willsnow8

[willsnow8]

Episode 1, in which I ejaculate for the first time

I was ever an anxious child; a bookworm devouring the works of Enid Blyton, whose characters' lives in contrast to my own seemed naively happy and full of exciting collective adventure. I had no brothers or sisters, and was unable to form friendships with potential co-adventurers due to my increasing self-consciousness, my ever-growing obsession with the fundamental fact of my own existence. 

As my age reached double figures, more and more time was spent in front of the bathroom mirror, trying to outstare the lightweight delusion of myself as a carefully-constructed character of consistency; to stare straight through that, to the corporeal stuff that such dreams are made on. I would tug my cheek muscles down, not to contort my face into a frown, but to reveal the bloodshot edges of my eyeballs, in order to accentuate their materiality, to shatter these windows of the soul into swivelling spheres of white cellular tissue. Standing thus, if I concentrated hard enough for long enough, I could attain a terrifying glimpse of myself as an alien soft machine. I could attain, for a split-second, a pure consciousness unpolluted by the fallacy of the continuous self. There was a masochistic frisson to such moments, comparable to the thrill sought by City executives after work, on their hands and knees, getting pissed on by a dominatrix dressed up as their secretary - in each instance, a strong sense of oneself is exposed as an insubstantial, wispy persona.

Aged about eleven, this masochistic pursuit, this debilitating obsession, also began to manifest itself through the occasional bout of bedtime angst, during which I would tearfully acknowledge the transient futility of all endeavour, including anything - any recollection from my past, any ambition for my future - hitherto granted some kind of significance. There I would lie in the dark quilted prison of a present destined to evaporate into memories that were intangible and therefore worthless.

Once, in the midst of such a bout, I was overcome by a force that felt separate to my self. Whether this force came from without or from within did not concern me at the time. Rather, my attitude was one of unquestioning acceptance and complete submission to its powerful effect. I - at least the consciousness thought of as I - remained inactive, as though it were but a numbskull pilot passively staring out at its vehicle being otherwise controlled. (It was actually quite exhilarating - like playing with a ouija board.) This foreign force jerked my body across the bed and threw me onto the bedroom floor. It then raised me to my feet, and carried me across the room towards the wall, against which my palms placed themselves firmly. 

It was then that my hips started to thrust, to move slowly back and forth. My head lowered, and the thrusting increased in speed and vigour. Still I was merely a marionette controlled by something separate; so I witnessed the rapid stiffening of my penis with a calm sense of detachment, as though I was idly viewing filmed footage of a slow worm rearing its head.

Before that night, the relationship between my penis and I had been cordial but cool; had been merely functional. Most of our interactions had entailed my nonchalant manual assistance with its urine-ventilation process. Admittedly there had on occasion been a rush of blood down there, causing it to increase in size and firmness, and to slowly twitch beneath my shorts. But these occasions felt no different to other biological phenomena such as the variable beat of my heart or the pre-meal yowling of my stomach.

This particular night in my bedroom, though, was different, was new. Along with the erection there developed a sensation that was emotional rather than physical. There grew a feeling, like sadness, like pain. This pain expanded so much that it merged with the force controlling me; in fact, the strong, separate force was smothered whole by the pain, and became a part of me. In full command of my body once more, I returned to the bed, lay down, and took matters into my own hand.

And so, thus, for the first time ever, I was masturbating. Clumsily grasping my erection, I wiggled my wrist in an awkward motion I hoped would prove effective. After a few clammy minutes, something in my testicles palpably stirred: something which I then felt surging up the urethra. I relaxed my grip and sat up anxiously,  just in time to witness, weeping through the japseye, a dribble of viscose liquid the colour of clotted cream. I was still erect, so my debut discharge remained, balanced atop my near-vertical penis, fenced in by my foreskin. Elated and curious, I dabbed a finger in the semen. I sniffed its sweaty, fishy odour. But I decided not to taste it.

