May is National Masturbation Month, and we're celebrating with Feeling Yourself , a series exploring the finer points of self-pleasure. Although he isn't romantically or sexually attracted to cis men, B says his fascination to "strictly penises" began when he started watching porn in high school. To maintain anonymity, he asked to only be referred to as one of his initials. After messaging each other for about a week, they met up at the other man's empty apartment.

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How do I, um, bring this up?
At a certain point, they reached a part of the cave that was pitch-black. They never spoke of it again. Brandon self-identifies as straight. He had never masturbated in front of another man, let alone a group of other men, before in his life. Yet he says in retrospect, the weirdest thing about the incident was how not-weird it seemed at the time.
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The event is organized by New York Jacks, a group that hosts regular meetings for men to gather in relative public to do something nearly every man does in relative private. They take over Paddles on Tuesdays, and on Sundays host a meeting on the third floor of a building on West 38th Street. I first attended a New York Jacks meeting with a friend on a Tuesday a few weeks ago. What if we see someone we know? As in every fetish community, the fear of being outed as a participant in something deemed weird or pervy keeps many people, including bators, in the closet about their interests. All things considered, mutual masturbation is pretty tame — masturbation is something most people already do, albeit alone — but the popular notion of masturbation as somehow being failed sex, the purview of lonely internet trolls, leads many would-be avid mutual masturbators to keep their sexual cards close to their chests. Among men who have sex with men, mutual masturbation is often seen as sex-adjacent, rather than a sex act in its own right. Now we get together every few months — less regularly than a book club but more often than you see your best friend from college who lives in Washington Heights — hang out, and masturbate.
Masturbation is the sexual stimulation of one's own genitals for sexual arousal or other sexual pleasure, usually to the point of orgasm. Masturbation is frequent in both sexes and at any age. Various medical and psychological benefits have been attributed to a healthy attitude toward sexual activity in general and to masturbation in particular. No causal relationship is known between masturbation and any form of mental or physical disorder. Masturbation has been depicted in art since prehistoric times, and is both mentioned and discussed in very early writings.