Adam Carolla - Daddy, Stop Talking! - And Other Things My Kids Want but Won't Be Getting

I’ll close out this letter with some thoughts on a very important part of life as a man: masturbation. The Jews say you become a man at thirteen. Well, I believe you’re a man the first time you find some porn and have at yourself. It’s something I call the bate-mitzvah.

I consider myself an expert on this topic. My best days are behind me, but I have so much to teach. Without a guiding hand, literally, you could get the hallowed act all wrong. So let me drop some wisdom about masturbation or, as I call it, jizzdom.

I was a late bloomer. Most boys discover themselves at thirteen. I didn’t start beating my meat until I was sixteen. I was at a friend’s house. I won’t mention him by name to limit the object of humiliation of this story to just me. He asked me if I had ever done that and I ashamedly admitted I hadn’t. Like the great mentors of history — John the Baptist to Jesus, Merlin to King Arthur or Mickey to Rocky — he opened me up to a whole new world. He pointed to his electric toothbrush and said, “See that? Fire it up and put it on the back of your weenus.” I said, “Huh?” He said, “It feels great. Just go sit on the toilet and do it.” (To clarify, it wasn’t the brush end. And he had a spare attachment. This wasn’t his actual toothbrush.) I did. And thus was simultaneously born my love of masturbation and my hatred of brushing my teeth.

After that first time, I thought, “I’m only good for one or two of these a month.” It was a process. Like crème brûlée, it was a once in a while treat. But very quickly, I figured out how to do this efficiently and, dare I say, artfully.

But before I get into the rules of the sacred rite — I call them Spunk Shui — let me express my wild envy of how plentiful porn is today. When I was a teen, there was none. I used to just lay in a field and wait for a cloud to take the shape of a boob. Now there’s so much Internet porn guys are spending the majority of the day in their refractory period. The question isn’t “Did you beat off today?” it’s “ How many times did you beat off today?” I think all the porn access nowadays is going to make you lose your hunger for the hunt. Your generation isn’t even going to bother to date because you can go beg the old lady for a hummer, or you could instead just look at thousands of videos of other chicks giving guys hummers. You’ll lose the eye of the tiger. This cannot be. Not for my son.

I was sickened the other day when I was perusing some porn with some busty nineteen-year-old, not a blemish on her, doing unspeakable acts with two dudes (and in high def and free ). I looked down at the bottom of said video and there were 623 likes and 128 dislikes. Dislikes? How can you dislike that? I want to find the guys who took the time and had the temerity to click “dislike” on the nineteen-year-old Swedish D cup being cornholed. Who are these animals that think, “I don’t know, I’m giving this a thumbs down.” What, there wasn’t enough semen? They didn’t get a bowling pin into the mix? When did this become not enough? I want to find these guys and just slap the crap out of them, film it and put it on the Internet and see how many likes it gets.

By the way, in that same session an ad popped up that said, “Tired of masturbating?” I thought, “Nope. Try me again in about one-hundred-fifty years.” It was one of those “Hook up with sluts in your neighborhood” ads. I say hit me with that ad when I’m in my refractory period and responding to a bunch of work e-mails. That’s when you might get me to try to connect with horny singles in my area. But you caught me at the wrong time. I will have no interest in sex in 10, 9, 8, 7… ahhh.

You kids don’t know how easy you have it. Because there was no Internet in my day, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue used to be jackable.

I know guys who used to beat off to the Adam and Eve or the Frederick’s of Hollywood catalogue. Not even porn, but a lingerie catalogue! My lowest point was when I went to a sporting-goods store and fell in love with the model on the raft box. This was a busty chick floating in a pool, holding a lemonade. To me, at age thirteen, not only was she hot, she was a celebrity. I assumed she must have lived in an inflatable mansion somewhere. It would actually make a great documentary to track that chick down. I could probably pull this off now. I have a successful career, she’s in her fifties, and it might be fun. But I digress. The point is there is no way the young ’uns of today are fantasizing about raft-box models.

Here is my “I walked three miles in the snow” story to you, Sonny. I watched my first porn at age sixteen. Ray’s brother had an 8mm stag film. We had to set up a projector and a screen. If you wanted to beat off back then, your parents couldn’t just go out grocery shopping, they had to go to Whole Foods… in Spain. They had to go on a cruise for you to have enough time to rub one out.

Ray brought the stag film, literally a black-and-white film, and a projector over to my grandparents’, who were in Europe, to set it up. They literally had to be on another continent for us to have enough time to arrange a porn-viewing session. But we couldn’t find a white wall to project it on. The best we could find was a white chest of drawers in my grandmother’s room, so we showed the movie on that. At one point, I pulled out the middle drawer and said, “Look, 3-D.” When the party wrapped up, the film got left behind in my possession, but not the projector. So the next day, I was literally holding the film up to the light and squinting. No jewelers’ loupe, just looking at eight millimeters of porn. That’s less than a third of an inch, approximately the width of a pencil. Sadly, John Holmes’s cock was still bigger than mine.

Yes, watching porn used to be a communal experience. It was so rare that we used to get together, have a party and watch porn. If you had roommates and you were the only guy in the apartment with a DVD player, or, in my day, a VHS player, you had to make sure to hook it up in the living room. Otherwise, your room would become the designated jack zone. It was a philanthropic gesture that not only was good karma, it also kept your roommates’ chi off your comforter.

You had to treat your porn like a commodity back in my day. It would get traded and passed around. You would show up at a buddy’s house with a shopping bag full of porn magazines and trade them like baseball cards. The aforementioned Dave of the Shave Dave party worked at a convenience store, so he would often pilfer porn (among other things). I’d go to his place and turn it into the floor of the New York Cock Exchange. There’d be heated negotiations. “One Gent for two Milkin’ and Poppin’ s? Are you nuts?” At one point, it got so tense that Dave’s roommate, who worked the third shift, came out and shouted, “Can you keep it down!”

And you’d have to hide your collection. It was a nice treat when you’d put it away for a while and forget about it, only to rediscover it a few months later. That’s a pleasure you’ll never know. One night, back when porno used to be on VHS tape, after a couple glasses of red wine, I stumbled across my stash and saw one that was named Head Cleaner . I got excited until I realized it was an actual head cleaner for a VCR. I still beat off.

And you’ll never know the awkwardness of visiting the porn section of the ma-and-pa video store. Now everything streams wirelessly onto all of your devices simultaneously. When I was a teen, there were little local video stores that had the porn section shoehorned into the corner. The entire place was nine hundred square feet, so they took a four-by-four corner and hung Western doors, beads or a shower curtain in the opening. It was like the world’s worst — or best — voting booth. If there was anyone else in the store, you’d have to pretend to read the back of the box for The Treasure of the Sierra Madre while you waited for them to walk out with their rental before you ducked into the porn section.