I think jacking off is one of the most beautiful things you can do. Too often it gets intertwined in the popular imagination with pornography, and thus has the baggage of that fraught industry thrust upon it. But jacking off is an act. Jacking off (masturbating, touching oneself, rubbing one out, whacking it) for all its synonyms and permutations is, after all, self-pleasure. That should be the lead, the essence that cuts through the add-ons and aids and toys and tassels we put upon it, just as our own puritanical culture lacquers so many good and pure things into impotence. To pleasure oneself is to declare: Hey, I can do it myself. More than that, I should do it myself; I will do it.

Not that doing it with others isn’t great. Hey, I’m the first one to say it’s great. But self-pleasure recenters the self as the first font of pleasure. It undercuts the clutter that our cult of consumerism hoists upon the self in an attempt to intervene with things that you need in order to feel good and must purchase in order to have. It reasserts gravity: the return of all things to the base.

So heed not the moralists, the capitalists, the fanatics, the detractors; fear not your ever-present capacity to make yourself happy. Jacking off is one of the last free things left in a world being bought up in gulps and gobbles by special interests and glassy-eyed weirdos, where selfhood is the final commodity and its lifeblood, attention, is being hunted to extinction in the shrinking wilds of the end of time. Jacking off is inflation-resistant. Jacking off is necessary.

It’s as they say: in order to love, one must first love themselves.