Part One of a two-part series; read Part Two.

Well, I'm not Methuselah by any means, but from the looks of things, I'm a bit older than a lot of the other Biographers. I came of age in the late '70s/early '80s, and the culture was very different then. There was no Internet. Personal computers were still owned primarily by hobbyists. Television was pretty tame. And masturbation was just not talked about.

I was very naive in my early teens. When I was in the 5th grade a bunch of boys and our fathers attended a sex-ed class put on at the local elementary school one night. A doctor gave us some pamphlets and gave us the rundown on the biology of sex. In terms of biology, it was accurate and fine. In terms of sex it was pretty sad. Of course masturbation never entered into it. Neither did "orgasm." I knew that the sperm had to get to the egg and I knew the route it took. And they even finally explained erections and why we got them (what a relief that was — why does that have to be such a big mystery for boys?), but nothing about what triggered it. For a long time I thought you just stuck it in and that did it.

Two things happened very close together to change all this. The first was that a close friend of mine was going to a special weekend school, and one day an older student showed up and opened up the trunk of his car and split up his collection of adult magazines. And my friend must have come home with a couple hundred. I don't know if the guy worked for a liquor store or if he just spent half of every paycheck on porn, but he had just about everything. My friend got them, and over time I got them as he passed them along. We saw everything that was in print at that time — a few Playboys, Penthouses, some Hustler, Oui, Chic, Cheri, Velvet, Swank, a lot of Gent, Gallery, Genesis, and a few others that came and went quickly (who remembers Harvey?), and more that I've forgotten. For a while I could name everything on the stand, and I knew what they were all about. So I stayed up late reading these things, looking up all the words I didn't know in the dictionary. A lot of things — like the dictionary definition of orgasm — made no sense. After a while I figured out a lot of it from context, but others remained a mystery.

About this time I stumbled onto the National Lampoon, which was a humor magazine. The NatLamp had a lot in common with underground comics — it was done up slick like a regular humor magazine, but the jokes were definitely adult. It didn't get much circulation where I lived — the record store had it with Rolling Stone and High Times. I found it when someone stuck it next to MAD magazine, not knowing what was in it.

It was a far cry from MAD. The first issue I saw (and I still have it) had pictures of a woman with the biggest rack I'd ever seen. They hung down to her navel, and she was wearing only a pair of bikini panties. I bought the magazine, didn't tell anyone, and read it at home. A lot of the humor went over my head. Some didn't. And I thought, This is legalized porn.

The payoff came a few issues later, when they ran a story by John Hughes (the same one who became a big-time film director) called "My Penis." It's about a girl who wakes up one morning to find out she'd grown a big old man-sized johnson, and her adventures with it. (A later turnabout sequel, "My Vagina," wasn't nearly as good.)

If you wake up one morning and find out you've suddenly swapped out your genitals for a working set from the opposite sex, what would you do once the initial shock wears off? She decided to give herself a handjob. I was stunned as I wrote this. You could simulate a vagina with your hand? You could curl up your hand and stroke it and bring yourself to orgasm? The idea was so simple — yet it had never occurred to me.

The girl in the story brought herself to orgasm with very funny results (semen everywhere). And I did the same. Wow! At first I was surprised and worried that maybe it wasn't semen — maybe it was something else (it was dark and I was in bed), but I came to my senses and realized I wasn't bleeding and it wasn't urine. I had ejaculated.

I was just starting out — I had noticed I'd had a lot of erections before that, but then after I had successfully ejaculated, they went away. For a while. Then I'd ejaculate again and they'd go away again. Once I started masturbating, I didn't have much trouble with spontaneous erections. Of course, there was the time in high school in health class, when we saw a movie about breast self-exams. There's nothing like a movie of a good-looking woman feeling herself up in the shower and on the bed — no matter how sober the reason — to quiet down a roomful of boys.

Vacations with the family were hell, though. One year we went on a long driving vacation up and down the coast in a camper, so there was just no privacy whatsoever. About a week into it, we got to a state beach and there was a decent looking woman at the gate. It was the first time in memory that I'd been within 10 feet of a set of knockers I wasn't related to, and that woman became Venus to me. I got a superhardon — a penis of steel. My parents parked the truck and everybody had to pile out — but I didn't want to get out. I couldn't get up. I was doing trigonometry in my head, and the third leg just would not go away. That was a horrible vacation.

Even though I'd discovered masturbation (and I now got all the references and jokes and stories in the magazines), my friends and I never discussed it. As we grew older and got to where we could buy new magazines without being carded, we'd trade them back and forth and make the occasional comment about pages being stuck together, but that was it. As far as we were all concerned, we just looked at the girls and drooled. We would occasionally rent videos (videos were still new then) when we had the house to ourselves, and we'd all sit and watch — with an occasional comment. But nobody made a move for their crotch.

I also collected the National Lampoon, and I got more material, including a wonderful photo spread that was a parody of men's magazines: "Three Girls Doing Just What You Want So You Can Masturbate." I don't know why — it was years before I realized that's what men's magazines were for. Not just to quench your appetite for nudity, but to get you off.

By the time I was in high school, I thought I knew everything. I knew what all the words meant. I'd read all kinds of advice, all kinds of accounts. I knew how it was all done. I thought. On my 18th birthday a friend got me a blow-up doll as a gag gift. It just a cheapy — the kind that looks and smells like an inflatable pool toy — except it had a pouch in the crouch.

All those years I'd been masturbating dry. A lot of people don't get that — but if you're used to it, there's nothing to it. Your skin is smooth, and you just glide over it. So it had never occurred to me that you needed lube. I won't go into the gory details — I'll just say the deed was not accomplished, and the doll was given away, where I suppose she's being serviced by someone who knows what he is doing.

Go to Part Two.


Go to the JackinWorld Random Biography Picker

Go to the JackinWorld Biographies Index