be grateful for your cancer-free life and go for what you want. If what you want is to come to the Jacks, then do it. I will happily share your strong erection, your passion and if you will allow me, to share your intense orgasm. Semen is just one small part of the process at the end. You will be surprised at how many men won’t think it’s a big deal, particularly since you have the part that so many men lack: the strong erections and the passion.

It may take some time to find your way back to your center of personal comfort and acceptance, but everyone in the world has some limitation or other. Take care of yourself first and know that even without loads of cum, you can be close to men, share pleasure, happiness and joy with your loved ones and with yourself, and you can have those things anytime you want.

You are one man with one life, just like me. We have all lost something we will never get back. That is how living works. Grieve for what is lost and let your grief be the basis for the value you place on the life you have. Dig into it and live it with passion. I mean that.

May is National Masturbation Month. In support, I’m going to attempt to write something about masturbation and post it every day this month. They may be short. They may be messy. They will most certainly get post-edited. If you enjoy what I have to share (or if you really don’t) I invite you to add comments. Your participation helps me a lot. Join me in celebrating the most common sexual act of our species and add your thoughts to this offering.

For most of my life, I have considered “mutual masturbation” to be a perfectly valid term. After many years of many hundreds of personal experiences with the act, I’ve come to a new understanding, for myself anyway…

To my way of thinking, “masturbation” is an excellent word to describe solosex. Universally, the word (and its many translations in every language) means sexplay of the self-inflicted variety. It’s about touching myself, connecting with myself, stimulating myself, getting to know myself, loving myself.

When two guys touch each other, even if the play is limited to non-penetration, hands only play, calling it “masturbation” doesn’t strike me as accurate. I think that as soon as one person touches another, or even just sees him, we’re talking about… something else.

I should mention that my first impulse is to say “we’re talking about sex,” but I hold that masturbation is sex. This is about how sex happens and the very significant differences inherent in who is enjoying the sex.

I know this seems a little off, heretical even, coming from a guy who runs a jack-off club. I have been employing the term “mutual masturbation” for years now… but in my heart of hearts, I don’t actually think that jacking a guy off qualifies as “masturbation.” What’s missing is the specific inner focus on the self and the lack of inhibition that is so much more available without others in the mix.

I think we can and do bring what we learn from solosex into partner sex and social sex, but each category of sex has a unique set of discrete qualities that are specific to the people involved. There are energies and processes that take place when I am alone with my penis that can not easily be invoked or sustained in a physical interaction with another person. Likewise, there are aspects of partner sex that can not be replicated alone and social sex has its own unique set of qualities.

So yes, I compartmentalize sex into three broad categories (and there are many, many ways to categorize sex but this is the one that matters here): Solo sex, partner sex and social sex. More on those three categories another later…

The actual mechanics of stroking, jacking, caressing, edging, precumming, gooning, etc. can show up in any of those expressions of sex, but the mere act of a lubed hand stroking up and down on a hard penis does not, in itself, constitute masturbation. It’s a technique, not a category of sexual experience.

What is unique to masturbation is the process of self-stimulation, self-awareness and focus that another’s presence interrupts or distracts from. It’s the activity of loving oneself—and the freedom to explore in private one’s own physical response, to be both cause and effect in real time.

Gooning is a good example (gooning is described here and here). When one consciously sinks into a more animalistic mental space and becomes objectively ridiculous, removing any outer observer becomes the factor that frees one to explore ways of experiencing more deeply and intensely aspects of one’s sexual reality without judgement. Yes, one does need to overcome self-judgement, but that is something we have personal control over.

It is the lack of control over any other person’s thoughts, feelings, actions and reactions that makes the mere presence of a partner or a group of playmates both limiting and powerful. To go that deep means becoming genuinely vulnerable, fully exposed to others and while finding one’s way to that level of trust is one of the great gifts of our species, and one of the primary purposes of sex (to connect), it is a struggle against one’s socialization to get there. We each have to overcome a vast array of learned inhibitions and fears to open up fully with another human during sex. That’s part of what makes it so powerful.