Confident my parents were both long asleep, I tip-toed along the landing to the bathroom and cleaned myself up. Discarding sticky loo-roll into the toilet, I caught my shadowy reflection in the mirror, and turned to face myself. ‘I’m you,’ I murmured. At that moment, I experienced a vague and irrational sense of unity, a coming-together of body and soul. Odd how this unity should be triggered by the emergence of semen. Odd how, in relation to my immature existentialism, the wank was, as the saying goes, 'a curve ball’: tangential, yes, but, even at the time, I understood it was related. Although, it would have been much easier to file these things away in wholly-separate brain-segments; I mean, it would have been much easier to bury the memory of my first wank deep inside a lowly neural network more suited for such primitive smut, far beneath the high-minded intensity of my mirror-stareouts.

But I didn’t do that. Instead I returned to bed, slept, and awoke in the dawning of an entirely new era, in which an entirely new force -  Eros, if you like - was granted uninhibited access to all thought and action. Free rein was given to sexual drive, which, on a regular (albeit erratic) basis, would clutch me in its grip, and squeeze out every single drop of pent-up angst, leaving me shrivelled-up and emptied of all pretension to cower before The Big Questions.  

A new era, in which my life was now a constant striving for privacy in which to masturbate. 

In this new era, the day would begin with self-abuse, would end with self-abuse, and, in between, would I seize every opportunity for more self-abuse. School-breaks were spent in a locked toilet cubicle, knelt over the bowl, tugging furiously, my eyes tight shut, my thoughts flitting between classmate Jenny Lee’s breasts and memories of mild sex scenes from rented Hollywood videos. And now, when I locked myself in the bathroom at home, it was not to outstare my reflection so as to challenge my philosophical outlook, but was to lie upon the laminate floor and ejaculate into a wet-wipe.

I wanked whenever I could, wherever I could: Beside a cycle-path at dusk, hidden by a clump of trees. Sat alone in a bus-shelter on a Saturday afternoon, managing to orgasm just by massaging the bell-end through my coat-pocket. In a River Island fitting room. At the back of a cinema during an otherwise-deserted matinee screening of Pret a Porter.

Such were my levels of enthusiasm during that first fertile Spring, that my over-handled penis soon turned red-raw, necessitating a period of abstinence. This enforced prohibition happened to coincide with the start of a package holiday to Zakinthos with my parents. The first two days of this holiday were for me dominated by an overwhelming discomfort, as the penile sores gradually scabbed into a brittle, brown crust; days spent in their entirety away from the hot sun, in my air-conditioned bedroom, moaning, face down atop a small pile of pillows, whilst, way below the balcony, beside the hotel pool, Mum and Dad soothed their parental anxieties with sun-cream, ouzo, and occasional reference to 'adolescent hormones’. Mercifully, on the third day, I awoke in relative comfort, and joined my parents on the hotel sun-loungers. And, even more mercifully, soon it transpired that frequent swimming was the ideal balm for my worrying affliction: the chlorinated water softened the scabs into an off-white spongy gunk that eventually just washed away, never to be seen again. 

Too riddled with anxiety to consult a friend, let alone a medical professional, I self-diagnosed the entire case of scabs as a rite of passage for my penis, akin to the miraculous metamorphoses that occur in the natural world, such as a caterpillar’s transformation into a resplendent butterfly. I was now in possession of a sleek, robust weapon, primed for all the strenuous activity I demanded of it.

[willsnow8]

Episode 2, in which I kiss a girl for the first time

My fledgeling sexual encounters were with nobody but I. (Presumably that's the case for almost every adolescent. Presumably even our ape ancestors, before they felt the invisible pull from other ape ancestors, would have first become adept at the manual pull upon their own erogenous bits.) And for a long while such selfish stimulation was enjoyable enough to stave off any sense of lack; I yearned for nothing more substantial or complex than tossing myself off. Certainly then had I no desire for girls to come between my erection and I! This was not due to disinterest in heterosexual intercourse. (Far from it: the fornication fantasy dominated the imagination as I reached each regular climax.) But fantasies were all they were - fantasies that remained internalised, stimulating no interaction with the opposite sex. 

