Quite an interesting talk. The notion that the brain is always after “new mates” ran true to me. My pornographic tastes are always fluctuating, and I always find myself search out new porn. The weight of anecdotal evidence that’s now appearing with men speaking out against compulsive and addictive behavior towards porn is overwhelming. There’s even a group of people on The Student Room with the aim not to masturbate for the whole of 2013. I am seriously considering quitting for good.
I’ve been looking at my masturbatory habits for around a year and a half now so I thought it might be time to take a general overview of how I think everything has gone and how I should proceed. For November and December I masturbated to porn 7 times in each month. Previously it had only been a couple of times a month. I was thinking about this last night and wondering whether it was such a bad thing in grand scheme of things. My original reason for wanting to curtail my masturbatory habits was because of my sexual dysfunction of not being able to come to orgasm during sex with girlfriends. My frequent, regular and habitual masturbation had desensitised not only my penis, but also my mind to sexual intercourse.
Through self-reflection and self-discipline I believe I have solved this problem. Since I started analysing my masturbatory patterns and started to cut back and reduce my masturbation to graphic porn I have been able to cum whilst having sex with my sexual partners. From this singular objective I have been successful. I have become a sexually mature man and have shuck off the detrimental patterns of my teenage years. (Please excuse any psycho-babel, I have been watching series after series of Frasier).
I was watching a sex education programme a couple of weeks ago. It was produced in the early 2000s and presented by two female sex therapists (I forget the name of the show). The topic of the programme was masturbation, so I thought it would be worth a watch. One point they made early on was not to think of masturbation as masturbation, but rather as “manual sex”. Whether with a partner or on your own they considered masturbation as sex first and foremost. I’m not completely sure I agree with them, but I thought it was an interesting idea I would share. Also during the programme they did an informal survey of male masturbatory habits. Almost all the men they interviewed masturbated multiple times a day, sometimes upto four or five times. When I started to become concerned I was masturbating at an average rate of 0,8 times a day, which compared with the above statistics appears minimal, and compared with how I’m doing now I almost appear celibate! I have no idea how much the average man in the UK masturbates and usually distrust figures that claim to attest to such knowledge. Either way it seems to me that I have my masturbation under control, and in such a way that it does not affect my sex life; which is the whole reason I started this quest.
My foray into tantric masturbation has been the result of a bit of mission creep on my part, but I think it could be something to look into if you have the time and patience. Being in my third year of University it is difficult to find the free time, peace and quiet (living in a house with three other guys) to meditate and progress. The distinction between orgasm and ejaculation in this (and other) disciplines is a helpful one to learn and get used to if you want to enjoy masturbation or partner sex with some ‘added extras’. Frankly ejaculatory control is an excellent tool to have in the bag if you can master it. Another important thing I’ve learned from this is about kegel/pelvic floor muscles. The regular exercise of the ‘clinching’ muscle (the one you use if you want to stop urinating mid-flow) is often recommended to women who suffer, or are likely to suffer, from incontinence. For men it is also used for the same reason, but a strong kegel muscle can also be used to enhance sex. This is done by using the muscle to regulate orgasms and prevent ejaculation. I won’t go into detail here, but search around and you’ll find plenty of information to do with ejaculatory control and kegel muscles. Despite learning interesting ‘sex tips’, I wouldn’t recommend tantric masturbation for someone who thinks they are suffering from a similar dysfunction as I was. It is tricky and could lead to you becoming obsessed with reaching the goal of multiple orgasms rather than becoming a sexually mature man, as you may have simply shifted your compulsive pornographic masturbation to compulsive tantric masturbation. “HANDLE WITH CARE” would be my disclaimer.
Next I’d like to deal with a few things that castimonia said in a comment on a previous post. Firstly I’d like to say I have really appreciated his insights and comments on this blog, but a couple of differences on our approach to this have surfaced and I think it would be helpful to point them out. In the first paragraph of the comment he talks about remaining “abstinent from ANY sexuality for a period of 30 to 90 days” including sex (of any kind) with a partner. My goal here it not to destroy or eliminate my sexuality, far from it. My aim is to enhance it. I have done masturbatory abstinence periods before, but all I found them useful for is proving to myself that I didn’t need to masturbate regularly or frequently. Admittedly this is good knowledge to have and is worth doing, but I don’t think it is necessary to sacrifice your entire sexual existence. A period of abstinence from masturbation (particularly from pornography) is helpful and I would recommend doing it for a period of around 21 days or a month, but if you are a single man or in the early stages of a relationship allow yourself the ability to have sex. So long as it is not compulsive or obsessive you should be fine.