So masturbation is an important, almost universal, means of exploring the abandonment of our blocks, recognition of our limitations, variety of effective stimuli, shades of physical/mental/emotional pleasure; all in the safety of our solitude. It’s not an inherently “lonely” practice, but a critical opportunity for self-knowledge. If one regards masturbation as “lonely,” that’s not about the masturbation. That’s about a man’s loneliness. It’s a separate issue.

You may be thinking, what’s the point of saying that buddy-bate, hand jobs, group Jack-off are not “masturbation?” The point is recognition of what makes masturbation unique, defining and embracing its specific power and seizing the opportunity it presents to know oneself better and better. It’s about acknowledging the validity and importance of the relationship I have with myself.

Here are some of my relevant, personal core beliefs: 

“Sex” is a very broad term for human activities driven by the hormonal and physical energies associated with our reproductive organs and processes. It is not limited to the physical and does not require actual explicit sexual activities, but must actively engage the process known as the Human Sexual Response Cycle (excitement, plateau, orgasm and resolution).

“Masturbation” is solosex, sex with the self.

“Partner Sex” is my term for sex between two individuals only, where the response loop is two-way and the dynamics are specifically developed from the reproductive and partner-bonding behavior of human beings. Those dynamics are specific to partner sex and may be missing from sexplay with more people involved.

“Social Sex” is my term for sexplay involving three or more people.

There are infinite gray areas among these categories too. It is possible to bring the actual solo intimacy of solosex to a partner, to masturbate for or with a partner, but the unique quality of masturbation is the absence of the judgement of another so one must be able to fully detach from that judgement and expose one’s personal sexuality in the presence of another.

I will continue to use the term “mutual masturbation,” because that is what many understand as non-penetrative partner or social sex, what Dr. Marty Klein calls “outercourse.” I always consider this an inaccuracy of terminology, and I think the words we use matter.

“Jacking off” is the physical act of stroking a penis with the hand. It is the most common form of masturbation but is an activity two or three or a hundred or a thousand men can do with each other. It’s just a physical technique, not masturbation in it’s entirety, no more than making oatmeal cookies is the sum total of baking… When I say “jack me off,” I don’t mean “masturbate me.” The only person who can masturbate me is me.

So! That’s a whole lot of personal opinion about masturbation and why I think the word should be reserved for solosex, but I’m not in charge of language, or anybody but myself. If masturbation has taught me anything, it’s that I’m only fully in charge of myself.

If you agree or disagree with any of this, I welcome your comments! Seriously. This can be a conversation, not just me and my opinions. I want your engagement and always respond. What’s your experience? What are your beliefs? Does any of this matter to you? Did it make you think of anything differently? Was it useful? Did it waste your time? Share, dude!

May is National Masturbation Month. In support, I’m going to attempt to write something about masturbation and post it every day this month. They may be short. They may be messy. They will most certainly get post-edited. If you enjoy what I have to share (or if you really don’t) I invite you to add comments. Your participation helps me a lot. Join me in celebrating the most common sexual act of our species and add your thoughts to this offering.

Repeat after me: This is my penis. It is part of me. It grows from me and extends into me. This penis is beautiful. My penis is a source of my joy. I know my penis. I care for my penis. My penis motivates me and moves me. My penis feels good. My penis feels wonderful. The pleasure of my penis radiates into and all through my body. My penis teaches me focus. My penis teaches me self-possession. My penis belongs to me and I command it. I am in charge of my penis. My penis is a reflection of my confidence, my maleness, my physical and mental health. My penis leads me to pleasure. My penis leads me to love. I love my penis. I love my beautiful penis. I honor my penis and will never take it for granted. I promise to treat my penis well for as long as life allows me to be with it. I promise to take good care of my penis. I choose to share my penis, but my penis will always belong to me. I love my beautiful penis.

