Do it Yourself: Self-Discovery in the Digital Age
by Justin Veiga
I never did much as a teenager: no organized sports, no music lessons. The Boy Scouts and a few extra-curricular clubs kicked off my first resume, but, for the most part, I just hung out. There was one thing, though, that I did often, and I did well. I was a professional – seasoned by years of experience, experimentation and hours of relentless practice often late into the night. Yes, I spent countless days of my precious youth masturbating. And I wasn’t alone.
Well, I was physically alone. You get the idea. But it was something all guys my age did, and we were hooked. Hooked, not because we did it more than our peers and not because we knew any trade secrets, but because we had something the previous generations of middle and high-schoolers didn’t: the information superhighway.
The Web.
The Internet.
It had many names but, to us, only one purpose. For the first time in history, young men like myself had instant access to pornography in the comfort of their own bedrooms, though most of my early romps were conducted in my mother’s home office, among plastic organizers and motivational posters. But I don’t want to overemphasize the word “instant.”
The days of dial-up Internet proved just how desperate a teenage boy was to look at naked women. Remember the screech and hiss of the modem? Especially unpleasant when it’s 1 a.m., and you’re sitting in the dark praying nobody wakes up. Remember the incremental downloads? Like peep-show windows, they moved so slowly you had to imagine what was coming next.
There’s her forehead. Oh, cute face. Boobs! Shaved? Yep. Nice.
And onto the next image, usually before her feet materialized.
Prodigy, CompuServe and AOL were our earliest links to the outside world, but those early days were tough. Along with modem hiss and molasses downloads, the risk of getting caught, red-handed or not, was always present.
But a bare breast, or even a nipple, made it all worthwhile.
Previous generations must have really had it rough. “Married ... with Children” son Bud Bundy stashed Big ‘Uns magazines under his mattress, and the guys of “Happy Days” congregated at Richie Cunningham’s house to watch sunbathers on a 35 mm projector. I don’t even want to think about what teenagers from older generations had to work with. Drawings? Books? Their imaginations? We were lucky to grow up in the digital age.
It started out innocently enough. I was a middle-schooler wanting to see pictures of wrestling babes, the barely-dressed female “managers” who hung on the beefy arms of professional wrestlers. My favorite was Sunny, the buxom, girl-next-door blonde who gave me her autograph at WrestleMania XII. So I typed her name into AltaVista.
Jackpot. Pages of the bikini-clad vixen posing on the beach filled the screen. It can’t get any better than this, I thought.
With my parents gone and a clear view of the driveway, I continued my exploration. Next, I searched for Sable, the blonde “bad girl.” Her outfits were more revealing and barely covered her large, fake breasts. I clicked from page to page, mesmerized by the images like they were works of art. But then, like spotting a van Gogh at a yard sale, my eyes widened and my eyebrows arched. My clicking finger froze.
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Stop the bus. Do my eyes deceive me? She’s … naked. Holy shit, I’ve struck gold!
The months that followed were a blur.
I explored the famous peaks of Pamela Anderson. I mapped the topography of Tiffani-Amber Thiessen. I journeyed to Jenny McCarthy.
It wasn’t long before I discovered real porn, and it wasn’t hard – um, difficult. A simple search for “sex” or “xxx” yielded millions of results. Millions! Sure, I had seen sex scenes in R-rated movies and even found a box of vintage Playboys at my grandpa’s, but this was different. This was hardcore. At least that’s what they called it.
The funny thing, though, is that I knew nothing about masturbation. I pitched a tent for sure, but let’s just say nobody explained how to take it down. I must have missed that part of sex ed. Oh wait, it wasn’t part of sex ed. Or maybe it was. I don’t remember – we were too busy snickering.
My mother sat me down for “the talk” a year or two earlier, but it was a CliffsNotes version, and I wasn’t quite comfortable talking to my stepdad about penises. I could ask my friends, but that’d be weird, right? Luckily my new pal, the Internet, was watching out for me.
“A/S/L?” somebody would type in the chat room and everyone would respond with an age, sex and location. I frequented one teen chat room and talked with strangers about everything: music, extreme sports, parents, Pamela Anderson. I was a 14/M/SoCal. The room was usually chaotic, so to talk privately, you could PM (private message) somebody. Every guy tried to flirt and chat with the girls, but there were always too few females to go around, and most were uninterested.