My attitude towards girls was still that of an 8-year-old boy intimidated by these prevalent female wonders due to their otherness, what with their general preference for clandestine incantation over squabbling one-upmanship. They were really more like adults, albeit much smaller and obsessed with hair-braiding. Apart from one unusually-confident and quiffed boy whose name I now forget, my male classmates and I co-existed immiscibly with girls - cheek-by-jowl yet somehow also separate - their giggling chatter at once compelling but indecipherable.

Gradually, though, as we progressed through High School, these fluid dynamics were disturbed, and inter-gender mingling started to occur. The earliest occurrences of this effected me greatly by challenging my perception of what children could or should do; in fact, they challenged my very status as a child. 

The first such occurrence was heralded in Maths one morning by the Chinese-whispered announcement that Jenny Lee and Gary Carr were going to 'get off' with each other on the school-field during break. Stunned and unable to concentrate on the sums we’d all been set, instead I spent the rest of that lesson glancing across the classroom either to Jenny or to Gary, both of whom had a newfound air of celebrity, like fully-fledged soap-stars sat amongst us lowly children. Gary in particular, though unchanged in appearance, now possessed an inner power betrayed by a flickering smirk. A smirk that made a fool of me. That was how I felt: fooled, deceived. Granted, we were not best friends - rather mere acquaintances - but he had been 'one of us'. He’d been like me, or so I thought. Yet it turned out that, all along, he'd been cultivating secretly the chutzpah to commit the preternatural act of plaiting tongues with Jenny Lee. Never before - never - had I experienced such envy.

At last, when the lesson ended, our entire class made its way as one along the narrow corridor towards the nearest exit. Drunk on collective consciousness, we stifled grins like circus-psychics teasing one another by refusing to acknowledge aloud the elephantine force which propelled us to the field. A small crowd (how did they know?) awaited our arrival with palpable anticipation. This we joined and formed a loose ring that attracted towards it more ambling clumps of pupils exiting behind us. 

For a few uneasy minutes this human circle shape-shifted around two gravitational centres; Jenny Lee’s female friends huddled closely to her, cooing compliments about her complexion; whilst our male group (including an unusually reserved Gary) continued to ignore the real reason we were there by reverting to our default tone of insecure piss-take punctuated by arm-punching. The crowd expanded and grew restless. Some of the older, more disinterested boys at the fringes began to pierce our group’s omertà with outspoken bawdy goads that stoked the prevailing impatience into a gathering hum of discontent. Eventually, a silver-backed sixth-year called Oggy grabbed hold of Gary’s bomber-jacket and thrust him towards the supposed object of his affections. 

A thrown, careering Gary caused the huddled girls to scatter, leaving him and Jenny Lee alone at last inside the circle. It was at this moment of sudden union that something happened to Jenny, to overtake her. Whether this was an all-encompassing Big Bang rapidly swelling from within, or the first outward appearance of a long-held conviction, I do not know for certain, but it appeared to be the latter - a flowering of feeling the buds of which she’d tended for a while. Calm and in control, she threaded her fingers through Gary's so that their hands clasped together like spring-clamp combs. Then she lifted up their long joined arms and twirled half around, confidently nestling her arse into his groin and pulling him close. In his embrace she swayed a little, causing them both to rock stiffly side-to-side for a second, Jenny’s half-closed eyes staring at the empty air in front of her, Gary peering down as though carefully counting the cowslips, his face racked with self-conscious seriousness as he awaited further manipulation. 