A lifetime ago, a time you can not and will never remember, a baby boy explored the world with wide-open eyes, a tasting mouth and reaching, grasping fingers. He was an experience sponge, taking in unimaginable quantities of information and learning, learning, learning from all of it. He took it all in and put his world, his life, his self in order according to those experiences. He is every baby boy.

And the reaching, grasping hand naturally, rightly fell between his legs and found his penis. It was not separate from him. Nothing was. Everything was him and he was everything. He was pure experience without subject or object and everything was more experience. His penis felt good when he touched it.

And sometime in those early years, someone big and powerful took his hands and began to divert them away from his penis, began to separate him from it with actions, words, spoken and unspoken intentions and with clothing. This too, is every baby boy.

Before sex was feeling and touching our penises was always a good feeling. Like all humans we naturally return to what feels good and push away what feels bad but this good feeling was not appropriate to our civilizations. Virtually every human society separates baby boys from their penises and even though virtually every boy finds his way back, that separation is always part of him.

We can not erase our fundamental understanding of the universe, and that is what we are sorting out as babies. What is this experience we call life? What am I and what are you? The answers we get as babies, learned through gentle directions of those far bigger and more powerful than us are permanent. We can revise, extend, reconfigure those knowings, but they are always in us.

My penis is a vital, literally vital part of life. It is my primordial connection to all men, all apes, all primates, all mammals, all animals and all life. The separation I was taught can not overcome that basic reality of my body and my species. I can not and will not abandon my penis to the fear of sex that was foisted upon me as an infant.

I claim my penis now, today, tomorrow and as long as I live. It is fundamentally good and inseparable from me. I will honor it with my loving touch, my full attention, my caressing and stroking. I will grant it orgasms and ride upon the waves of joy emanating from it. I will rest with it, wait with it, bring it with me everywhere and I will love it and every part of my life because my life is a precious, transient gift.

Reclaim and take full, joyful possession of your own beautiful penis every day. Love it, stroke it, bring it to orgasm and get to know it in exquisite detail. This is what you are sharing with your fellow man and woman, your personal self, your beloved, beautiful, confident, healthy penis. I will share mine with you and together we will experience the precious, bittersweet ecstasy of life for a moment or a lifetime. 

May is National Masturbation Month. In support, I’m going to attempt to write something about masturbation and post it every day this month. They may be short. They may be messy. They will most certainly get post-edited. If you enjoy what I have to share (or if you really don’t) I invite you to add comments. Your participation helps me a lot. Join me in celebrating the most common sexual act of our species and add your thoughts to this offering.

Jallen asked rhetorically, “Why can’t masturbation be an actual act of self love?”

I love Jallen, though we rarely get together. In some ways, I wish I had his life, working with people to actively improve the sexual experience of our species. I do love my own life though, which trumps that fantasy, so I simply allow myself to be inspired by his example.

When I first discovered masturbation at 9 years old, I was so thrilled. I felt like I’d discovered a new world behind a door I’d passed countless times and only just opened. It was a new world (and I’ve told that discovery story before) that was characterized by a sudden awareness of my own ability to experience pleasure, and the powerful understanding that this belonged to me, that it was my body, my penis, and that I had an ability to do something fantastic that only one day before I had no idea I was capable.

It was the moment I came into possession of my penis, my own pleasure, my body and my life. That moment of understanding has been an important part of my life ever since. In many ways, it was a giant step out of childhood and into taking responsibility for my life.

All this from some slippery, gentle friction on my penis and the experience of orgasm and ejaculation.

I have explored and explored and explored my own pleasure ever since, finding new ways my body responds to action and thought and intention. I’ve directly applied my understanding to the exploration of pleasure with other people, male and female, and at the root of sexual pleasure was always this sense that my penis belongs to me, that my pleasure belongs to me, that my erection and orgasm and my total experience of sexual joy and satisfaction is all mine, that I can never hold someone else responsible for me feeling good or not, that when I share myself sexually, that it comes from my core sense that my body is good, my penis is good, my complete sexual cycle is all good and mine.

