If it’s still May (which it is), then you’ve still got a few days left to celebrate the end of Masturbation Month in style. Do it for your health! Do it for your sanity! Do it with a toy! Do it with a friend! Masturbation is the next best thing to … NOTHING. No, really, there is nothing better you can do for your health and emotional relief than rubbing one out.
Did you know that the more you do it the more you want to do it? Because that’s true. Did you know that the less you do it the less you feel like doing it? That’s also true. Did you know that the more uncomfortable, embarrassed, or disgusted you are about doing it, the more ignorance-based social constructs have harmed you? That is tragically true. You can measure the degree to which shaming has inhibited someone’s sex drive by exploring their attitudes towards self-pleasure. The more negativity they express, the more uptight they are about it, the more likely they are to have dysfunctional sex lives.
Masturbation is a universally programmed urge every healthy human brain experiences from puberty until you just can’t. Considering its universality and the myriad health benefits of orgasms, all the science on it suggests that masturbation really exists to promote self-healing and health. The research abundantly documents orgasm’s role in revitalizing organs, maintaining healthy blood flow, increasing your immunity to diseases, and prolonging human life. Every time you have a blissful orgasm, all of those mechanisms (blood circulation, immunity, stress-relief, inter alia) kick into place. There is no other single act more beneficial to the human body than climax by choice. Choosing to masturbate is a door to wellness.
Inspired yet? If not, I thought I’d share some light-hearted facts about that ever-fascinating part of human body, the penis. Get out the lube and let’s do this thing.
Five Fun Penis Facts
1. The human penis literally separates man from ape. Man is the only primate who doesn’t have a bone in his penis (the baculum or erectile bone). Another way that man-dick trumps ape-dick: at a bold average size of 5-5 1/2″, humans possess the largest organ in the primate family. Take that, King “Teeny Weenie” Kong.
2. That intrepid rod is really a boomerang. A 2002 Stanford University sex study looked very closely — as in under the skin — of heterosexual couples as they had vaginal intercourse. Lo and behold, the upward thrust of the erection outside the male body was matched by an erection of the penis root inside the male body at roughly the same angle, creating a boomerang shape. (Reminding us that a penis doesn’t just hang off a body like a rag but is actually only the half of the complete penis structure that sticks out of the human body.)
Hmmm … Does this mean that if you throw your penis it will come back to you?
3. Self-sucking blowjobbers are precious and few. It’s estimated that only one in 400 men can successfully manipulate his penis into his own eager mouth. By this, of course, I mean only 1 in 400 can do it without destroying vertebrae or ending up in an emergency room telling improbable tales about how you got injured to skeptical doctors choking back snickers. I had a client of advanced age who attempted self-suckage in his youth and lived to chronically limp and eternally regret his moment of fellatic excess. So maybe don’t get too experimental with your masturbation until you’ve mathematically assessed your penis-to-mouth ratio or completed a few years of yoga training.
4. Knowing how to correctly pluralize penis is a skill most pertinent to swingers and hedonists who need to describe their orgies accurately but it is still informative to all. It pleases me to inform you that the plural of penis is penises. Sounds like “penis-iz.” If you insist on being clinical about it, you may prefer the Latin plural, which is penes (like weenies, but with a p). The increasingly popular “penii” are hilarious but regrettably wrong.
5. You can’t keep a good penis down. Nor should you. The normal life-cycle of a health penis depends on getting intermittent erections every day and night. A virile penis gets hard about a dozen times per 24 hour period, whether or not the man is conscious that he is getting hard. The brain has this impulse locked down: in order to ensure that there’s healthy blood flow to the perineum, every cis-male body has a natural (involuntary) cycle of erections. Morning erections are perhaps the most noticeable manifestations because it is a tad startling to emerge from sleep already hard. Don’t worry about it — you’re actually getting hard all day long and, by the way, there’s nothing you can do about it except buy larger pants. Worry about that.
Or better still, take matters into your own hands and celebrate the end of Masturbation Month!
