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The magnitude of guilt
I am David. Not my real name. I have been struggling with masturbation since I was ten. Not that kind of struggle! I know how to do it, and I'm good at it. This struggle comes from my family's deeply religious orthodox beliefs, my problem is that I can't understand why something that feels so good and natural can be so wrong.
Many years ago, my dad asked the rabbi he was close with whether he had discussed wet dreams with his son when he experienced puberty. He said, "Not yet." When he asked again a few years later, after his son had physically matured, he said, "No, it just never came up."
Giving a boy zero information about why his sheets are sometimes sticky is a recipe for confusion, shame, and guilt. How can it be right to keep truths about human biology a secret from young boys just because we feel uncomfortable?
My dad said that maintaining secrecy must lead boys to think that these challenges only affect a few people, but that wasn't true. The solution my dad gave me was to overcome the urges through willpower.
I have never told my father that I lack the willpower that he thinks I have since then. I masturbate in the shower every night and feel guilty afterward. I have searched the web for years looking for answers and I took heart from one Quora answer about masturbation in Yeshivas:
"In my yeshivah, they'd say if you don't wear flip-flops in the shower you might get pregnant."
Another person answered: "I remember it being hard to find a bathroom around 7 pm in my yeshiva dorm."
I wondered if this is true. I also wonder what percentage of boys spend the entire time thinking that they are the only ones. My mind drifted off to the many yeshivas in Jerusalem with their students sitting for hours diligently studying and reflecting. The yeshiva is a rare survivor in the twenty-first century and cannot easily be taken for granted. For all its shortcomings and insularity, the traditions, and beliefs it nurtures do give hope. They transmit a tradition, not only as an object of study but as a vital and life-giving for communities.
It was sometime after my bar mitzvah when I attended a question-and-answer session where a rabbi was asked how and when, if at all, a Jewish father should talk to his sons about wet dreams and masturbation.
Before he could even answer a person interrupted him: "There are children here!" The youngest boy in the room was two months shy of his bar mitzvah and I couldn't think of no one else who needed this information more urgently than a 12-year-old boy. Then, in rabbinical style, the rabbi said he didn't know and would probably ask his rabbi when his children grew older.
The typical answer I have received over the years has been something like this: "The fact that you are asking this question shows that you have a deep religious feeling. The beginning of teshuvah is a feeling that what I have done is wrong.
To do better you must look and see what it is that made you sin and try not to put yourself in the same situation again. For example, if you live alone maybe find a good male roommate."
Now that I am older, I have had more world experience, I found out that Catholics have the same taboos around masturbation and that Catholic boys live with the same guilt that we do. Hindu and Muslim boys also live in guilt, but when Muslim boys succumb to their needs it is seen as a lesser evil and they seek forgiveness.
So how do I manage? I hate feeling so damn guilty and fearful every time I do it. The way I always rationalise is that:
It isn't directly addressed in the Torah despite being such a "horrible sin"?
Why the heck would we be designed to do it so easily?
I am not married and therefore how am I wasting seed if there is no wife around to potentially impregnate?
Plus, our bodies regenerate sperm our whole life. It makes no sense that it would hold such value worthy of being equated to murder. Also, sperm does not contain souls, only DNA. My understanding is when a baby is formed from the womb, the soul is then planted by G-d.
I put my flip-flops on and got into the shower. The warm jet of water felt good on my back, I closed my eyes turned my head up, and washed my face. I massaged the shower gel across my shoulders and onto my chest. I washed my arse and cleaned out my hole using the gel. I lifted my legs and washed my thighs and my calves.
My dick grew harder as I massaged my body and I washed under my balls. I washed my shaft and was careful not to soap into my piss slit. My dick was upright, parallel to my stomach when I started to wank. I felt an incredible sensation building up and my body trembled, and I held onto the wall for a moment as ropes of cum splashed onto the shower glass. I was breathing faster, and I felt my heart beating in my ears. An incredible sensation.
But I then experienced "la petite mort" (the little death), that feeling of post-orgasmic guilt as my religious ideas swirled in my head reinforcing the feelings of guilt. I turned off the shower, dried myself off, wrapped the damp towel around me, and went to my room. I dropped the towel and stood looking at my body in the mirror for a second and wondered what would become of me. I used some tissue to dry off some remaining drops of cum on my dick before I put my undies on.