became a thing, almost something I planned for, and something I knew would take at least half an hour (partly because I took notes afterwards), whereas previously it had always been improvised. And so my masturbation frequency went down from daily to two or three times a week. In a way, quality replaced quantity. It may not be a coincidence that I kept up a healthy lifestyle in general during this period. For example, I stopped eating sugar, which in a way is the porn of food as it creates a dopamine rush of instant satisfaction.
Dōjinshi are diverse
It was not until I started reading dōjinshi actively while masturbating that I realized how different they were, not only in terms of drawings and story, which of course range from very amateurish to very professional, or in terms of characters and themes, which are a matter of taste, but more in how believable the story was. The examples above, with stories from a past childhood, were believable to me, as in ‘that could have happened’, and that made those dōjinshi good. But more often, very young boy characters would greedily jump over the first cock that presented itself. That too worked for me, but it was different. If the boyhood stories enhanced a sexual curiosity that was there from the start in the typical pubescent boy that the characters were modelled on, these other stories pasted an overly virile sexuality onto characters that would not be sexual to start with (or at least not that sexual, or in that way). Maybe one of the thrills of creating your own dōjinshi is that you can mend reality in such unbelievable ways? This relates to ‘the thrill of customizing someone else’s characters as one likes’ (Nagayama, 2020: 79), that is, creating erotic ‘parodies’ of famous comics, which is a defining feature of dōjinshi culture, instead of inventing one’s own original characters. In any case, discovering the cultural diversity of my masturbation material made me want to discuss in more detail how my research participants think about different dōjinshi.
Desire by proxy
My desire did not only emanate from the content of the dōjinshi, but from the fact that other people too were excited by this often extreme content and masturbated to it. Safely separated in time and space, we were sharing a sexual moment and maybe coming on the same pages, to the same frames. I did not want to see these people (at least not while I was masturbating), but just knowing that we were, in a way, doing it together added something to my pleasure. This feeling was enhanced when I read a secondhand dōjinshi, which I assumed had been used for masturbation by its previous owner, and thus been ‘charged’, like a magic charm that would continue to bring happiness to new owners.
Conclusion
What I learned from this experiment was to attach greater meaning and value to the act of masturbation, and especially of doing it to two-dimensional material in the form of comics. By that I don’t mean that I had belittled it before, but in a way I think that we all
