As of July of this year, I am no longer a teenager. I turned 20 and left my awkward, gangly years behind me. If only I knew then what I know now, growing up would have been so much easier.
Let me start at the beginning — age 11. I was an early bloomer. While most 11-year-old kids would be thrilled to be getting taller than the rest of their classmates and be amazed at the increasing size of their manhood, I was not. I was terrified. Don't get me wrong — I have great parents and came from a good school system. However, the minor detail of explaining the concept of puberty to a young boy was somehow overlooked. No worries! I'll just figure it out on my own! So one weekend as I lay peacefully in bed after a hard week in the 6th grade, horror set in. I woke up with a raging erection. (Thanks to the "P" volume of the encyclopedia, I knew this was normal.) The erection wasn't so much of a big deal as what was happening inside. I felt like I needed to go to the bathroom, but it was so intense, there was no stopping it. I ran down the hall, slammed the door, and ran to the toilet. I barely made it before I began shooting violent loads of white liquid.
My first reaction was to cry. As a kid, the slightest cold or flu had me worried that I had somehow gotten cancer. I can't explain why, but that was always the first diagnosis I came up with. This particular instance was the worst. Looking back on it, I am still somewhat bitter that I didn't get to enjoy the first time I ever ejaculated. That moment is one which some kids look forward to for years. Not me, though, because as far as I knew, I had cancer. The sad part about all this is that my dad is a doctor. If any kid should have been informed on such matters, it should have been me. I thought about going to him to tell him what had happened, but having never even said the word "penis" to my father, what would I have said? I decided instead to wait it out and see if I "got better."
About a month passed and all was well. I still checked every night to make sure that nothing was leaking out, but for the most part, my mind was at ease. Then, it happened again. Only this time, I didn't wake up in time. I have no idea what I was dreaming about, but apparently it must have been good. I woke up to find my penis pulsating and spewing the white stuff all over my briefs. I didn't get back to sleep that night.
Right around that time in my life, my parents were working on moving me into a new bedroom. I was getting older, and they had told me I could move into the room on the other end of the house for more privacy. When summer came a few weeks later, the move was made. I was still too naive to appreciate the privacy, but there was one perk I did take advantage of: the Internet.
The first night I was alone with the computer, I searched every word associated with "penis" that I knew of at the time. I can't describe the weight that was lifted that night as it all began to make sense. The search not only explained what was happening to me, but also explained how to control it: masturbation. Now, of course, when you type the word "penis" into a search engine, you're not just going to get the educational. You're also getting porn. I, somehow, stumbled onto erotic stories that first night. As I read the stories, the new information I had just learned started to sink in, and I got the bright idea to touch myself while reading. Of course, I was already hard. I swear, my hand no more than touched my penis when I felt that peeing sensation again. I knew there was no way to stop it, so I stood up and tried to take off a sock to catch it in. And as usual, I was too late. I will never forget that orgasm. I must have shot 5 or 6 feet into the room before I got the sock positioned just right.
The nights that followed were some of the most amazing nights of my young life. Each night I would experiment with a different grip. For a while, putting a pillow up against my scrotum and stroking for a minute (at the most) was all it took. Soon I lost the pillow and switched to a 3-fingered stroke instead. And it seemed that the more I masturbated, the more I grew. Of course this was just coincidental timing, but hey, it made me feel powerful. I grew over 5 inches taller that summer, and my voice had completely changed by the start of 7th grade.
Another statistic I became interested in was my penis size. To this day, I still have the measuring tape I used through my teenage years — marks and all. There seems to be a 5.5 mark, which sounds about right for that summer. Again, now I realize how above average I was for my age, but back then, I had no idea. Now that I had conquered the art of masturbation, or so I thought, my new goal in life was to find out just how well I measured up to other guys.
Going into the 7th grade, talking about our penises wasn't something my friends and I did. Even with my best friend, it was an off-limits subject. I resorted to the gym locker rooms to size myself up. Our school didn't require after-gym showers, so there was never that prime opportunity to see exactly what I was up against. I resorted to comparisons based on the size of the bulge in the other guys' briefs. Obviously, this provided less than adequate feedback.
It wasn't until I found The What's Happening to My Body Book for Boys that I began to get an idea of what was normal and what wasn't. This book was amazing. The funny thing is, I don't actually own it. Whenever I would go to the mall with my parents, I would run into the bookstore and read it before they got there. I wasn't willing to risk the embarrassment of asking my dad to buy it for me. The part I was particularly interested in was the topic of dealing with other males. At this point, I wanted more than anything to know how my penis size compared with the other guys, but more important, my best friend. Even at a young age, I was incredibly competitive. Even with knowing the numbers provided by the book, I still felt like I needed a visual aid. What if I was measuring wrong? What exactly did an average penis look like, and was mine it?
When the school year finally ended and summer rolled around again, I had my friend over to spend the night. We were watching some movie that I had deliberately picked because of the sex scene in it. When it came on, I realized that this was the best opportunity I was going to have to start a conversation about sex and masturbation. In a moment of near silence while we both watched the at-the-time graphic scene, I asked my friend if watching stuff like that gave him a hard-on. He confessed that it did, and I think we both noticed the bulge in each other's pants during the conversation. I was scared to death, but I finally built up the nerve to ask him if he had ever been curious to see what he looked like compared to me. That night was the first night I had ever seen another male's penis. It turned out that my friend was just as curious as I was, and we both agreed to drop our pants on the count of 3. When we hit 3, we both just stood there, facing each other. We didn't say a word. We just looked. At that point I was about 6 inches and he was a little bigger than me. As we both looked, I got up the nerve to ask another question I had been curious about. I asked how he masturbated. It might have been a bold question, but given that we were already standing there with our erections hanging out, it didn't seem to faze him. He walked over, stood right next to me, and made a few strokes, using his whole fist. This was amazing to me, as I had never used more than 3 fingers. And in fact, when I demonstrated, he told me to try it his way, assuring me it would feel better. After a few more minutes of standing next to one another, holding out our erections as straight as possible to see just how closely we compared, we zipped up and continued with the night just as normal. It may not seem like much, but that was truly an age-defining night for me. I can't describe how good it felt just knowing that someone I actually knew did what I did — and looked how I looked. Not long after that, I discovered JackinWorld — the final chapter in my worried early-teenage life. I remember reading those pages for the first time and finally feeling 100% confident that I was normal in every way.
As the years went on, I started to date a lot. All through junior high, I had a girlfriend on my arm. When I was 15, I had my first physical experience with one of these girlfriends, when she decided to teach me about mutual masturbation. That relationship remains one of my longest and most successful to this day! However, through it all, masturbation remained an active part of my life and still does. I do it at least once a day, preferably before bedtime. After comparing with my friend and reading every page on JackinWorld, I felt comfortable enough to talk openly with all of my guy friends about penis size, masturbation, porn, girls, you name it. It wasn't long before we all felt comfortable enough and had some of the best conversations I'll probably ever have. (And it also helped that by the time it was all said and done, I could proudly give my numbers as 7" long and 5.5" in circumference.)
Even though it was stressful not knowing all I wanted to know when I was young, I guess learning in bits and pieces did add a sense of adventure. And thank God I no longer have to worry that I've contracted some strange form of cancer each time I get off!
