How did you Find Out that Others Masturbate Too?

There are pretty much only two ways anybody learns to masturbate. One is that an older sibling or friend or cousin explains it or show us. A variation on that is that you catch the older sibling doing it and demand that he explain what’s going on. But many of us learn about it by stumbling onto it without any external prompting by another soul. I am in that group. I have no older siblings. One day I was in bed with a a boner, I rubbed it, and was rewarded with my first orgasm and ejaculation. I thought I had discovered something nobody else knew about — this secret way of experiencing sexual joy without the inconvenience of finding a sex partner. I was 12.

And so it went. None of my friends at school ever mentioned anything about their solo-sex experiences, so I just assumed they didn’t have them. I was the only one. And so I kept it secret.

The next school year a friend, Charlie, who was unusually skilled at drawing for a 13 year old, showed me a drawing he’d made of a naked woman, with breasts and vulva gloriously displayed. He explained that he’d had an erotic dream the night before and made the drawing that morning, inspired the by the character in his dream. Well I had had wet dreams before, and my Dad had explained to me that all guys get them. So I asked Charlie if there had been any wet when he woke up. “Are you kidding,” he replied. “It was a huge puddle!” I asked him if he got wet dreams often. He said, “Just sometimes. There’s something else I like to do a whole lot better, ‘cause you get to be awake for it.” That was as far as the discussion went. But at that moment, I knew I was not alone — Charlie knew the secret too.

It was only a month or so later that my Dad had the masturbation talk with me. The two of us were in the car on our way to a rock-climbing park. Out of the blue my Dad says, “You know, masturbating won’t make you weak or blind or give you hairy palms, or anything like that.” This was the first I’d ever heard the word, masturbating, and I had no idea what he was talking about. So I asked him, “What’s masturbating?” He said very simply, “It’s when you rub your penis till it squirts semen.” He went on to explain that it won’t make you crazy either — that in the old days some doctors thought it did because they observed mental patients doing it. But that’s because everybody does it, and mental patients are a part of everybody. I said nothing. That was the extent of the discussion. But the secret was a secret no more. Clearly my Dad knew I was masturbating on a regular basis, and it struck me that he had probably done the same when he was my age. And I surmised that among my friends, it was probably not just Charlie who was doing it.

 

I knew guys, in general did it from health class. The first person I knew for sure did it was a friend in high school who admitted his parents had banned him from the computer for watching porn on it. I figured that if he was watching porn then he probably masturbates.

 

Oh 'Health" class. I remember that 7th textbook had a chapter on 'maturity' and a whole one paragraph on masturbation - "self manipulation of the genitals for personal gratification". Nobody talked about masturbation, it was unspoken. I made a joke to my buddy once about 'getting a good workout' wink wink...he did finally get it and said "oh" then looked embarrassed - he probably did it more than I did. My 17 year old girlfriend asked me once if I masturbated.....and I said what do YOU think......she said sheepishly, I thought so since I do it too, sometimes in the shower with the shower massage... " I was flabbergasted - my sexual competition was a nozzle.

 

I became aware that what I was doing pretty much every one else did too when a kid started spending the days at his grandparents house 2 doors down.
We ended up being jerk buddies. Interesting summer that was.