When I masturbate or just think about masturbating, I am stepping into self-love, not just physical pleasure. I’m not just feeling good, I am making myself feel good, acknowledging my self-possession, celebrating gratefully my ability to feel anything at all, to feel deeply. 

I know my body is temporary, that I will age, and feel pain and die someday. That could happen in many years or it could happen this year or even today. That’s the most consistent quality of life: that it’s temporary. I try to live every day like I could be dead by its end because that is factual truth. We learn this fact in hard, hard ways. Grief forges new paths in our minds and can bring us to a full appreciation of our beautiful, bittersweet, heartbreaking transience. It can make us more joyful, more fully engaged than any other life experience, the idea that this moment counts because there may not be any more moments after it.

So I keep coming back to releasing the millions of foolish moments that I hook into thinking that something stupid is important, remembering that love is actually what matters, letting the ones I love know that I love them, experiencing and recognizing that human passion in all the ways it shows up and not taking it for granted.

And that means that every time I feel my penis tingling with life—my mind moving toward pleasure, and the gift of sexual pleasure, the image of my brother masturbating or fucking or sucking or just talking about sex—I am full of joy as well as lust. For me, they are intertwined, horniness and love. I feel my love for my fellow beautiful, heartbreaking apes and I feel my love for myself.

And when I take the time to reach between my legs and touch my own beautiful penis, feel it spring to life and respond to my own touch with stiffening and twitching, vibrating, mounting stimulation; when I bring myself again and again through the cycle of arousal, plateau, orgasm and resolution, I am in love with my penis, with my self, with my life and with all life. It’s silly sounding, but it’s a fundamental truth for me. Because I love myself, because I possess my own penis and body and life, I love you too. Masturbation is self love for me, but it is also the basis of my love for anyone else.

You and I will be gone someday. Let’s not squander our precious moments of wet animal joy with the idea that it is somehow wrong or bad. It is perfect and perfectly human. Masturbate as you will and love it and yourself fully. It can bring you to a fuller understanding of your own value, the value of your whole life and the value of your brothers and sisters.

Make love to yourself. It is your absolute right and it is absolutely right.

Sadly, PDX Jacks folded after just one year of operation. It fell victim to the same flaw that has brought down dozens of JO clubs over the past three decades: Overdependence on a single individual who could not, for whatever reason, keep the project going.

It’s really no different than any other kind of aborted effort. The fewer people support it, the more vulnerable it is to failure.

And I want to state without reservation that PDX Jacks was not a failure. It was just a short-lived club. It was one of the best experiences I’ve ever had at a Jacks club anywhere.

Jacks parties are unique and satisfying experiences. It’s difficult to convey their true nature because it is similar to other group sex experiences but also critically unique in other ways. Everyone has their ideas and fantasies of what a Jacks club will be like but only experience tells the whole story.

From inside the management of a club, and having met and interviewed many Jacks organisers, I know that it is far more difficult to host than to attend as a member. Nobody else appreciates it, but I want very much to see a new renaissance of Jacks in the coming years so I am willing to do what I can to facilitate that.

I applaud your intent to help start a new club in Portland. Portland men can and will support it if the organization is sustainable. I know a few things about making a club work over the long haul and would be grateful for the opportunity to assist you. I’m close enough to actually come down there to help. If you are serious, contact me again and I will respond privately.

I am sharing this publicly because I want anyone else reading it who has been motivated to help form a Jacks club in their own community to know that it is possible, and that there are people who will help you if you are willing to accept help.

The young black man sat in my new member orientation session last night. His eyes did not connect very much. He was nervous, like everyone is at their first Jacks visit. He looked around frequently, not paying full attention, but I could tell he was listening. He was getting the message… I just don’t think he was ready.

