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Caught Sticky-Handed: People Share Stories of Getting Busted Masturbating

Mom! Get out of my room!
Photo by Raymond Forbes LLC via Stocksy

There are only two rules of masturbation: don't use something that will give you an infection, and don't get caught. Though some of us may, from time to time, let a partner watch as we get ourselves off, there is something uniquely humiliating about being unexpectedly discovered rubbing one out.

Of course, there's nothing wrong with masturbating. It's fun, it's healthy, it's normal! But the joy of self-pleasure lies in its intimacy, and when that intimacy is interrupted, the happy ending is almost certainly replaced by emotional distress.

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Although the experience is most commonly associated with teenage boys, there's a good chance you may get caught choking the chicken at least once in your life. Locked doors and strategic timing aren't always enough to keep interruptions away. Broadly spoke with people about their personal tales of masturbation humiliation.

Read more: Why Girls Hump Pillows and Stuffed Animals

Martha*

Once, as a sophomore at Princeton, I was taking a "me" day, so I ordered food and spent most of the evening using my vibrator on and off. I lived in a single, so I wasn't particularly worried about noise or anything. But then I checked a site that was pretty popular around that time—"Princeton FML"—and noticed there was someone posting from my building. It read, "The girl next door won't stop masturbating with her Hitachi Magic Wand, and it keeps disturbing our smoking. She must have used it 6 times already. FML."

Now, I'm not using anything with near the juice of a Hitachi, but the freshman boys next door were kind of infamous for their smoking sessions, so I'm pretty sure they were talking about me. So I left an anonymous comment saying essentially, "I think this is me. Knock on my door, and I'll know to be quieter." However, there were a few people on the site who spent a lot of time trying to figure out who was being mentioned in any particular comment, and they were able to figure out it was me pretty easily. So the persistent "fact" that circulated about me for a little while was that I was a voracious Hitachi Magic Wand user.

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Emily

No matter how well I try and hide it, my mother always manages to find my vibrator when either she visits me or I visit her. So I just started leaving it out so we could have the "I'm going to act embarrassed and surprised despite the way this happens every time" in a way that I can at least control.

I finished, and then about a minute later my boyfriend said, 'You know I'm not asleep, right?'

Jerry

I'm 14, it's 4:15 in the afternoon after a school day, and I'm in my room with the door locked watching the porn I torrented because it's 2004. My mom raps on the door angrily. I shout, "Hold on!" She says, "What are you doing?" I say, "HOLD ON!" I come to the door in sweatpants and a fluffy robe on she had sewed me that same year before she knew what a bad boy I was. And she looks at me in the eyes and SNIFFS. I'm thinking, What in the fuck? Does my mom know what jerking off smells like? Am I getting in trouble for this? My shame is skyrocketing.

She goes, "It smells like marijuana in here." I had not smoked weed at this point in my life or even been around it, so that's definitely not what it smelled like; maybe it smelled like Jergens and teenage despair, but not marijuana. So she just kinda slunk away, and my plans were delayed by like 12 minutes as I collected myself.

Jess

When I was a little kid, I didn't know what I was doing, so I used to just masturbate all the time, everywhere. One time I was doing it on my grandma's armchair and my dad told me not to, right then and there. I think I was embarrassed; I mean, I still remember it! But it was probably a good lesson to have learned.

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Beth

Once I was masturbating in bed, just with my hands, because I couldn't fall asleep. My boyfriend was lying next to me and hadn't moved in a while, so I assumed he was asleep. We have a memory foam mattress, so I wasn't worried about noise or movement. I finished, and then about a minute later my boyfriend said, "You know I'm not asleep, right?"

Andrew

Back in the Stone Age, when there was such a thing as "family computers," my mother walked in on me masturbating to pornography I had downloaded into a secret folder from Kazaa. Terrified, she ran away immediately. About half an hour later, we had to sit and have a chat, where she chastised me for not locking the door and during which I had to briefly explain what her son was doing watching a video called MILF Hunter—and what MILF even meant in the first place.


*All names have been changed.