On the second paragraph I do agree that my mind has been warped by pornography and the sexualised media of our time. Truth be told I have become more attracted to her, but I do think the relationship may have run it’s course. The second point I also agree with if I was searching for a compatible life partner. I have been with and met women who were gorgeous, but with awful temperaments and personalities. If I was after a long term relationship I would put personality over looks, but as it stands now, that’s not what I’m after. I believe I can allow myself a little vanity when it comes to choosing a girlfriend. I’d like to congratulate castimonia for getting married and I hope he has a happy and fulfilling life.
In the third paragraph he mentions sex not just being about orgasms. The reason I do most things is because I enjoy them and it is the same for sex, and dare I say, masturbation. Because I am not in the same kind of relationship as him I feel we have a different approach to the “goal” of sex. To him it’s an affirmation of love and commitment, but to me it’s about the raw pleasure and thrill that sex brings. I don’t mean to say that one is better than the other, simply that we think about it differently, and a young single man shouldn’t miss out on the opportunity to learn about himself that sex with a partner brings. Without sex I would never have considered my masturbatory habits to be compulsive or obsessive and be spurred on to curtail them.
I did masturbate that much or at least I didn’t seem to. I had a lot of 3-4 days gaps between masturbating, which I think is a sign of me becoming less addicted to it.
My total masturbation was 0,33 so 2,33 times a week.
I masturbated to porn on average 1,4 times a week.
So, I masturbated to porn 60% of the time, which is worse than last month, but only by a wee bit.
I’m back at Uni now. My girlfriend is still wanting to wait until she gets onto a pill that doesn’t try to turn her inside out, so we’ve just been playing with each other sans-sex. I’ve been counting our encounters (oral sex, handjobs, etc) as masturbation without porn because it’s sexual stimulation without extreme graphical images of extremely attractive women, even though I’m being stimulated by another person. I could count it as sex, because frankly they’re the same reasons I don’t count normal sex as masturbation. So perhaps I should count it a sex and not masturbation without porn.
Either way, I’m not totally happy with the relationship. I’m not massively attracted to her, but the fact is she’s just too nice and I don’t want her to be upset. So that get’s me thinking that it’d be worse to keep her hanging on. I would quite like to be the free, young man about town, hooking up with (or at least trying to) all the pretty young things out there. It’s my last year of Uni, and I just want to enjoy myself. I think for the first time in my life, I’m actually confused.
So, it turned out that we didn’t have sex, but we still played around for a while. One thing that disturbed me was that as she was masturbating me I was tensing trying to cum and not relaxing and getting into the zone. As a result, the pain that I had originally felt when I lost my virginity came back. It wasn’t as intense a pain as it had been, but it worried me. I think it was more of a psychological thing rather than a physical “I’ve been masturbating too much” thing, as I hadn’t since Saturday. I have my doubts about this girl, and that’s what’s probably making me so tense. She’s a lovely girl with a great bubbly personality and I do like being around her and talking with her, but she is a little overweight and I just can’t shake the feeling that I “could do better”. The last three women I’ve slept with have all been in the top half of the spectrum at least, and from a masculine perspective it feels almost like I’m going backwards. I think I’ll just wait until we’re both back at Uni and take it from there, as we’ll only be seeing each other maybe once in the next two months.
Here are my Masturbatory numbers for June:
General Sexual Attivity: 0,57. So 3,99 times a week.
General Masturbation: 0,53. So 3,71 times a week.
I also recorded how many time I masturbated to porn: 0.33. So 2,31 times a week and 62% of my General Masturbation.
I only had sex once last month, due to the break down of my last relationship, which shuck me up quite a bit. I’m seeing a new girl who’s a virgin. We haven’t had sex yet, but we’ve done everything else. She actually has made me cum using her hand, which only 2 women before have managed to do before. I think this signals that I’m quite comfortable with her and perhaps just more comfortable with myself. I’ve started to do press ups, sit ups and weight lifts to try and tone up before I go back to Uni in October. I’m stick of being a weakling!
I was at a BBQ yesterday and got a few texts from a girl I went out with a bit a few weeks ago. She was incredibly drunk on a night out in town on a University bar crawl. She ended up coming to mine after I had gotten back home. She was smashed. I can’t describe how funny she looked stumbling around my room trying to take her clothes off! Anyways, she crawls into my bed and I lie down next to her. She was having a particularly heavy period so we didn’t have sex. In the middle of the night I woke up to find myself on the brink of ejaculation. I ejaculated before I realised quite what was going on. I had just had a wet dream. I had masturbated 2 days ago, so it’s not like I had a build up of semen my body wanted to get rid of. It seemed to be quite out of the blue, and appears to have had no cause. I can’t remember the dream I was having, so I can’t be sure whether it was my mind fanatising about having sex because I wasn’t getting any. Either way I found it strangely disconcerting.
