The New Puberty by Amanda Dunn

Author:Amanda Dunn [Dunn, Amanda]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780522870763
Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing
Published: 2017-01-15T07:00:00+00:00

III

Boys and Puberty

Chapter 10

What’s Happening to Me?

When I had my first wet dream at night—I was 11, I think—and was reaching for the light switch to see what the heck had just happened, I reminded myself not to panic if I saw blood everywhere when the light came on. I’d once seen a bull with blood on its cock in a paddock, and my cousin had sagely informed me at the time that it was sperm. I assumed that human sperm might look like blood too. So maybe I hadn’t read Where Did I Come From? as carefully as I should have.

Tom, 45

I remember being pretty uncomfortable about the way many of my friends were more manly and hairy than I was. I wanted to catch up, but things moved slowly, or it felt slowly anyway. I wanted to have hair on my face and have to shave, but my cheeks and chin were pretty bare for what seemed like a long time … it caused me quite a lot of anxiety.

Jason, 45

I AM ON THE phone to an old friend, asking him what he remembers about his own puberty. Was it difficult, easy, embarrassing? Did he have enough good information? He pauses and thinks for a while. ‘What I remember most’, he says drily, ‘was just how constant the erections were’. He says that he and his mate used to refer to an erection as the ‘inexplicable’—their code word for what prompted them to artfully arrange a textbook on their lap and stick a hand in their trouser pocket to frantically press down the wayward penis. There was usually no trigger for the erections—hence, ‘inexplicable’—which was the most mortifying thing of all. ‘You’d just be sitting there’, my friend says, ‘conjugating French verbs, when suddenly …’

Did he and his mate have a technique for dealing with the ‘inexplicable’? ‘Well, you might give it a good whack with a ruler’, he replied. To my uproarious laughter—I have a vision of a penis rearing up in response, like a cobra about to strike—he adds that there was a story going around his school at the time that nurses used to deal with spontaneous erections in male patients by slapping them down with a spoon.

What this meant, of course, was that my friend, and no doubt many other boys, spent a lot of their time masturbating as teenagers, dealing with a powerful physiological need as much as any erotic fantasy. The two are not necessarily present at the same time, though. My friend’s voice becomes serious when he says: ‘There was a lot of guilt and shame, obviously, tied up with it’.

There is it again: guilt and shame. How many of us managed to get through puberty without a surfeit of either of those two mind-altering substances? And how have we come to make them the collective response to a process so fundamental to human life and as natural as breathing?

One of the interesting aspects of researching puberty is how much more information there is about girls than boys.

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