Entwined around each other, Jenny led Gary on a slow and clumsy four-legged walk to the sparser end of the circle furthest from the school. Here they stopped. She raised their threaded hands and twirled back to face him, rubbing her hair against his chest before pointedly meeting his gaze. Mobilised by a cue he finally recognised, Gary lurched forward abruptly and clamped his open mouth around hers. They French-kissed vigorously, with amateur-dramatical desire. There was neither subtlety nor tenderness in their competing attempts to swallow one another. The moment had the dispassionate industry of a mid-shift bed-bath. The gathered audience witnessed this brief encounter in complete silence. Only when it ended did someone half-heartedly jeer so as to ease the awkward transition back to normality. 

Released from the clutches of Jenny Lee, Gary returned to our group wearing an ill-fitting mask of nonchalance. Being sure to avoid eye-contact, I searched his face for signs of romantic feeling, but saw only braggadocio. A couple of the other lads asked him strangulated questions in an attempt at worldly experience that fooled no-one and to which Gary responded but with deep-throated chuckles; a baritone amongst castrati. He was distinct from the rest of us now; we all knew it. Having graduated from our childish world of Top Trumps, sweets and wheelies, he occupied now the time zone that we all wished to reside in but to which we daren’t yet venture. 

Never again did I witness such a public display of affection in broad daylight. But there did soon follow similar (albeit more private) encounters amongst my peer-group. Legendary was Kim Lazenby’s birthday party to which my pals and I were invited: a long, unchaperoned evening eating Pringles in front of Friends, culminating in a game of ’spin the bottle’, during which I had my first ever proper kiss, with Kim’s slightly-older cousin called Sarah. My own substandard contribution to this kiss was to close my eyes and repetitively gape my mouth open and shut like an oversized goldfish, in the hope that it looked and felt roughly as it should. I did not enjoy it at the time, and was in fact thoroughly relieved when it was over; nevertheless for many years afterwards did I think of it when masturbating. 

As I occasionally found myself the object of adolescent fumbling (whether determined by the settled position of a spun bottle or by the undammable determination of a hormonal teenage girl) my ‘wank bank’ of titillating memories from which to draw began to accumulate slowly. But it did not occur to me to progress beyond mild foreplay. The snogs preluded a climax that was a solo refrain rather than a duet. This was due in part to my stereotypically British reserve - just as I was reluctant to chat to a stranger on a bus, was I also reluctant to start fingering a girl I was kissing - for one shouldn’t presume that a word spoken or a digit inserted will be welcomed by the open ears or legs of its recipient. Associated with this reserve was my low self-esteem, because, surely, an acne-ridden gibbon with a smelly palate brace should be grateful for a kiss and should certainly not strive for anything more. My frigidity was also due in part to the prudishness that lingered from my Church-going days, when the 'desires of the flesh' were preached about with such pious disdain. 

Plus there was the Peter Pan factor, my unshakable attachment to childhood. Surely sexual intercourse with another was something only adults did, whereas I was still determinedly but a boy, a status which ejaculation did not invalidate by itself. And, always, one of my defining characteristics as a boy was that I never ever rushed towards the bustling fun of the playground, but instead would I hesitate at the unlocked gate, overwhelmed by the sight of such communal enjoyment, before heading back, alone, to my bedroom, to make perfunctory use of my toys.

[willsnow8]

Episode 3, in which I gradually discover pornography

Only rarely nowadays do I spy a row of porn magazines upon a newsagent's top-shelf. When I do so, the line of women’s faces pouting over the greyed-out polythene evokes the innocuous nostalgia of a pre-War saucy postcard. For they have become relics of a rapidly-vanishing age in which men were satisfied enough by these mere static photographs of lone naked females. 

