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May is National Masturbation Month. In support, I’m going to attempt to write something about masturbation every day this month. If you enjoy what I have to share (or if you really don’t) please comment. Your participation helps me a lot. Join me in celebrating the most common sexual act of our species and add your thoughts.

I’m right-handed. I’m also a creature of habit (like pretty much every human on the planet). Most guys have a “primary masturbation mode” and mine goes like this: I generally jack off with my right hand, with a steady massaging stoke up and down my shaft, focusing mainly on the top four inches of my dick and speeding up a bit as I approach orgasm.

It is also my routine to fight against the urge to speed up a lot, and deliberately go slower than my instincts tell me. Once I start to ejaculate, I stop jacking my cock, hold it steady and watch my cum squirt. After the first spurts of semen, I will give it a couple more strokes, finally wringing out the last drop of jiz before wiping up and getting on with my day…This is my personal “old faithful.” I know how to time it, I know exactly what to do to coax out a load fast or slow, but I tend to masturbate just like this at least 85% of the time. If I didn’t consciously switch it up, I would probably jack off like this 99% of the time.

But I know about boredom and I have a commitment to myself to make my sex always good, including the sex I have with myself. I want quality orgasms and quality ramp-up time. I want good sex, not utilitarian sex. This is why I like having sex with others, letting other guys jack me off and sticking with it, even if their technique is not what I would choose. I need the variety so I don’t fall into the death-grip trap.

The “death-grip” is the addiction to one way of getting oneself off, usually with a tight fist no mouth, butthole or pussy could ever replicate. Once can actually render oneself incapable of orgasm any other way when one becomes addicted to the death-grip. It’s a real thing that affects a lot of men.

Now, I’m nowhere near in danger of the death-grip. I have always treasured variety in my self-love and I’ve never been into a very tight grip. I frequently have to coach my jack buds on exactly how to handle my cock to get the results they crave, particularly if they’re hooked on the death grip and try that shit on me… It just don’t work on my more discriminating penis.

But even I fall into the familiarity trap. It feels instinctual, like autopilot. No matter what kind of bate fuel I may be using, what kind of bate talk I employ externally or internally, whatever fantasies I may roll out, whatever porn I may lose myself in… the mechanics of the stroke itself tend to be the same.

And this is inevitable—this is human nature—but I have consciously chosen to foster deeper contact with my sexual self, to let my masturbation be more self-loving and that means switching it up.

So this morning marks the start of a one-week break for my right hand. I will allow my right hand to play with my butt or my hole or my nuts or my nips, but until I have shot my load, I may not touch my own dick with my right hand for another week. This week, my left hand gets all the dick, no matter what. It is not easy. Not at all easy.

But I love it. My dick loves it and my left hand loves it. My cock feels twice as big when my left hand applies long, slow strokes to my full cock. I feel harder and while the orgasm is much slower to rise and erupt, it is more intense. It’s a game I have played with myself before and I always love it… and it is never easy to keep my right hand off my cock. I really want it there… but I’m the master of my bate. My right hand will just have to be happy squeezing my meaty butt cheek for a while.

Next week, I may do something else to switch it up. I may only jerk my cock through underwear or while standing at public urinals. I might decide to leave the head of my penis untouched or I may focus entirely on the head. I may jack off into condoms or I may simply use only an overhand grip, as alien as my left hand.

I invite you to join me, to get to know your penis from a slightly different perspective. Switch it up and deny yourself whatever your most routine technique might be. Stroke it in the total darkness, in new rooms, with agonizingly slow strokes, in broad daylight or in public (but… please be very safe with any legally questionable public play and don’t get arrested, my friends. Seriously. Public masturbators who get caught can get saddled with a lifetime on sexual offender watch lists. You do not want that).

Switch it up starting with your very next bate session. Determine what your routine is, whatever is most familiar and comforting, and then decide on a period of time without that one thing. I like one week, but for you, three days, two weeks or two months might be what you like best. Change your perspective and become a better self-lover.

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.