My club does a 10-minute new member orientation session for any guy who’s never been to RCJ before. We just want to make sure the rules are crystal clear and more important, we want to introduce first-timers to the culture of this particular JO club, even if they’ve been to lots of other Jacks clubs.

Not everyone likes the session, though most do. Some guys arrive full of themselves, full of their expertise in Jacks clubs, or just not ready to follow somebody else’s rules. It’s okay if those guys just turn around and walk out. I prefer it, in fact. I would like the guys in the playspace to all be into it, all buying in on the vision of friendly, social dick play. If it’s not for them, it’s better for everyone if they just bail out.

I’ll call the young black man “Mark.”

Mark interrupted me to ask a clarifying question as I was explaining that the required minimum participation was stripping to underwear, that if a guy is not willing to strip to his underwear, he’s in the wrong place.

Mark asks, “Is it okay if I wear a shirt? It’s kind of cold.”

I say, “Yes, it’s okay,” reassuring him that it was much warmer inside the playspace.

So we wrap up orientation and a few minutes later, I see Mark in the entryway to the playspace, wearing underwear and a T-shirt. Also a hoody and a hat. He is, essentially, dressed. I can tell that he dressed not to stay warm, but to feel safer.

It seemed to me like he was armored up; protecting himself from becoming vulnerable, naked, by hanging on to these clothes that not only kept him from getting a chill, but were invested with meaning and identity. 

And for two hours, I saw him observing from afar, separated from everyone else, not engaging in any way with anyone else and giving off a strong “don’t touch me” vibe.

I felt bad for him. He was there for some reason, obviously. One assumes it was because he was at least a little interested in jacking with other guys! But his clothing armored him and anchored him in another reality. It kept him from trusting, giving himself to the experience and attempting any kind of interaction.

For all I know, He may have been just as shy and standoffish if he’d worn only the underwear, or nothing at all, and I learned that attempting to protect himself with clothes is indeed an indication that a guy is in the wrong place, that he’s just not ready for the Jacks and perhaps never will be.

For my part, I learned that we should enforce the minimum participation rule and not allow guys to wimp out. It’s better they those guys not be in the club at all than be in the room while hiding uneasily behind their armor.

I want to experiment more with abstinence, at least for more than 24 hours. I don’t just mean neglecting to masturbate, but deliberately, mindfully choosing not to masturbate.

Currently, I average once a day, often showing up as two orgasms every other day. What I notice is I am less horny overall and I don’t ejaculate as much when I keep up my regular frequency. I would like to experience more desire and less release.

I am not into hardcore solo edging, though. I am too easily distracted and have too many conflicting priorities. I like to do a lot of different things and that means I don’t have more than a half hour to focus on masturbating. The fact is, I’ve got shit to do… Just like Dan Savage says.

My ambition to abstain from masturbating now and then is not about wanting to control myself, or about cum denial. It is about wanting to experience what horny feels like more intensely. I want to want more. I desire more desire.

I am clear on many things, among them is my sexual orientation. I am homosexual, actively attracted to men and male bodies and utterly indifferent to women’s bodies. I am also clear that I do not feel satisfied with solosex alone. I get my greatest sexual pleasure in sharing with other men, sharing my experience and my body.

I am also clear that the excitement of novelty is necessary for me to reach my peak excitement. No mater how much someone turns me on, there will come a point that I will only be able to experience the most intense pleasure with a different, entirely new playmate.

That said, I don’t need to always experience peak excitement. I am happiest, regardless of the situation, when I can just be fully present with another person. Naturally, that almost always ends up being my husband, since there is nobody I love more or whose company I desire more.

I think I will spend the next couple of days mindfully abstinent. I won’t suppress sexual thoughts, but I will pass up the opportunities to masturbate until I feel more desire…

This has been an unedited rambling in the absence of an intentional subject to blog about. Feel free to chime in.