Home alone one night, I PMd a seemingly cool 21/F/Florida.
“A/S/L?” she asked.
“18/F/SoCal,” I lied. Just for fun.
We chatted about summer weather and my trip to Orlando, Fla., a few years earlier, agreeing that Cape Canaveral was boring. I think she was in college. She said her boyfriend was in the room, bugging her to stop chatting so they could have sex.
Intrigued, I replied, “My boyfriend is here too, but we’ve never had sex … I’m not sure what to do.”
She suggested I give him a handjob, but I coyly replied I didn’t know how.
“LOL,” she typed, and proceeded to fill me in.
I rushed to the bathroom to test it out on myself. I don’t recall how long it took – only that I felt awkward, like a caveman smacking stones together to make fire.
Am I doing it right? How come nothing is happening?
And then it started to feel … good. I stood over the sink, trying not to look at myself in the mirror. When it finally happened, I was joyous.
“Did he like it?” she asked when I returned to the computer.
“Totally! Thanks,” I said. “But I have to tell you something. I’m really a 14-year-old boy.”
I logged off before she could reply.
Sex-crazed and hormone-fueled, the months leading up to my freshman year of high school were exhilarating. Blondes, brunettes, redheads, straight, lesbian, I didn’t discriminate. Solo action, couples, threesomes, moresomes. Who knew? I tried to keep an open mind with the fetishists, but most were too strange to understand the appeal. But apparently I’m a sucker for stockings. And uniforms.
The more I discovered online, the bolder and more impetuous I became. A few times I let my guard down and didn’t see the car pull into the driveway. The slam of the car door would get my attention, and I would duck under the window and escape to my room in record time.
But I was a smart kid. I knew which creaky stairs to avoid and how to pull up a safe Web site at a moment’s notice. While my peers were struggling in typing class, I was making community newsletters on Microsoft Publisher. But as computer savvy as I thought I was, I didn’t know about clearing my tracks.
I came home on a Saturday afternoon, two days before school started. My parents asked me to sit down in the living room. They sat on the couch and instructed me to sit in the chair directly in front of them. Either something seriously bad happened, or I was in some serious shit.
“Have you been doing inappropriate things on the Internet?” my mom asked.
I looked her in the eyes and said no.
There is no way she could know. Not a chance.
“Maybe we should give him one more opportunity,” my stepdad said.
“No.”
“OK then,” my mom said as she stood up from the couch. “Follow me.”
I trailed her into the office. My heart pounded like it was trying to run for the door, but I tried to maintain my composure. She went to the computer and opened Internet Explorer. I slipped my hands into my pockets as they began to shake.
What the hell is she doing? What could she possibly know about computers that I don’t?
She opened the browser history, the feature that tracks when and where you’ve been.
As if my mother opening “Free Sex Pics” or “Best XXX Babes” in front of me wasn’t punishment enough, I was grounded for a month. Not because of the porn, she said, but because I lied about it.
I cursed her under my breath for weeks. I didn’t think lying about it was such a big deal. It wasn’t until the end of my grounding that we were able to talk.
On an afternoon drive, we talked about the difference between Playboy and Hustler: artistic nudity versus smutty porn. She explained that behind each spread-eagle girl was probably a troubled past or a family that missed her. Most of it I already understood, but it was nice to know I didn’t have to turn to the Internet for all my questions.
I didn’t get my computer privileges back for a few months, and it was probably for the better. I learned to appreciate the traditional teenage pastimes, like masturbating in the shower, using mental images of the girls in my class. When I got my TV back, I had a new appreciation for it – watching late-night scrambled porn is more painstaking than dial-up Internet.
Is that a boob? Nah, just an elbow.
Whether looking up movie times or looking for up-skirt pictures of Britney Spears, I can’t imagine life without the Internet. But it’s time for me to pass the torch to the next generation of fledgling flesh-seekers. Technology will surely evolve, but I can rest easy knowing teenage boys of the world are staying abreast of it, one breast at a time.