I first remember masturbating when I was about 7. I'm sure I was doing it before then, but that is my earliest memory of doing it. I would put my hand in my underpants and, holding my hand flat, move my soft penis up and down. The rubbing of my hand and of my penis head on my cotton underwear felt fantastic, and if I was lucky I would reach a sort-of orgasm before I got too much of an erection for my technique to work. Of course, I didn't use those words — "boner" was what my best friend and I called an erection, and orgasm was just some final, great, nameless feeling.
At that age, my best friend and I didn't masturbate together, but we did play "doctor" — Star Trek doctor, where a phaser blast meant the other had to do some surgery that always seemed to involve pulling down the patient's pants. When we were a little older, 9 or 10, we began to trade what little knowledge we had about sex, and we always masturbated while trading stories. By this time I had graduated to a more standard way of doing it, and both my friend and I would, whenever we could get away from adults, have our penises out and would stroke away. It seems like we always had erections, and his little brother would sometimes join in — it was just easier to show him how to do it than to try to hide from him all the time.
Things began to get more serious as I hit 6th grade and started, barely, to enter puberty. I remember asking my friend one night if I could look at his penis — we had seen each other naked lots of times, but I had never really looked. He agreed, if he could see the hair I had told him was coming in on my testicles. It's funny to think back on how shy we were, even though we had both seen each other's stuff before. I had suddenly become worried about the size of my penis, probably after hearing someone joking about penis size, and I was happy to see my friend and I both were about the same size. I was still worried, though, because I knew that soon I would have to shower in P.E. at school, and even though my friend and I were the same size, I knew our 3 inches was still little — because my neighbor had joked about someone having a 3-incher.
About this time, I found a book by Nancy Friday called Men in Love — it's a study of men's sexual fantasies. I learned the nuts and bolts about sex from this book and used some of the accounts as masturbation material, especially the ones written by boys close to my own age. I didn't worry quite so much about my penis size anymore, although P.E. still embarrassed me — there were some guys in the showers with huge penises, or so it seemed at the time. Mine looked tiny when it was soft, and I assumed these other boys' penises grew as much as mine when they were erect. That would have given my next-door neighbor about an 18-inch erection! I finally figured out that some don't grow as much as others, and as my pubic hair grew I became at least middle of the road in the showers: not as developed as some of the guys, but more than others. By the 9th grade, I was more or less fully developed. One boy, who was the same age as me to the day, had always liked to punch me in the arm as hard as he could. He had a similar last name, so our lockers were always next to each other in P.E. — and he stopped picking on me the first week of 9th grade, as soon as he saw me dressing down for P.E. He still had a little boy's button of a penis, with no pubic hair. He actually stared at my equipment for a couple minutes, and apparently decided that even though he could punch harder than me, my bigger penis and curly pubes meant we were equals of a sort.
All through junior high my best friend and I had been masturbating together. Sometime in the summer between 6th and 7th grade, I had my first ejaculation. I wish I could remember the exact time, but I can't — I just know that when I read a popular Judy Blume book at the end of 6th grade, I didn't have any clue what the heroine of the book was talking about when she said stuff shot out of her boyfriend's penis. But by 7th grade, I was shooting stuff myself. I do remember showing my best friend. We were hiding out in the middle of some pine trees that had been cut down, burrowed in the middle under all the branches, like a fort. No one could see us, and we were masturbating. I offered to show him how I could shoot, and then said that if he would masturbate me, I would do it to him. We were just about to start but his mom called us — and even though she had no idea where we were or what we were doing, we both pulled up our pants as fast as we could, as embarrassed as if we had been caught red-handed. That night, I masturbated to orgasm and he watched. Then I knelt in front of his bed and masturbated him until a small drop of clear semen oozed out. From that night on, we couldn't keep our hands off of each other.
