MASTURBATION: BEGINNING
BY EDWARD BRONGERSMA

“Masturbation: Beginning”, is part of “The Outlets”, the final section of “Boys and their Sexuality”, the third chapter of Loving Boys, the encyclopaedic study of Greek love by the eminent Dutch lawyer, Edward Brongersma, of which the first volume (including this) was published by Global Academic Publishers in New York in 1986.

Of Swiss schoolboys, 41% claimed to have discovered the practice by themselves, 25% were instructed by comrades 3% had read about it or seen pictures, 4% were taught by adult men, 14% couldn’t remember how they had begun and 13% denied ever doing it Biener 1973, 64). In Hite’s sample, 60% discovered it themselves, 34% were instructed by friends, 6% by movies or books.^[1]

Some examples of discovery:

87 [sic] “It wasn’t until I was eleven and reading some of my comic books with some erotic pictures and laying on some inflated swimming inner tubes on the floor of the basement, that I had my first climax. For this I could not have been less prepared. I have fantasized what would have happened if I had gone up and asked my mother about what had happened to me. However, I overcame my fears and began a regular practice of masturbation^[2] 

15-year-old boy: “I woke up once and found I had a hard-on. I wasn’t sure what it meant, but I rubbed it and I came.”

15-year-old boy: “I discovered it on my own. I just I played with it one day and it felt good so I just kept on doing it.”

15-year-old boy: “I had an erection one night and I just started to stroke it and it felt good.^[3]

Most beautiful is the description of the Japanese novelist Yukio Mishima.^[4] “For over a year now I had been suffering the anguish of a child provided with a curious toy. I was twelve years old. This toy increased in volume at every opportunity and hinted that, rightly used, it would be quite a delightful thing. But directions for its use were nowhere written, and so, when the toy took, the initiative in wanting to play with me, my bewilderment was inevitable. (…) The nature of its tastes had become bound up, not only with my childhood memories, but, one after another, with such things as the naked bodies of young men seen on a summer’s seashore, the swimming teams seen at Meiji Pool, the swarthy young man a cousin of mine married, and the valiant heroes of many an adventure story. (…) The toy likewise raised its head towards death and pools of blood and muscular flesh.” One day, perusing a book with reproductions of art, he accidentally sees one of Guido Reni’s paintings of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian: “That day, the instant I looked upon the picture, my entire being trembled with some pagan joy. My blood soared up: my loins swelled as though in wrath. The monstrous part of me that was on the point of bursting awaited my use of it with unprecedented ardour, upbraiding me for my ignorance, panting indignantly. My hands, completely unconsciously, began a motion they had never been taught. I felt a secret, radiant something rise swift-footed to the attack from inside me. Suddenly it burst forth, bringing with it a blinding intoxication… Sometime passed, and then, with miserable feelings, I looked around the desk I was facing. (…) There were cloudy-white splashes about – on the gold-imprinted title of a textbook, on a shoulder of the ink bottle, on one corner of the dictionary. Some objects were dripping lazily, leadenly, and others gleamed dully, like the eyes of a dead fish. (…) This was my first ejaculation. It was also the beginning, clumsy and completely unpremeditated, of my ‘bad habit’.”

Other boys needed instruction from books or, more frequently, from friends: 15-year-old boy: “I think I was thirteen, in my parents’ bedroom, and was looking through their book The Joy of Sex, and I read it and tried it to see what it felt like. It felt very good and I’ve been doing it ever since.”

18-year-old boy: “My older friends told me about it so I tried it. After I came I was scared because I didn’t know what the sperm was.”

15-year-old boy: “All my friends had always talked about it jokingly because everybody thought you were a fag if you really did it. I had never come before, so one night I tried just like my friends described (up and down) and it worked.”

15-year-old boy: “Friends had been telling me about this neat feeling and I had also been checking things out on my own. Eventually a friend and I tried masturbating together and we both found out what it was like.”

15-year-old boy: “I discovered it from my cousin. I guess we got crazy and started playing strip poker, and then we went streaking around the room. He told me to spit in my hand and clamp it around my penis and pump. He said it is like the actual thing, making love.”

16-year-old boy: “It was during camp and I happened to come into my cabin and saw a guy doing it. So I was curious and tried it later that day.”

16-year-old boy: “I discovered it from my cousin. We had to sleep in the same bed. He was masturbating and I asked him what he was doing and he showed me.”

16-year-old boy: “My friend showed me. We were sitting there one day and he showed me by doing it himself.”

16-year-old boy: “From a girl I was with. When she did it to me I thought I would do it to myself.”

5-year-old boy: “I discovered it from a girl who had given me a hand job.^[5]

88  ”I had my first orgasm when I was twelve. I was playing with my cock and it kept feeling better and better until that indescribable explosion of passion which I shall never forget, though I’m well past fifty (…) Since we lived on a farm I discovered a unique way of getting my sexual needs satisfied. I began to experiment with cows. First I tried it on the calves about a year old but they were a bit too tight and would not stand still. So I took to fucking older cows, some of which seemed to enjoy it as much as I did. I figured this is what it must be like to fuck a real girl and would fantasise I was doing just that.^[6] 

A large majority of boys obtain their first ejaculation – proof of puberty – by playing with their penises. The average age at which this happened, for 233 American boys, was 12.9 years.^[7]

89  A New Zealand boy said:^[8] “I was fooling around with my dork. I suppose you’d call it masturbating. Well, I came all over the place. That was the first time. All this sticky stuff everywhere. I pulled all the blankets right down and lay there very relaxed. I looked down at this stuff all over my pyjama top and belly. I thought, ‘That’s sperm. That’s the stuff. It’s got hundreds of eggs in it and any one can make a baby.’ It seemed really incredible, very, very powerful stuff. I thought, ‘All I have to do is find a girl and put some in her and she’ll have a baby.’ Not that I wanted a baby. Just the thought that I could do it made me feel very important, very powerful. I could do that, make an illegitimate baby, and no one could stop me because even if they did find out it would be too late.”

