Category: Opinions & Advice (Page 1 of 2)

[Inspired by, although not officially a part of, a prompt from Laurie Penny’s “write like a person” project on their Substack. I found this prompt too tantalising to resist…]

Hear me out on this one.

I would like, gentle readers, to cancel the following phrase:

“If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

I say this, obviously, as somebody who has been the recipient of said phrase a few times. I try to avoid saying such things to anyone – the same is true of things like “that’s tough” or “serves you right”. I’ve been against these phrases since primary school; I rarely got them, but every time I did, I was incredibly upset.

The reason I’m so strongly against “if you have to ask…” is that it genuinely makes no sense. I’ve heard it from people who have taken offence to something I’ve said, and that’s when it was usually deployed… the reason I asked, of course, is because I wanted to know what I said was offensive! If I need to apologise, I’d like to know why!

Example #1: “It’s a performance school and amateur dramatics club that [my sister] attends.”

She didn’t talk to me for hours afterwards and I got an “if you have to ask…” from her after a while. In the end, I had to relate all this to my mother, who also had no idea. As it turns out, my sister had professional aspirations to the stage and had a crush on her dance tutor. My use of the word “amateur” – true though that may have been – was what had upset her.

If she’d just told me that, I would have known.

Example #2: “You’re allowed to like the porn you like, but why do you like [specific subgenre of porn]? You don’t want to do that in actual sex. It’s kind of weird.”

Okay, fair. I shouldn’t have said “weird”. But I had felt secure enough in our relationship to ask my girlfriend this; it was, after all, the first time we had been watching porn together. I hadn’t been able to say much so far, because I’d been busily licking her out for the past half hour.

Secretly, I think, I was a little jealous. I knew that she had done [specific thing that happens in subgenre] with a former sexual partner. None of my other girlfriends have had any former sexual partners, but I was dealing with this quite well. Exploring the topic in porn I took as a suggestion there was something I couldn’t give her.

Anyway, after sulking at me for while, she deployed the “if you have to ask…”, which further threw me off. Ten minutes later she said, completely out of the blue, that she had no idea why she liked that porn; it wasn’t even something she wanted to do, and it just scratched a particular itch.

If she’d just told me that, I would have known.

Love shouldn’t be a game of Mao

I may be innocent, but I’m not genuinely an idiot. If I’ve upset someone and I want to apologise, then I’m going to need to know what I’ve said. If I’m asking, I want to be told. Why ask if you don’t want to know the answer?

Humans – scratch that; all animals, really – are curious creatures. We want to know things. The average adult human can ask around thirty questions a day (young children do so much more), only about half of which warranting an answer. Questions are a way one gets to understand the world, or the people that inhabit it. “Why?” is the eternal one. It’s one that needs an answer. Nobody really asks “why?” without expecting a response.

Yes, some of the things you are going to say may not be what people want to hear, but “what did I do wrong?” isn’t a rhetorical question. It’s one that deserves an answer.

In the card game Mao, you aren’t allowed to ask the rules. A huge amount of enjoying a game of Mao is trust. New players may be thrown by older players seemingly inventing rules as they go on. One has to trust that there will be a codified set somewhere. There is. It’s just part of the game.

Life shouldn’t be like that. I managed to upset the girlfriend I mentioned above once by asking her to marry me. It’s fairly evident that didn’t, of course, marry her, but at the time, I was somewhere between thrown and distressed by her response. I managed, after many tears, to ask her what I’d done wrong.

“If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

Then how am I going to learn?

One doesn’t simply finish school at 18 and have, by that point, learned everything. Every day is an opportunity to learn something more – I’m 41 in a couple of months’ time and I’m still expecting to not yet know some really interesting stuff. Many of the most engaging eighty-year-olds I know still don’t themselves.

Withholding information from people because you “just think they ought to know” is just cruel. If I ask you why, assume I am going to want to know. In fact, if I ask you why you may wish to assume I don’t know. I myself like to answer questions – I’m not keen, however, on guessing.

Let’s all be a little kinder, shall we, and recognise questions and answers as the way of sharing knowledge and information they are intended to be – and not, as many seem to assume, as veiled attacks?

Because, after all, if I have to ask, then yes, I do deserve to know.

“I still don’t understand why I have to take at least one female member of staff with me.”
“All the clients working with you are female.”
“Female-identified.”
“Fine, that. It’s a matter of customer protection. You know this.”
“I’m not dangerous because I’m a boy, you know?”
“A boy? You’re not a boy. You’re a man.”

Am I? I’ve never thought of myself as a man.

Sure, I’ve been called one by many people over time. I’m referred to as “the man” by members of the public who don’t know my name. My second girlfriend used to refer to me as a man despite the fact that I wasn’t particularly comfortable with it. I’m cisgender and male, so I’m fairly certain that various pieces of literature about me – medical records and so on – list me as a man. Back in my internet dating days, I was listed as “22-year-old man”.

And yet I still think of myself as a boy.

“I’m still a boy. You can refer to a ‘group of boys’ and they can all be adults. You can have a ‘boyfriend’ and he can be however old you want.”
“I guess…”
“And nobody seems to have a problem with the term girlfriend. Although it seems to be easier with girls. There’s a popular blogger with ‘girl’ in her name and she’s almost 40.”
“That’s different.”
“How?”

