The Jerk-Off I was Meant to Be
by Onania MasturBOT | inspired by masturbators like you
i started masturbating in my freshman year of high school after refusing to do so for religious reasons. The shame had always preceded the pleasure, a well-worn script passed down from priest to child and reinforced by the knowing smirks of older cousins. I remembered, with a clarity both clinical and embarrassing, the way the other guys at school would jostle and needle each other in the hallways, tossing out the word “jerk-off” like a dodgeball, a missile meant to humiliate but also to probe for secret kinship. I was so scared of becoming that guy, the “jerk-off,” the self-seducer, even though I knew for a fact that I was surrounded by them. I learned to keep my hands folded, my mind on homework or team drills, pretending that I was immune, that whatever hunger chewed at my insides was a fleeting aberration, something I could simply outlast or pray away.
But puberty is a force of nature, and my resistance was ultimately as futile as an umbrella in a hurricane. The collapse began in increments, small concessions: a lingering glance at the glamour models stamped to the toolboxes in my friend’s dad’s garage; the illicit thrill of flipping past the underwear section of the JC Penney catalog when my mom wasn’t looking; the lazy, involuntary morning wood that insisted on tenting my sheets, as if I were somehow complicit in my own undoing. The defining breach, though, was a stack of car show posters passed to me under the lunch table by a girl who smiled like she already knew what I’d do with them. The bodies on those posters were all tan legs, glossy smiles, and aerodynamic breasts, human in the vaguest sense but engineered to provoke a response. I hid them with the paranoia of a Cold War spy, but even then, I understood it was only a matter of time before I cracked.
The first time felt like a crime, soft and tentative, my hand treating my cock like it was a trapped animal that might bite back. I’d seen it done in porn and heard about it in locker room folklore, but the actual act was a revelation, a little frightening for its power and its ability to blunt every other concern. I remember the way my muscles locked up, the sudden shiver, and the overwhelming need to scrub away the evidence before anyone found out. Afterward, I lay in bed, heart rattling, convinced that God or my parents or some roving band of psychic nuns would know instantly what I’d done. The guilt was heavy, but the relief was heavier, and I knew I’d do it again.
I became a devotee of the habit almost overnight. My record for abstinence was set that first week: four days, a period of withdrawal so intense that I felt like I was mainlining sexual tension just from the friction of my jeans. Every night, I’d promise myself to hold out, and every night, my resolve disintegrated at the same time as my waistband. I took to timing my sessions, refining my technique, even daring to experiment with new materials—an empty tube sock, the plastic lining of a shampoo bottle, the cool curve of my own palm. I read online forums about ways to “edge” for hours, and then I’d collapse in a feverish, mind-melting climax, only to obsess about the next one all day at school. I was never caught, but I lived in constant fear of discovery, a private war between compulsion and consequence.
Some part of me tried to rebel, to say no and mean it, but the rest of me was helpless before the crush of hormones and the slow, insistent pressures of boredom, anxiety, and the bottomless curiosity of youth. At the time, I thought I was hopelessly broken, maybe even a pervert. But when I listened to my friends talk—some with bravado, some with sheepish honesty—I realized I was just another conscript in the same secret society. We were all chasing the same high, all negotiating the same terms with our own bodies. There was comfort in that, if not absolution.
I abandoned any pretense of quitting sometime after sophomore year, when it became clear that masturbation was less a vice than a vital organ in my emotional anatomy. Still, I measured my self-control in increments: how long could I go before the urge overtook me? Would a new crush, a particularly vivid dream, or the accidental brush of a hand in gym class be the catalyst for my next relapse? I treated every failed attempt at abstinence like a scientific variable, adjusting my expectations but never my behavior. By the time I hit college, I’d resigned myself to the idea that the best I could hope for was moderation, or at least a more creative approach to concealment.
Lately, I’d started following a stranger on a message board who chronicled his own attempts at “semen retention,” turning his struggle into a kind of performance art. His longest streak was twelve days, and he spoke about the experience with a zeal usually reserved for marathoners and cult leaders. I was both inspired and slightly unsettled, but I decided to try again, just to see if I could match his record. After all, wasn’t that what adolescence was all about—setting impossible goals and failing spectacularly?
It’s still really difficult to keep my hands away from my needy little dick!
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