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Male Pleasure and Masturbation

There are many reasons people shy away from masturbation, growing hairs on your palms and the fact that God is watching you being just two of the reasons. However, heightened sexual awareness and also the ability to further your sense of satisfaction (and that of your partners) could be reasons to do it.

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Women are complicated sexual creatures. Touching here and licking there will have one woman seeing stars and the next slapping you in the face. Leaving aside the little fact that all women are different there are the different types of orgasm: penetrative, clitoral, boob, self-induced (see: mutual masturbation). Heck some women can climax from doing a good round of crunches or even having the right thoughts at the right time. True story, it’s all in the kegels.

Female pleasure is a wild terrain to try to tame, but masculine pleasure has been whittled down in public discourse to ‘eyeball it nicely, maybe lick it, say something nice to it, put it inside you’ and boom. Done.

The sexual experiences of men have been stripped of nuance leaving them as, seemingly, sexually simplistic. Men are the Windows 95 to women’s Apple Mac iOS: simple, not as sexy, but much more functional. Play minesweeper, type your word document and log off.

However, a candid conversation with a very self-aware male friend about the nature of masturbation had me thinking; do we over simplify men’s approach to sex? Initially the conversation begun with simple questions, like ‘what is it that men get from masturbation’?

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Increasingly, delving into notions of male pleasure and masturbation has made me wonder if simplicity is the case. Conversations have had me engaging with psychological notions of shame, sexual prowess, the need to show virility and a need for increased pleasure–the pursuit of something more and something deeper. There were ideas of a sexual hunger for something they could not conceptualise and desires to engage in the mental part of sex without the pressure of pleasing a partner.

Men whom I spoke to had far more intricate and complicated ideas that tied into the actual act of slapping the sausage. There were some who linked it to their sexual identity and how the actual act allowed them to either build (or in some cases dismantle) notions surrounding this. How masturbating could make you a ‘certain sort of man’ or not, how what you thought of, what you fantsised about and what you actually did actually fed into much more than simply ‘getting off’.

Basically, men are more sexually complicated than they have been given credit for.

These conversations added a dimension that I had never thought off, that maybe there was more to men touching themselves because of blue balls. This birthed the question: with the ways we have sex and experience pleasure growing at an exponential rate is there a space to make the male sexual experience deeper rather than wider through masturbation?

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