Whenever we were together, one of us would start by asking how much hair the other had grown. It was such a stupid thing to ask — we saw each other at least every weekend and usually once or twice during the week. We would masturbate each other, and finally one night he agreed to suck my penis. It was the most incredible thing I had ever felt, and I didn't want him to stop, ever. I didn't do him that night, but by the next time we spent the night together, I was ready. As soon as dinner was over, we went to his room to play, and I just unbuttoned his pants and did it. After that, we would do it all the time, often doing each other at the same time, letting one person lead. "Do to me what you want me to do to you," one of us would say, and that person would mimic the other's movements — fast, slow, teeth, no teeth, where to rub with our hands. We never got caught, although we had to push a chair against the door to keep his little brother from barging in. He had seen us masturbate before, but this was a different thing altogether. We kept this up until I started 10th grade — high school — and we drifted apart.
As junior high ended, I struck up a friendship with a guy at school whom everyone thought was the coolest and, as we would have said back then, was "totally hot." Mike was handsome, and I suppose I had a crush on him, in a way. I do remember seeing him one day and thinking about how perfect his butt seemed, and I started to think about him when I masturbated. By this time I was doing it at least 2 or 3 times a day — before I got up for school, when I got home in the afternoon, and after I went to bed. Toward the end of that last year of junior high, this guy and I started hanging out. We skipped school one day, for no reason really, and as soon as my parents were gone for work we hung out at my house. For some reason I cannot remember, we stripped down to our underwear. We sat there in our jockeys, trying not to become erect, basking in the erotic, rebelliousness of the day. (Skipping school was a big deal at our junior high, and tough to get away with!) We did stuff like that all summer — skinny dipping, talking about all the times he'd had sex (I was a virgin) and finally one day masturbating together.
Thinking back on it now, I can see just how much Mike manipulated the situation. He always started things, and we progressed from masturbating together to watching each other, then to doing each other. He always felt guilty about it afterwards, and made sure to spread the guilt around. For my part, I was so infatuated with my hero and all the attention he gave me, I let him play his games. The first time we had oral sex together, he came home the next day from working with his dad with grease burns all down his arms. He told me he felt so guilty about what we had done the night before that he intentionally burned himself — for being such a faggot. But a week later, he wanted to do it again. We went back and forth like that for 2 years, until I finally got the courage to find some other friends and stopped hanging out with him. But before I did, Mike had actually come to live with my family — his parents had moved out of state, and he didn't like it there. After being apart for 6 months, he moved into my bedroom. It was a total disaster. While he was gone, I had become more confident, more sure of myself. He tried to be the same manipulative person he had been when he left, and I didn't want to play that game anymore. One of our biggest fights was over masturbation. I woke up early one morning and saw him going at it. I like to do it before school myself, so when he got up to take a shower I started masturbating, too. When he walked back into the room I was still going, not quite finished — which was no big deal, I thought. But he started saying how I masturbated to much, how I shouldn't need to do it before school, and even that my stomach caved in too much as I did it! I moved into our spare room, and Mike moved out as soon as school was over for the year.
Since then, I have had several partners — both guys and women. One guy I had a pretty serious relationship with, when I first came to college. He would get mad at me for masturbating — he wanted me to "save it" for him. Another guy I worked with liked to masturbate with me, but only after smoking some pot. It was kind of funny: He would talk about girls constantly, as if he was trying to prove to me and himself that he wasn't gay. Then after a bowl or two, he would start talking about his erection and asking to see mine. I almost felt sorry for him.
Masturbation is a huge part of my life, especially as I am single now. I am trying to get finished with college, and a relationship would just get in the way too much. So it's just me and myself right now. I wish JackinWorld would have been around when I was 12, trying to figure out if what I was doing was okay, if it was even safe. (I figured that out pretty quick, thank god!) I can't help but think of how much this site would have helped some of my friends — one kid I knew would not spend the night at anyone's house because he would have "wet-dreams" in their bed! His church had scared him into thinking masturbation would send you straight to the deepest pits of Hell. A more objective opinion is exactly what he could have used.
I will never stop masturbating, relationship or no. Sex with a partner is wonderful, but different. Sex with myself is important, too, and I will never be with someone again who cannot respect that.