Growing up in that bygone age of print, there were a few occasions as a child when I encountered paper-based pornography. For instance: one balmy Sunday evening by a news-hut near the Gare Du Nord (at the tail-end of an excruciatingly dull weekend in Paris with my parents) when I stared with perplexity at a magazine-rack filled with censored cover-photos of conjoined naked adults seemingly in agony. Or the morning I found a Daily Sport on a local park-bench, then smuggled it home to spend the rest of the day alone in my bedroom, poring over the pictures, stories, and thinly-veiled adverts for masseuses (that even a nine-year-old could see through), as though granted a precious glimpse into a hitherto-unknown world of unfettered working-class promiscuity. 

And then there was the time, aged ten, when I joined a clique of classmates walking home from school via Paul Collingfield’s house, to look at a copy of Men Only that Paul had found in his Dad's wardrobe. For a few silent minutes we clustered around Paul in his bedroom as he slowly turned the pages, and I carefully studied the photographs of thin, tanned women as they each in turn undressed and splayed themselves so as to best display their vaginas - vaginas which resembled strange pink anemones and which were deeply affecting in their alienness.  

At the time I never considered how remarkably new this experience was in the context of human history. It never struck me that, of all the thousands of generations that have lived until now, only the last two or three could, feasibly (and only the last one had, probably), have seen a photographic reproduction of a vagina, and thereby have been affected as I was that afternoon in Paul Collingfield’s bedroom. 

Much more recently, I’ve recognised the essential self-deception at the heart of pornography. The visually-prompted urges that have evolved over millions of years through in-the-flesh experience can now be conjured up willy-nilly by the sight of paper-thin representations that possess zero potential for genetic procreation.

This is one possible explanation for the post-ejaculatory malaise I started to experience increasingly after I acquired a porn mag of my very own. It was then that I ceased to rely on my imagination and memory for erotic stimulation; instead my eyes remained open to stare at my crumpled copy of Mayfair. Yes, I’d say this theory has the ring of truth to it: Post-ejaculatory malaise as an emotional consequence of the deep-seated expose of a trick played by the brain upon the balls. Post-ejaculatory malaise as the inevitable rejection felt following the denial of full consummation that had seemed inevitable in the sight of such intimate revelation. Post-ejaculatory malaise as a lack: a lack of something longed-for, then presumed, but, then, ultimately, not really received. In relation to this theory, of pornography as an agent of ennui through the virtualisation of sexuality, my porn mag period was noteworthy as the start of the virtualisation process. But it proved to be a period defined more by its brevity than its importance. Because the age of print was already on the wane, its rapid decline determined by the coming of another age…

[willsnow8]

Episode 4 - The Digital Revolution

Ever lying in wait to pounce and smother me whole with unbearable truth is the singular fact of Universal existence and my infinitesimal place within it, rendering insignificant any ideal ever dreamt up by humanity, such as wisdom, honour, or compassion, and validating only the transient hormonal bursts attained through certain material comforts. No statement made can add to this singular fact. We can only describe parts of the Universe, either by labelling or by comparison. It is reassuring, for example, to compare something large and complex like a galaxy with something smaller and simpler like a clock or computer. Such a comparison can conjure up the illusion of understanding, but is in fact just metaphor, is in fact the inverse-mapping of local familiarity onto the chaos beyond.

It feels almost too obvious to say - that the stories humans tell each other, the ways in which we explain existence to ourselves, are filled with the particular costumes and props that surround us every day. So the Jesus of Renaissance paintings is an Italianate man in red silken robes. So visions of angels become superseded by accounts of UFOs, correlating not only with the harp’s demise but also with the rapid modernisation of aircraft and homeware design. So, now, sitting here in front of this computer screen, manipulating the flow of electrons in order to create different patterns on an LCD screen, the entire Universe too becomes a digital projection determined by an unseen complication of electronic impulses.

But the comparison of life to a computer is bound to be unsatisfactory, for virtual reality is always a sub-reality that cannot encompass existence in its entirety. For instance, our emotional response to a digital experience is not itself digital but occurs outside, in non-virtual reality. Therefore this comparison - this virtualisation - reduces life to something lacking most sensuality and all emotion. This is the digital age in which we live.