So, in 20 minutes time I’ll have done another 3 day stint of no masturbation. I had a difficult morning today, I had to stop myself mid-stroking. I just had to keep saying to myself “health and happiness”, the motives for why I need to cut back on masturbating. I had to do the same thing in the shower a few hours later, but I managed to do it. I thought to myself today – considering the scar has only just healed – that I should give it another day, though I may aswell give it til Thursday when I’ll be back at Uni and seeing my girlfriend. I’m not going to masturbate tonight, so I guess we’ll see in the morning if I’ll go for longer than planned or not.
Hello,
This’ll be my first proper blog, after some earlier forays when I was a bit younger. The purpose of this blog is for me to keep a track record of what I’m going through and why I doing it, to keep me on track and get to where I want to be. So let’s start from the beginning . . .
I started masturbating when I was perhaps around 12 (I have a hazy memory) and have done it pretty much consistently over the past 8 years. I’d get home from school, my parents would still be at work till late so I’d have the house to myself I’d sit by the TV watching music videos (esp. Beyonce) or sit on my PC. I’d look at porn and get myself off. In the past 2 or 3 years my tastes in porn have gone to the BDSM side of thing (think of that South Park episode when then internet goes down). The content of the porn I watch isn’t really the issue for me now, but the volume. If I’m bored, I’ll look at porn and masturbate; if i can’t sleep, I’ll look at porn and masturbate; if I’m alone in the house, I’ll look at porn and masturbate.
Over September and October I noted down on my calendar how many times I masturbated per day. On average it came to 0,8 times a day. Some days I’d be busy with Uni or seeing friends, others I’d be going 3 or 4 times over a few hours. Recently I’ve not been masturbating so much, because of my new girlfriend, so I’ve been getting my sexual pleasure from her and not my own hand. Unfortunately frequent sex is not obtainable for many men who feel they masturbate too much, and I’ll say this, frequent sex is not a solution, but is merely transferring the method of getting off from your hand to her vagina. Better arguably, but ultimately when the relationship ends, you’ll be back to overly frequent masturbation.
Many people say masturbation’s healthy, why would you want to stop? It’s fun and doesn’t harm you. Well, yes and no. Masturbation itself isn’t harmless. Getting rid of your sperm doesn’t kill you, but doing it frequently does unbalance your brain chemistry and effects your relations with other people, especially women. But for me this is only a secondary problem.
I had my first time with a girl late last February. We started going out and for the first month we were together I couldn’t come inside her. I couldn’t even come whilst masturbating on top of her. My balls would ache for the rest of the day, as if my sperm were banging on the sides trying to get out. I often had to wait till she was asleep, then sneak off to the bathroom. I looked the problem up on the internet and found that it was probably anxiety, due to my inexperience. I believe this was the case then, as when she came to my place, I finally managed to come inside her! Despite this breakthrough I still found it incredibly difficult to come during normal sex, and I would last for what seemed like ages. You might be reading this thinking, “wow, I’d love to be able to pleasure a girl like that”, but you soon realise that what you first mistake for sexual virility is actually sexual deficiency.
I slept with another girl over summer (I broke up with the other one before the summer if you’re wondering) and again couldn’t come during. It took another go in my own home to get me to come and again it took far too much time. This was when I started to note down my habits and get a little concerned. I met my current girlfriend in November. I came first time in her flat, which was a relief to me, but it was still after an exhausting amount effort. This pretty much takes me to where I am now.
My ultimate goal is to get to a state whereby my autosexual habits do not interfere with my heterosexual ones, i.e., that I can come pretty much at will inside a girl. If I want a quickie with my girl, I can have one, or if I want to last a little longer and give her what she wants then I can quite comfortably. In order to achieve this I need to ween my penis off of my own hand, so as to make it more sensitive to the female touch. I’ve tried to stop masturbating before, and at the most I’ve managed one, very difficult and horny week. I’d like to be able to comfortably go without masturbating for a week at a time (perhaps more, but let’s keep it at an achievable target for the time being) and stop completely when I have a source of real sex. I need to rewire my brain so that it’s default setting for pleasure is not masturbating, but real sex, or at least the thrill of the chase on a night out.
All in all I want to cut down so that I can have a healthy and enjoyable sex life with my future sexual partners, and also, myself.
Curtailing Masturbation 