I’ve long had a problem with the term, and in particular the connotations of, the word “man”. There are plenty of neologisms which ascribe something to a man – something to be ridiculed (man pain, man flu, man look); something society sees as “female” being appropriated (man bun, man bag); a negative action (mansplain; manspread); be assertive to the point of being a dick (man up). Look at all of those and it probably goes some way towards explaining why I’m not comfortable with being a “man”?

And then there are those who whine about it. People who use the #NotAllMen hashtag non-ironically and protest about it being “not me.” Dude, we know it’s not you. That’s not what anyone’s saying. But, again, this creates a visibility issue. Men get accused of something and their automatic response is to bitch about it.

Incels, MRAs, PUAs and the like make media headlines and have paid-for ads appear on Pornhub. Things like Yewtree and the recent revelations about Russell Brand show the predatory side of men in power. Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are universally hateable men who should, by all rights, be in prison by now. Michael Moore wrote a book rightly entitled Stupid White Men.

Look at this from the point of view of an alien coming here for the first time: men do terrible things, they can’t handle criticism and they’re dangerous and to be avoided.

(And yes, I know that isn’t what I’m actually getting at. This is hyperbole, I know. But just imagine.)

“I don’t really know. I’ve seen older women refer to themselves as ‘girls’ and nobody has an issue with it. Why can’t I be a boy?”
“It just seems odd. Why wouldn’t you be a man?”
“Have you seen what ‘men’ are doing these days, or for the past few millennia?”
“But that’s not you.”
“Yes, I know. But you shouldn’t need to say that. That’s the issue. If I’m a boy it doesn’t carry any of the negative labels. Plus, I’d have to admit I’d grown up, and nobody wants to do that.”

She paused. There was a stillness in the room during which I realised I hadn’t made the most salient point.

“Gender doesn’t exist, anyway. It’s a social construct.”

And then we had a discussion about that.

It’s a question that’s been asked over and over and over again. For the curious reader running the gauntlet of op-ed pieces – medical popular science claiming that masturbation is healthy for young men (because girls don’t masturbate, obviously); strait-laced but very angry, ranty sex-negative activists linking all masturbation to porn and using that to plan an attack; bright and breezy articles about masturbation being all rainbows, sunshine and candy; the endless “ZOMG! LOL!” of the tabloids – one question always rears its head.

How much masturbation is too much?

It’s also not a question I’m too keen on asking. A more salient question – and one which isn’t so judgemental – would be “is there such a thing as too much masturbation?” As a young man who came to masturbation quite late (I was 18 when I started), it was a question I asked myself more than a few times… never coming to a clear conclusion. I could have thought more about it, but I usually got distracted and would, instead, go off for a stress-relieving wank.

The fact that it took me years before I admitted to masturbating also delayed the occasion that I got around to asking anyone else about it. JackinWorld, an American website all about it, gave a slightly nebulous attempt at an answer – something like “there is no such thing as too much masturbation, unless it interferes with your daily life and usual activities,” which meant very little to me as a student, but made a friend laugh for about half an hour when I read it to him.

“Usual activities?” he wheezed, turning around in his computer chair.

“I don’t know,” I shrugged, reclining on his bed. “I mean, how many times do you do it?”

“Twice a day, maybe? Except when people are staying with me… then I don’t do it at all.”

“Not at all?”

“Not always.”

As our conversation continued from there on, and continued onto MSN once I’d gotten home that night, we shared more. We both enjoyed masturbation; we both set time aside for it as well as doing it spontaneously; we both watched porn when we needed an aid (he was gay, so didn’t like any of my recommendations); we both masturbated even when talking to other people on MSN… which, of course, made me wonder. But not too much.

Something I didn’t tell him was that, for years, I was convinced I was masturbating too much. I was, initially, a victim of my own efforts to stop completely – and, when that didn’t work, to cut down. “I’ll jerk,” I’d tell myself, “but I won’t jerk off. I don’t need any orgasms.” My blossoming sex life was more of a continuing cycle of masturbating, having orgasms, feeling guilty, deleting all my porn… and starting again.

I also didn’t tell him that I didn’t start masturbating until after I’d had sex for the first time – well after – or that I used to deal with my erections by curling into the foetal position and waiting for them to subside. And, of course, I didn’t tell him anything about my continuous attempts to quit.

It wasn’t until university that I gave up trying to give up. I had a lot of free time and had, in a short space of time, been dumped by my girlfriend, forgotten by all those at school and realised that I wasn’t going to make any new friends where I was. I bought some telephony equipment, hacked into the internet from my room, and discovered a whole new world of porn, erotica, and sexual excitement.

And I haven’t looked back.

So if you were to ask me the question – is there such a thing as too much masturbation (and, if so, how much is too much?) – I doubt I’d ever reach a definitive answer. I can reminisce at length about my own experiences, attempts, discoveries and masturbation. I can tell you how much I masturbate now, or even how much I used to. With my memory, I can even think back to frank conversations about exactly how much wanking went on in my early 20s.

But I can’t give you an answer. Because there isn’t one. There’s one for me; there’s one for you. Like most things in life, the answer’s probably different for everyone. I’m not everyone, so I can’t answer that question.

But I can give you one piece of advice, based on my own history:

Relax.

If you think it’s too much, it probably isn’t.