The Goon Cavemen

Millennial masturbation before easy Internet porn access

The first time I even thought about masturbation was when I was in middle school and my mom bought me one of those “your body and you” type books about puberty. One chapter detailed that “some people like to touch their genitals in a way that makes them feel good.” I raised an eyebrow and thought, hm, okay. Whatever floats your boat, I guess. Suddenly all the racially diverse preteen kids on the cover of the book, with their generic unbranded primary color T-shirts, their smiles embellished with braces and rubber bands, the one obligatory kid in the wheelchair with glasses…looked irredeemably perverted.

A couple years passed. By fifteen or so, I figured out why people might want to touch themselves, and had done it myself. But I still thought it was creepy, weird, and something that was almost exclusively a “boy thing.” I genuinely believed that I was the only one of all the girls in my school to have done it before.

Things took a turn when I attended a summer camp with the geekiest premise imaginable: the camp was on a college campus, and all summer, the campers were to take college-level courses, presumably because it would look good on our college applications. Only kids who scored high on some kind of standardized test could attend, which more or less eliminated the cool kids. This sounds painfully boring, but you could choose your classes, so I chose the writing classes, and I was actually excited about it. Also, because the camp was full of poindexters, I could effortlessly mog everyone socially by showering, making eye contact and having a sub-130 IQ. The other kids at camp were so nerdy, in fact, that we had a campwide rule against “flagrant displays of friendship” because it might make friendless kids feel bad. Every camp dance had an alternative “quiet reading room” for kids who didn’t want to socialize.

I was the coolest and most ruffly girl at camp

So naturally, I was surprised when my roommate, Rachel, was a girl with a nose piercing and dyed black hair, who had an older boyfriend back home, and who proudly brandished her Barney-purple vibrator on the first day of camp and announced that she masturbated “constantly.”

My first instinct was to distance myself from Rachel. Everyone in our bunk thought she was weird and creepy. The feeling was mutual—when she thought I was asleep, she called her boyfriend and complained to him about me “eating too many chips.” But one day our dynamic changed. The entire bunk was sitting around one night watching a movie when Rachel once again made some masturbation joke. We all rolled our eyes and told her she was being weird, and then one other girl with frizzy hair and a hefty retainer piped up, “Is it that weird for Rachel to do that? I’ve definitely masturbated before.”

You could hear a pin drop. We all sat there, paralyzed, every one of us thinking the same thing: we all do it, don’t we? It was hard enough for me to imagine other girls masturbating, but now I was discovering that geeky girls masturbated, which seemed even more farfetched. Another girl volunteered, “This is really embarrassing but I’ve used the handle of a hairbrush.” One by one, every single girl in the bunk admitted to having masturbated before. One girl said, “This isn’t really masturbation but one time I was sitting on my grandparents’ summer house porch in just a big T shirt with no underwear and I think an ant might have crawled into my vagina. But also, I’ve masturbated before.”

One thing that was striking in hindsight was that none of us had masturbated to porn. It was 2005, so technically Internet porn was around, but it was hard to come by. Most of us didn’t have our own laptops; we had a “family computer,” usually located in the living room. And even then, Internet porn was illegal if you were under 18. Even if I had wanted to watch it, I was afraid I might go to jail. And besides, the desire just wasn’t there. A while ago I heard a rumor from my parents that a family friend’s son had “accidentally” stumbled upon hardcore porn while doing Internet research for a school project about the Oregon Trail and was “traumatized.” (It has since occurred to me that this was likely a clever cover, which managed to fool both his and my parents.)

Personally, I had a fairly convoluted way of coming across jackoff material. I used to use the website Quizilla to take various personality tests. I wanted to know what Degrassi character I was, whether I was a witch or fairy or vampire, and whether or not I was “hot” based only on my self-reported multiple choice selections. But one day everything changed when I saw a quiz titled, “How horny are you?”

I wasn’t horny at all. I was in my family’s kitchen with my brother and parents not far away. But I was curious, so I started answering the questions, most of which were variations on the quiz title, like “If you saw a hot person right now, how TURNED ON would you be??? A.) SoOoO turned on B.) kinda turned on C.) ew get away from me!!!!”

I answered every question as horn-ily as possible. My quiz “result” was the most filthy erotica story I had ever seen. I couldn’t exactly lug the family computer to my bedroom, so I simply tried to memorize the story. Later, I went to my room and wrote elements of it on small post-it notes that I kept under my pillow (at least until the terrifying day that I went to my bedroom to find my father cheerfully announcing he would be changing my bedsheets.)

I continued taking the Quizilla quizzes, including one that had a prank result (instead of an erotica story, my result was "EEEW U ARE A PERVERT!! *runs away from the pervert*”) When I finally got my own laptop, I would open Word documents, write erotica, and then delete it. Given that I am now a professional writer, you’d think I’d have parlayed this skill, but for some reason I’ve failed to break into the goon book business.

Thinking about my masturbation origin story got me wondering about other people my age and older. Today, I can open Twitter and immediately see an unsolicited open asshole (and this is coming from someone who has no interest in looking at such things on Twitter.) But Internet porn wasn’t always this easy to come by. Before it was easy to obtain Internet porn, how did young people jack off? Naturally, I asked my Twitter followers.