Men v Women

In the most recent Men’s Health magazine, a reader wrote in to ask why men have a much higher proclivity to jack off than women have to masturbate. I had to smile; and wonder how old this dude is. Then I read the answer and it got my panties in a bit of a bunch; I had to digest it a little bit to understand that he was right, but he didn’t go far enough in his explanation. Maybe it was an editorial-space thing.

Their answer was: Nature and nurture. “From an evolutionary perspective, men are hardwired to want to orgasm because it’s necessary for reproduction,” says Kinsey Institute senior researcher, John Bancroft, M.D. “It isn’t the same for women; they don’t need to have orgasms in order to procreate.” [That’s the Nature part] The paragraph goes on to say it still has something to do with the old societal taboos associated with masturbation, particularly for women. [There’s the Nurture part] In a 2010 National Study of Sexual Health and Behavior, 56% of women admitted to having masturbated in the past year. Compared to the Kinsey study of 1953… Okay…blah, blah, blah.

The piece of their answer which was missing was men’s familiarity with our little selves. And by that I mean how often, on a daily basis, we handle mini-me. From the time we begin potty training, we’ve got our cocks in our hands. Between pissing and bathing we’ve handled it more times a day than… well, I don’t have anything to compare it to. When we become aware of how nice it feels to touch it when it gets hard the number of times a day triples – or maybe it quadruples or even quintuples; who knows? By the time we’re hitting puberty, it’s no stranger to us – we’re more than willing to shake hands with it – unless some traumatic event (religious or otherwise) makes us shun it – at the first indication of a boner, and as often as possible, with no feelings of guilt whatsoever.

Women, on the other hand, don’t have this external plaything that gets touched multiple times a day, every day. Their attitude wouldn’t necessarily be quite as “how do you do” as ours. And, as I’ve said before, it’s time we men encouraged the ladies to catch up (read the post). ‘Cause, perhaps, just perhaps, guys, if they caught on to the fun they might not begrudge us our solo one-eyed snake charming.