90  At thirteen years of age: “I was lying in bed one day and playing with my prick because it felt so nice (…) I kept playing with it and rubbing the head and all of a sudden I got this wild funny thrill feeling all up and down my spine and my legs twitched and some egg-white-looking stuff shot out of the end of my cock all over my belly and hand! Wow!!! It felt better than anything I had ever felt before. I tried it again and again and finally did it four or five times before I had had enough. These four times were in a total time span of about ten to fifteen minutes at the outside.^[9]

No wonder boys, if their minds aren’t poisoned with shame and shyness, are proud of this newly-acquired capacity and like to demonstrate it.

91 No one has better described such a scene than Günter Grass in his novel Katze und Maus, where Mahlke, the most popular boy in school, finds himself on a half-sunken ship in the Baltic, surrounded by his comrades and the girl Tulla. Tulla, who has admiringly watched other boys masturbate to ejaculation, encourages Mahlke to “do it” too. So he pushes down his swimming trunks to his knees. “A few short movements with his right hand and his cock stood up, so much increased in size that the glans emerged from the shadow of the ship’s binnacle into the sunlight. (…) Tulla’s hands, as always coarse with cuts and calluses, worked in vain upon this thing which, under her probing fingertips, became thicker, the veins swelling, the glans enlarged. (…) Schilling, the one among us with the longest prick, had to bring his out, make it stand up and hold it next to Mahlke’s. Mahlke’s was, first of all, one size thicker, second, a match-box longer and, third, looked much more adult, dangerous, venerable. So now that he had shown it to us again, he immediately demonstrated something else – pulling it off, as we used to say, twice in succession. (…) Mahlke had hardly spurted the first charge over the rail when he started immediately anew. Winter clocked the time on his water-proof wristwatch: Mahlke needed about as many seconds as it took the torpedo-boat putting to sea to come from the end of the mole to the navigation buoy: at the moment the boat passed the buoy he discharged just as much sperm as he had the first time. And we all laughed like madmen when the gulls swooped down upon this stuff, lurching in the smooth, barely-rippling sea, and cried for more.^[10]

In boarding school dormitories boys may pursue sex as though it were a sport appropriate to their age: pump themselves off together, competing to see who can ejaculate first, who shoots his semen the farthest, who can first put out a candle with his sperm, etc. Of the Danish boys in Hertoft’s research, 42% had participated in group masturbation, the majority of them during the years between 13 and 15.^[11]

“If the boy gives up masturbation prematurely, he automatically deprives himself of a psychophysical process that seems essential to the completion of a developmental sequence that begins with sexualised self-love and proceeds through fantasied homosexual and heterosexual love, culminating in the achievement of masculine identity and choice of a heterosexual love object separate from the primary one.^[12] We should amend this statement by pointing out that the ultimate choice for some will be homosexual love object.

In any case, the campaign against masturbation – so often waged with naked sadism upon helpless children – is a fight against the fullness of human potential and the order of creation. He who carries on this battle with the idea that it is pedagogically beneficial inflicts upon the child permanent emotional problems;^[13] he who does so motivated by religion is a megalomaniac bent on correcting the work of the Creator in whom he claims he believes.

Both fight against pleasure and joy. But the man who has learned to view pleasure positively should value masturbation as one important source of happiness.

Continue to The Outlets: Sex with Girls

^[1]  Hite, Sh., The Hite Report on Male Sexuality. New York: Ballantine, 1981, 867. [Author’s reference]

^[2] Friday, N., Men in Love. New York: Dell, 1981, 321. [Author’s reference]

^[3] Hass, A., Teenage Sexuality. New York: Macmillan, 1979, 90. [Author’s reference]

^[4] Mishima, Y., Confessions of a Mask. London: World Distributors, 1958, 29, 33- 34. [Author’s reference]

^[5] Hass, A., Teenage Sexuality. New York: Macmillan, 1979, 90, 92-95. [Author’s reference]

^[6] Friday, N., Men in Love. New York: Dell, 1981, 259. [Author’s reference]

^[7] Dort, N. M., Teen-age Masturbation. Los Angeles: Spartan House, 1968, 36. [Author’s reference]

^[8] Tuohy, F. & Murphy, M., Down Under the Plum Trees. Waiura (New Zealand): Alister Taylor, 1976, 134-135. [Author’s reference]

^[9] Friday, N., Men in Love. New York: Dell, 1981, 34. [Author’s reference]

^[10] Grass, G., Katz und Maus. Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1961, 27-28. [Author’s reference]

^[11] Hertoft, P., Unge mænds seksuelle adfæd, viden og holdning. København: Akademisk Forlag, 1968, I-133. [Author’s reference]

^[12] Moore, W. Th., Masturbation in Adolescence. In: Marcus & Francis (Eds.), Masturbation. New York: International Universities Press, 1975, 253. [Author’s reference]

^[13] Levin, S., Affects and Masturbation Conflicts. In: Marcus & Francis (Eds.), Masturbation. New York: International Universities Press, 1975, 309. [Author’s reference]