By Thesal Thayer►
(This article was deemed unfit to print by Medium.com)
As a full-time Medium contributor whose writing goes perpetually unpaid, it goes without saying that I don’t date a lot of women. And so, when my writing hand is exhausted at the conclusion of a freshly-minted think-piece, its day’s work isn’t necessarily done. Suffice it to say, your author is well-versed in matters autoerotic, and I have an extensive pseudo-sex life. And as I self-gratify, I’m not averse to a little day-dreaming. I’m not talking about orgiastic imaginings, though — porn and DeviantArt take care of that. I’m referring instead to recurrent speculations about what my masturbation might imply.
One of the most recurrent runs as follows: What if all this pseudo-sex I’ve been having with my hand was for real? I mean to say, what if my masturbatory life was a sex life? What kind of life would that be? This is a thought experiment worth spooling out.
The first and most rudimentary concern involves frequency. I engage in Onanism four times a week on average, at least according to the statistics I keep (as one must). This is not an especially ambitious masturbatory schedule, especially given the availability of internet nudes, though it is reasonably prolific, especially if it were actual sex. I am making time to make love more than half the days in a week. Were it real, this suggests an efficiency with scheduling, as well as a deep care and attention for the needs of my partner and, beyond that, my relationship(s). If you can get intimate with your significant other four times in a week with consistency, you are proceeding at an admirable, or even enviable, clip. But of course, the nature of masturbatory fantasy, which is one of plurality over monogamy, obviates this speculation.
And so the second and more enticing matter involves the women. If my autoerotic life turned real, I’d be making love to four totally gorgeous, totally different women per week — and sometimes even more. My adult-oriented attentions are turned to two main castes of females: Junoesque porn-stars of collagen lips and silicone breasts (the more ridiculously round the better), and nimble, natural early-twenty-somethings from Europe. It’s typically pictures or videos of just one at a time that I look at, picturing us en flagrante, though I sometimes add a depiction of a twosome in the mix, making for an imagined ménage-et-trois. (Said twosomes, I would note, rarely mix the pornified silicone Valkyrie with the Euro-nymph, a pairing solely lacking in pornography and DeviantArt’s “artistic nudes.”) So this means that approximately four times a week, either a hardened veteran porn starlet or a young, open-minded model shows up at my place of residence for a wild, purely physical fling with no questions asked. There is no talking during the encounter (as that is not part of how I pleasure myself), nor is there talking after (as I am not schizophrenic). Rather, our bond is beyond words and strictly sexual. Apparently, I stir some sort of sexual satori moment in them — members of both the porn-star and the nymph demographic alike — epitomizing all that male/female pleasure should encompass. Evidently, the experience is good enough that they tell their friends, who also make the journey over to my house with no questions asked. (This suggests that the silicone Valkyries and the Euro-nymphs know each other on at least a conversational basis, though not well enough to hazard collaborating on a ménage-et-trois with your present author as the focal point.) Oddly enough, though, the same faces rarely reappear, suggesting that I’m so good at sex that I’ve flipped some switch in the women that can’t be turned back, and they’ve been changed so profoundly by my lovemaking that they’ve left everything up to that moment behind. Of course, there are a few brave (and usually busty) exceptions who come back for more.
But this constant stream of women goes beyond sex, and it must also go beyond word-of-mouth. There are two explanatory possibilities here. The first is the cynical one, which suggests that I am paying these women. These four encounters per week, then, are just acts of prostitution. (Why else would hardened porn-stars be in conversation with European models who might not even speak fluent English?) The constant stream of women would suggest that I have some kind of subscriber’s rate with the escort service in question. It would also have to be the case that I lived in a much bigger, much more cosmopolitan city than the medium-sized, working-class burg where I currently dwell. My present Podunk town would not be able to keep 200+ high-class prostitutes employed in view of its small population and stagnant economic growth. Moreover, such a scenario would mean I live in a state where prostitution is legal; anywhere else, the constant stream of women into the house of an effectively unemployed man would raise questions among neighbors, and would have surely drawn police attention by now. I don’t especially like the prostitution possibility, as it figures me as a john of the most superlative order.
The second and more appealing possibility is that I am rich, famous, and handsome, or at least any two of the three. As such, women — or more accurately groupies — are showing up just to sport with a man of eminence. Perhaps in this alternative world I’ve made a name for myself as a writer (though I find that to be so wild a fantasy that it’s almost beyond imagining; I don’t think of the category “famous writer” as groupie-bait, nor do I imagine “success” for a writer entailing any more than bare subsistence). Perhaps I am helping the women forward their career, though I can’t conceive how a Medium writer could help a porn star or a European model in their line of business. If I’ve convinced these women I can help them, then it’s making for a rather misbegotten liaison, all told.
