No, my right hand (and very rarely, my left) is no casual friend. It’s a lover that’s served me well over the decades, and I figure if the incessant typing (I’m a writer and editor by trade) doesn’t give me carpal tunnel syndrome one day, the masturbation will.

Although the exact age is lost in the shifting and treacherous sands of time (I am in my mid 40s now), it was somewhere around age 11 or 12, I think, that I had my first and only wet dream. It was a watershed moment for me—or a jism-shed moment, perhaps. I never looked back.

I’m not sure how I knew exactly what had happened and that masturbation could make it happen again—and better. It’s not that I was ignorant; my mom talked to me a couple times about puberty, sexual development and sex, and she’d even gotten me a book that helpfully described to boys what they were about to go through as the hormones ramped up.

But I’m pretty sure she never talked to me about masturbation specifically. It’s one thing to talk about what adults do to make babies, but there’s something personal about jacking off. Many of us feel strange admitting openly that we do it, even to our lovers. I think most parents are unlikely to do much more than toss off a “when you become sexually mature, you may find that touching yourself is fun” and even that is probably a rarer child-rearing statement than it should be.

Still, I knew that this sticky, slimy mess in my underwear meant something good and special.

Not that such a revelation stopped me from taking my sheets off my bed and putting them in the laundry. I didn’t want to crawl back in the next night to a sticky mess (hey, I didn’t know then the stuff dries) and I didn’t want my mom to find (not thinking about what might happen if she did laundry right away) any of my nocturnal emissions (God what a horrid clinical term that is).

So, knowing that I had experienced a very pleasant dream that had produced a slightly obnoxious mess, I set about doing what I could to repeat the experience in my waking hours. Like most men, it took me zero time to realize that stroking the penis would achieve that, and that erections were meant to be tamed by jerking the cock until it was limp again. Before that point, I had always assumed (going back to around fourth or fifth grade) that an erect penis meant I need to pee.

I know for a lot of people, shame is associated with the early (and sometimes even later) years of masturbation. They grow up with religious prohibitions or parents who hit them for touching themselves even in private or whatever. I feel bad for those people and what they went through; but you’re here, now, at EdenFantasys, so let’s put the past behind us and make sure we don’t do any of that to our own children and that our children don’t grow up to do such things to their own. There’s time enough for guilt in life over things that deserve it.

Fortunately, I didn’t grow up with any such hang-ups.

My mom was not ashamed to walk naked from the shower to her room without a robe, secure in the knowledge it would neither scar me, nor make me desire a tryst with her. She was Catholic, but not a church-goer, and she’d been a rabble rouser from a young age, including running away at age 15 or 16 from the farm she lived on to live for a while in New York City before her father located her and dragged her back to the kind of abuse I never had to face in my own childhood. She was a single mom (at the time; she and my dad got back together later in my life) and had boyfriends, and I overheard more than once a sexual encounter behind closed doors while making a late-night trip to the bathroom.

Also, my mom (God bless her) had a small bookcase in her bedroom with several fine erotica books like Emmanuelle, The Story of O and Fear of Flying. She also had a decent-sized stack of Playboy and Penthouse magazines. Whether she “just read the articles” or had some outside the hetero box inclinations at times, or wanted them around so that I could find them…well, who knows? What I do know is that I got a lot of my early education and stimulation thanks to sneaking into her room after I got home from school and before she got home from work.

The thing is that I’ve never felt ashamed of my masturbation. Ever. Every once in a while, when I do it several days in a row, and then have sex with my wife and come face to face with the cruel joke that is fickle middle-aged penis, I feel bad because I figure if my penis hadn’t been recently satisfied, his middle-aged ass would work harder when I’m fucking my wife.

But still, I’ve never been ashamed. I’ve hidden it, of course. Jacking off as quietly as possible under the sheets and blanket so that my college roommate wouldn’t know. Slipping a Penthouse or Hustler magazine into my backpack and spending some time in a restroom stall so that my roommate in college really wouldn’t have to know. Doing it when my wife isn’t around or when she’s asleep. Things like that. But it’s never been because I think there’s anything wrong with it; only that it’s a personal thing and other people generally don’t want to know when it’s occurring.

In the end, though, what I want to leave you with—as we near the end of the first part of my “masturbation monologues,” as it were—is that masturbation is a good thing.

There’s nothing pathetic about it. If you don’t have a person handy to play chess with, you play against the computer, right? Doesn’t make the game any less challenging or any less satisfying when you win.

I find, for example, that masturbation has probably made me a better lover in many respects. I know my penis well and how it responds. I’ve also reinforced a lot of good things in my mind through jacking off. Many’s the time I’ve timed myself to come during a hot scene of a woman having an orgasm or two gals kissing or when a couple has a simultaneous orgasm. In a sense, I’ve conditioned myself to get off on things that aren’t just about the guy in the story or pictorial or video getting off but rather about the mutual pleasure or the pleasuring of the woman.

I don’t think it’s any coincidence that simultaneous orgasms, or nearly simultaneous ones, are very common between my wife and I. Nor that I sometimes get hottest and most passionate when I’m making her hot. That’s the kind of stuff I focused on when I was masturbating and didn’t have any prospects for a sexual partner.

Also, masturbation is a great stress reliever. And, unlike with alcohol, no one ever crashed a car or got into a fight because they were under the influence of a recent orgasm.

Finally, it can be a great sexual aid when you’re in a relationship. Sure, now that I’m older I sometimes have to moderate things so that I don’t desensitize my cock too much, now that he’s gotten so fickle and random in his ability to stay hard for long periods. But when I was younger, taking the edge off with masturbation pretty often meant that I could stay hard for my woman a lot longer and give her more of what she wanted and needed.

It’s not a something any of us should be ashamed about. I don’t masturbate in front of my wife more than once in a blue moon, and neither does she with me. That works for some but it’s not our thing—at least not yet. But all the same, even though I jack off alone and my wife frigs herself alone, masturbation is a friend to both of us, and makes its presence known in our bedroom in subtle ways that are, for the most part, good things.