The Porn Conversations #19

I was fifteen years old, lying on the floor of a dilapidated trailer shower, when my body introduced itself to me for the first time.

We had no television. No internet. No one had told me anything about sex beyond the vague assurance that my father and mother had prayed for me, and that’s how I arrived. So when the water hit my penis and the pleasure built and built and then erupted in a wave I had no category for — the sticky white stuff, the almost-scream I managed to swallow — I lay there genuinely bewildered.

I had no idea what had happened. I just knew it felt good. And I knew deep inside that I should never mention it to anyone.

That shower became my best friend.

For the next forty years, every act of self-pleasure was followed by guilt.

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The church had a word for what I was doing. Two words, actually.

Self-abuse. That was the clinical-sounding one — Victorian-era language that lodged itself in evangelical culture and never left. The implication was built into the term itself: you were hurting yourself. Damaging something. Your body was the site of assault, and you were both perpetrator and victim.

The biblical word was onanism. Preachers invoked it with grave authority. It sounded ancient, damning, and specific. Then I actually read Genesis 38 for myself.

Onan’s brother Er died. Under levirate law — a Bronze Age inheritance custom — Onan was required to sleep with his dead brother’s wife Tamar and produce a son who would legally belong to Er’s lineage, protecting Tamar’s legal standing and keeping family property intact. Onan had sex with her but pulled out — coitus interruptus, withdrawal — specifically to avoid producing an heir for his brother. God killed him for refusing his legal and familial obligation. For cheating his widowed sister-in-law out of her legal protection.

The story has nothing to do with masturbation. No solo sex. No self-touch. It was a man dodging an inheritance obligation.

The word onanism entered medical and dictionary literature in 1758 through a Swiss physician named Samuel Tissot, who published a treatise claiming masturbation caused blindness, insanity, and physical wasting. He cited Onan. The medical establishment ran with it. The church cheered. Three centuries of shame, built on a deliberate misreading of a property dispute.

Many dictionaries still list onanism as a synonym for masturbation today.

The whole guilt machine — the cold showers, the accountability partners, the Covenant Eyes software, the men’s retreat confessions, the prayers of shameful repentance that lasted three days before the cycle began again — rested on a text about inheritance law that had been stripped of every drop of context and weaponized against an entire gender’s most natural impulse.

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Men got self-abuse and onanism. Women got something worse.

They got a diagnosis.

For centuries, an enormous range of women’s symptoms — anxiety, irritability, insomnia, erotic thoughts, emotional intensity — were categorized under a single term: hysteria. The word comes from the Greek hystera, meaning uterus. Female distress, by definition, originated in the womb.

The prescribed treatment was pelvic massage. Physicians brought women to orgasm as a medical procedure, documented it clinically, and billed for the service. The women kept returning. As their practices exploded, physicians found the work exhausting. Jean-Martin Charcot ran the famous Salpêtrière hospital in Paris — dramatic public demonstrations, hypnosis, women photographed mid-“hysterical crisis.” Freud studied under him. The institution was real, the documentation extensive, the images haunting.

I’ll confess: the doctor’s role in all of this — the physicians who administered relief at the patient’s own request, not the predators who exploited the arrangement — has always struck me as the most enviable position in medical history. Make of that what you will.

The history of who invented the vibrator to ease that clinical labor is contested among historians. What no historian disputes: for centuries, female orgasm was a procedure performed by a physician, billed as treatment for disease. Never a woman’s right to her own body. Never her pleasure to seek, explore, or name.

Men’s self-touch was a sin. Women’s pleasure was pathology. Two genders. Two completely different systems of suppression. Both were designed to ensure that no one owned their body.

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Here is what the research actually says, stripped of the theology and the Victorian panic.

Masturbation is the single most universally practiced sexual behavior across human cultures. Regular solo sex is linked to reduced stress, improved sleep, and prostate health benefits for men. A 2003 Australian study found men who ejaculated more frequently had significantly lower rates of prostate cancer. The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists lists solo pleasure among practices supporting pelvic floor health in women.

The shame has no medical basis. None.

And here is the detail that should make every evangelical refugee want to throw something: studies consistently show that women who masturbate report higher overall sexual satisfaction with partners than women who don’t. Self-knowledge translates directly. You cannot ask for what you don’t know you want. You cannot guide a partner toward what you’ve never found yourself.

The church told women their bodies were temples to be kept for their husbands. The research says women who know their own bodies bring that knowledge into their marriages. The purity framework actively undermined the very marriages it claimed to protect.

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Many evangelical women I know have almost no experience with solo pleasure. Some have none at all. Living in Barcelona has expanded my cultural frame considerably. Different theologies, different cultures, wildly different rules. Strikingly similar results. The suppression of female pleasure turns out to be less a Christian invention than a nearly universal human project. Different delivery systems. Same theft.

An Australian urologist named Helen O’Connell published the first comprehensive study of the clitoris in 1998 — the first. The organ whose sole purpose is female sexual pleasure had warranted exactly eleven published anatomical studies worldwide in the preceding fifty years. Eleven. Her medical school textbooks had given her entire chapters on penile anatomy. The clitoris got a footnote. When MRI studies followed in 2005, they found that 90% of the clitoris lies beneath the surface — a wishbone-shaped structure wrapping around the vaginal canal, containing 8,000 nerve endings, twice as many as the penis.

Women had been navigating their own bodies with a map that left out most of the territory.

O’Connell described her medical education this way: it was as if throughout her training, her experiences reinforced the idea that there were males, and then there was another subset of people who were not whole people in the way that males were — and therefore not deserving of their body parts having a full description.

Read that sentence again.

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In TPC #12 I raised a question I never fully answered: what would it mean to make solo sex a ceremony? To treat the experience with the same intentionality you’d bring to anything else you care about?

The answer I’ve been living: it means slowing down. It means candles if you want them. It means a toy chosen with care rather than purchased in shame. It means time — not the frantic three minutes of guilt-driven urgency I gave myself for decades. It means lying there afterward, in your own body, in your own skin, without the rush to clean up the evidence.

For those who’ve never explored this: start with curiosity. Your body isn’t withholding from you. It was never given permission to speak.

The Magic Wand Rechargeable is the New York Times Wirecutter’s 2026 top vibrator pick — the gold standard, powerful, versatile, the one that has been quietly changing women’s lives for decades. If budget matters, their best value pick is the Satisfyer Purple Pleasure, which uses air-pulse technology — suction and pressure rather than vibration — at around thirty dollars. Tens of thousands of reviews describe women discovering orgasm for the first time in their forties and fifties. That sentence alone is the entire indictment of purity culture condensed to a single data point.

I mention these the way I mentioned dental dams in #13 — the way a knowledgeable friend would, over coffee, without ceremony. Because you deserved this information decades ago and nobody gave it to you.

For men: the Arcwave Ion applies air-pulse technology to the frenulum — the ridge of tissue on the underside of the glans, among the most nerve-dense spots on the male body. The Tenga Flip is worth knowing. Both offer a genuinely different experience from the grip-and-friction approach most men default to, which over time can dull sensation and make partnered sex harder to enjoy.

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The fifteen-year-old on that trailer floor had no one to tell him what had just happened. No one to say: this is your body. This is yours. This is normal and healthy and you are allowed to know yourself.

He spent the next forty years in a cycle of pleasure and shame so ingrained he couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began.

What I know now: the shame was installed. It was never inherent. The guilt was a choice someone else made for me before I was old enough to make my own.

That fifteen-year-old on the shower floor deserved better than forty years of apology for something that needed none.

The shower was always his friend.

He just wasn’t allowed to know it yet.