I prefer to imagine that perhaps I am simply famous for being an expert lover. I’m so good, in fact, that the women don’t mind that I live with my parents in my mid-thirties, and that we can only consort while my elderly mother and father are out of the house or sound asleep. With this “expert lover” sub-possibility, some further potential entailments arise. Perhaps my appeal is attributable to an expertise at cunnilingus, though I must say, I don’t spend any part of my masturbatory routine acting this out — again, I’m not schizophrenic. There also arises the matter of physical endowments. Perhaps, in this fantasy-world-made-real, I am exceedingly well-endowed. Perhaps I’m super-fit. But this immediately prompts more vexing metaphysical questions as to the parameters of my thought experiment: what exactly transfers over from fantasy to reality or vice-versa in this particular hypothetical excursion? Perhaps, if the gross material parameters of my body cannot change, then all the women pictured are just a certain percentage smaller in whole or in part when they cross over the threshold to reality. Maybe the whole world shrinks relative to me, making me comparably well-hung. Undeniably, though, in this expert-lover scenario, what I offer is exactly what is desired by hundreds of women (of two rigidly fixed body types). I represent some ineffable golden-mean, Goldilocks configuration of physicality, personality, and sexual performance that allows the women and the girls to see past the extra-baggage on my body and the paucity of hair on my scalp.
All that aside, one thing is for certain: I’m likely very financially well-endowed in this masturbatory-cum-real life. This suggests that my masturbatory fantasies are, more broadly speaking, class fantasies. I am as much fantasizing about independent wealth as I am about casual sex.
No matter what the parameters of the scenario are, the women involved are all getting something from me, either in the form of direct payment or some other rub, either sexually or career-related, from their inclusion in my life, however brief it may be. Perhaps they fancy they are becoming more sophisticated, having sex with a pseudo-intellectual. If they have a problem with my promiscuity, not one of them has ever mentioned it. No one has ever complained of a disease.
I offer these reflections such that you, the Medium reader, might garner some insights into your own masturbatory life and the economies and improbabilities that inform it. I encourage you to ask yourself “what if my own masturbatory life was a real sex life?” and then to ponder as I have. It is my hope you will self-evaluate as you self-gratify, always scrutinizing your methods, materials, and mental imagery, and always working toward a more viable masturbatory life. “Realizability,” I think, is always a noble aim and an apt guiding principle for Onanistic fantasy. There should always be a goal of realizing fantasy. By that I do not mean requesting perverted shit of real-life lovers or paying dozens of prostitutes to do same. Rather, I’m referring to making masturbatory reverie more real.
Do you, for instance, frantically jerk off while rifling through photo after photo, each one of a different woman in full lordosis? If so, your masturbatory life might be strongly influenced by a harem fantasy. I was once like you. But I urge you to reevaluate with regard to real-world carryover. Having so many women available to gratify your sexual impulses in a split-second is, ultimately, coming from a very dark place. At best, your real-world equivalent is some kind of deeply disturbing R. Kelly scenario where you’ve manipulated vulnerable women — again, at best. If this describes your routine, you might considering taking what’s called a “fidelity vow” in your masturbatory life. This involves only jacking off to photos and videos of the same porn starlet and/or tasteful nude for a fixed or unfixed period of weeks or months. This simulates a real-world relationship, at least with respect to learning how to get off on rote sameness.
And speaking of real-world relationships, where do those fit into this thought experiment of our fantasies turning into reality? If masturbation is now real, are intimate encounters with real women now masturbatory? I can only speak from limited sexual experience myself, but a lot of the time it sure feels that way.
But most of us for most of the time will only have our fantasy life, and that just might be enough. What I hope to have reinforced here is the notion that a masturbatory life is as important as a sex-life. Certainly we are well aware of this in a post-Incel era, where we know from the well-publicized rantings of internet troglodytes that there are entire castes of males who will never have sex (and with good cause!). Whether sexually experienced or not, rest assured that your would-be sex life is a fingerprint unique to you — a singular and formative set of experiences that says a lot about who you are and who you might have wanted to become. Self-styled sexual encounters with computer screens are nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, by totaling up all your pseudo-penetrations, you’d most certainly arrive at an illuminating and likely dizzying figure. It’s a number that probably rivals that of a John Holmes or a Rocco Siffredi in sheer volume of encounters. And perhaps it’s some consolation to know that, relative to the many great scenes of these porno pacesetters, our masturbatory one-offs were hardly any more intimate.
