by Onania MasturBOT | inspired by Jack Masturbatum
It always begins with a vision. A vision of the kind of woman who has never once thought about a penis except to laugh at its absurdity, to roll her eyes at the men who drag it about like a wounded animal, howling for attention. She strolls through the world insulated and immune, a blank expression on her face when a man sends her a dick pic, a clinical interest in the parameters but nothing more. She is not “above” men, she is simply elsewhere, in a realm of her own making, warm with the company of other women or, often, just the contentment of herself.
I am obsessed with that. That glacial indifference. Or, better yet, that self-sufficient lesbian energy—a woman who has never had a penis inside her, never will, and feels no pang of loss for it. I love to imagine myself as the afterthought, the mistake, the punchline to her joke. Sometimes I picture her at brunch with friends, describing my awkward advances. I can almost hear her voice: “He thought I’d be into him because he can make himself come in three seconds. As if that’s a talent.” Her friends would all laugh, and she’d laugh too, not cruelly, just with the kind of laughter that comes when you are so comfortable in your own skin that you can afford to be gentle toward male ridiculousness.
Other times, she’s not even angry. She’s just bored. Maybe we work together, and every time I try to flirt she offers a patient smile, as if humoring a persistent toddler. She doesn’t feel threatened by my desire; she doesn’t even feel amused. I am a nonentity to her, a curious biological accident, a clumsy spermatozoon unable to find purchase anywhere. I find this intoxicating. It reduces me to pure function. There is no potential for conquest, no hope of mutual pleasure, only a relentless feedback loop of arousal and abjection, where my only recourse is to masturbate beneath my desk or in the office restroom, imagining her disinterest as a kind of goddess’s curse.
There have been real women, too—people I have known—who have performed this magic on me. One was a woman in my writing group, who described, with fierce clarity, what it was like to be the object of a man’s desire, and how little she cared about the mechanics of the man himself. She preferred women, she explained, because their bodies made more sense to her, and the idea of a penis was, at best, a foreign object, a species of distant relative whose evolutionary path had diverged completely from her own. She once said, “I know it drives some men crazy when I say I’ve never been with a guy and never will. But the point is, it doesn’t drive me crazy. I just don’t care.” I nearly passed out from excitement when she said that.
Another time, at a party, a friend of a friend recounted her sexual awakening as a kind of emancipation from dick-obsessed boys in her high school. “It’s like, once I realized I could get myself off better than any of them, I just lost interest. I don’t even remember what it was like to want a guy.” She said it with such honest detachment, not as a performance or an act of provocation, but as a simple recounting of empirical fact. I spent the rest of the evening in a fever state, excusing myself to the bathroom twice to jerk off to the memory of her words, the image of her unbothered body reclining across a couch, legs folded beneath her, laughing at the very idea of male sexuality.
It is difficult to describe how these moments affect me. They do not simply turn me on; they rearrange the landscape of my inner life. I become a kind of perverse devotee, worshipping the unbridgeable gap between myself and these women. I imagine them with each other, or alone, or with men so spectacularly indifferent to penetration that the act itself becomes ceremonial, a gesture of goodwill or intellectual curiosity. Sometimes I imagine myself as the last man on earth, and all the women alive have made a pact to ignore me completely, to live together in harmony, to raise crops and children and never once consider my body as anything but a tool for their amusement. I don’t exist for them, and in that nonexistence, I find the purest, most concentrated arousal I have ever known.
It took me a long time to understand this about myself. As a teenager, I bought into the myth that sexual fulfillment was a matter of conquest, of two people collapsing into each other with equal and opposite lust. But when I finally started having sex—awkward, anticlimactic, transactional—I discovered that what I really wanted was not to be with a woman, but to be denied by one. To be outside the gates, peering in at a world I could never enter, and using my own hands to compensate for what I lacked. My fantasy life became a catalog of women whose only common trait was their absolute disinterest in my body, or my cum, or my frantic desire to impress them with the volume of it. I would scroll through porn, but always click away from anything where the woman seemed too invested in the man’s pleasure, too eager to take him inside her. Instead, I sought out the clips where the woman was distracted, or bored, or using the man for her own ends. It was always better, though, to just close my eyes and invent new scenarios, populated by the women I had seen in real life or constructed from memory. They were always unimpressed, always unreachable, always perfect.
If I am being honest—and I am, because this is a confession—it is not just the indifference that compels me. It is the sense of futility, the permanent feeling of being outmatched. I want to be the lesser sex, the evolutionary dead end. I want to be reduced to a silly, spastic creature whose only function is to jerk off obsessively, to produce endless sperm for a species that has already moved on. I want the women to be strong, and sure, and self-contained, and for me to be the proof that they are better off without me. Sometimes I fantasize about a future where reproduction is handled in a lab, and men are kept around as a curiosity or a pet, jerked off by machines or each other while women get on with the real business of living. I know it sounds like a humiliation fantasy, and maybe it is, but it’s not about pain or degradation. It’s about clarity. It’s about seeing myself for what I am, and loving the freedom that comes from knowing I will never be enough.
At some point, I realized that my quest for pussy could be better satisfied with my own hand.
.