Ashley Stinnett | How to stop masturbating

Just Monking Around | Embrace the clickbait, become the clickbate (Hey-o!)

By Ashley Stinnett 11/06/16 9:23pm

The Monk class is deep into the month of silence now. This is a time to eliminate absolutely all distractions in your life, digital and IRL. Vows have been taken with regard to food, sleeping habits and celibacy.

This includes masturbation. But, like me, you ponder: “How would anyone know that you masturbated?” Well, when your shoulders are no longer swallowing your neck and your gait is long and free, rest assured that everyone will be able to call you out on your bullshit.

Or else, the guilt will eat you alive when you sin. It’s a genius fail-safe — no matter what you do, it’ll be on your mind. Constantly aware. Damned if you do and damned if you don’t.

But your repressed sexual energies have to go somewhere, don’t they?

Since the beginning of the semester, we’ve had to write in a journal every 30 minutes of every waking hour. When you’re deprived of good food, good conversation and SABSing generally — when you can’t even make eye contact — you pour your procrastinative efforts elsewhere.

You masturbate with your journal. Not, like, as a replacement sex toy, but mentally. When there’s nothing else to gratify you, to validate you, all you can do is pour *~everything~* into the journal.

There are notable changes in my journal that reflect its transmutation into my *~everything~* : From one-sentence “I am doing homework” entries to pages-long refrains on how “We are all just desperate to feel something.” Someone slap me.

At least I admit that “Maybe I’m just a solipsistic fuck who wants to sound #deep in her journal that her professor will be reading.” At least I’m aware, right?

But I keep doing it. I’m well beyond the first step, denial, sure. But I’ve also never been so self-satisfied in my life.

A little bit of masturbation is good, but it can easily turn into too much. I finally understand why places like r/nofap exist — not necessarily because of some Christian, moralistic fundamentalism, but because masturbation can easily turn into procrasturbation — not only in the homework sense, but also in the deferring your entire life sense.

There is something important in learning to delay gratification. And instant gratification can sneak up on you in the most innocuous of ways.

Professor McDaniel explained this once as akin to working out during your month of silence. It’s a great tool to wake up in the morning and expend some energy — not to mention be healthy — but, especially during the month of silence, it is important to be mindful of when it becomes too much. When the workout becomes an obsession and a means to distract yourself.

The whole point of the month of silence is to eliminate distractions and expose yourself entirely to whatever it is you were trying to get away from. Is succumbing to my mental masturbation, just because it’s thoroughly dissolved my three-year-long writers block, justified? Absolutely not.

But the class has already established that we are going to f*ck up in many ways. The key is to be aware of it, and to adjust your behavior accordingly.

There are even sneakier ways of masturbating, though, like self-flagellation. We’re not actually flogging ourselves in this case, but sticking to the precepts a little too much, imposing restrictions when there aren’t any. The pain is pleasurable, the external validation of anyone watching is pleasurable and crucially, the internal validation of believing you’re more adherent than all the others is pleasurable too.

Eliminating self-pleasure is also masturbating, and you end up with the same fat head. You can’t escape it! It’s basic algebra: Subtract it from one side, and it’ll get added to the other somehow ...

Masturbation — in all of its different ways — is inevitable, but it doesn’t need to subsume everything. Be the masturbator, not the masturbated. You can control your masturbation, and you don’t need to be distracted by it. This is delaying gratification, and this is freeing yourself from distraction.

To free yourself from the distraction, you must acknowledge the distraction, rather than ignore it. Ignoring it is a greater effort than acknowledging it, and thus gives it power. Acknowledging the distraction eliminates the need to focus on expending that energy, and then you can face whatever it is you were trying to avoid.

So I’ll just live with my fat head and my engorged clitoris for now, and hold out for the best orgasm of my life when the month of silence ends on Nov. 21. Mark my words. You might even hear me all the way from the Quad.