Rules of the Game

by Neil Strauss

  I pick it up and examine it. I’ve never actually studied one before. There’s a little minus sign in the indicator window.

  First thought: She’s not pregnant. What a relief.

  Second thought: She took the test without me?

  I walk out of the bathroom to find her lying on the floor in front of the TV where I left her. She’s watching the episode where Charlotte and Trey decide to take time apart.

  “Why didn’t you tell me it was negative?”

  She looks up at me and shrugs, “I didn’t want to bother you.”

  Then she turns back to the TV. I know how the episode ends. I know how all of them end. They’ll break up. Then they’ll get back together again. Then they’ll break up again. Some things just aren’t meant to be.

  RULE 10

  THE COMFORT ZONE IS ENEMY TERRITORY

  THE FIRST DAY

  “Your balls are going to be in your throat and you’ll be screaming in pain,” she says.

  “No,” I tell her. “I can do it.”

  “Sure you don’t want to wait a few more days?”

  “I’ll be fine. Now take off your pants.”

  Gina steps out of her pants and I lay her down on the couch. I want to make sure she’s as close to orgasm as possible to make this easy on myself.

  “No tricks, now,” I warn as I enter her. “If I say stop, you have to stop.”

  It’s different this way. I feel a sense of clarity I’ve never had during sex. My mind is alert and in the moment, instead of elaborately recording imagery to its fantasy database. I am detached from the friction and frisson, and as our grinding intensifies, my body begins to lighten and then dissolve.

  She comes in slow, deep waves. Immediately afterward, she flails from side to side, as if the physical sensation is too much to take and she needs to crawl out of her skin until it subsides.

  “I want to go surfing.” These are the first words she says when she comes back to the present. She has not wanted to surf in two years, ever since her best friend died in the water. She looks like she’s just seen the face of God.

  I’m afraid it’s the best sex she’s ever had with me.

  And it’s all because I’m doing the 30 Day Experiment.

  THE SECOND DAY

  Linda calls and says she’s in town. I haven’t talked to her in two months. There must be some psychic signal I’m sending into the universe that says, “It’s going to be really hard for me to have sex right now, so please come over and tempt me.”

  As soon as her lips touch mine, I’m hard. It is a different kind of hardness—urgent, independent, and definitely not going anywhere. She feels it and says, “I can always do that,” as if she’s responsible.

  She says she doesn’t want to have sex this afternoon, and that is fine. Just from the making out and rubbing, every nerve in my body is tensed and ready to explode. This gets more difficult each day.

  I excuse myself to go to the bathroom, splash cold water on my face, and then return and tell her about the 30 Day Experiment.

  That night, I talk to Kimberly on the phone. I’d messaged her on MySpace two weeks earlier. With her black bangs and large, innocent eyes, she reminded me of a Mark Ryden painting. She lives across the country in New York, but we’ve been talking nightly. She is easy to speak with, and the more I learn about her, the more I like her. Not only do we both collect 60’s garage-rock and secretly enjoy being pushed around in grocery carts, but she is one of the sweetest, most genuine people I’ve ever never-met. Recently, I’ve been waking up thinking about her and randomly checking my phone throughout the day in case I miss a text from her.

  I’d been wondering if she felt the same way about me. Tonight, I find out. After we hang up, she texts, “I’m rubbing my skin raw thinking about us. I hope you don’t mind me admitting that to you.”

  I tell her that I don’t mind and, six texts later, I know her favorite position, speed, and motion. While I’m having alphanumeric intercourse with Kimberly, Linda texts, “I want sex. Fuck your thirty days. Start it tomorrow.”

  Suddenly she’s interested.

  Then Kimberly texts, “My hips are moving so quick and high to meet my hand. I want to swallow you while I do it. Is that too much?”

  Then Linda texts, “Baby, I want to fuck. Just one hour of bliss.”

  This kind of thing never happens.

  Blood rushes to my pelvis. I feel like I’m going to pass out.

  THE THIRD DAY

  My friends think I’ve lost my mind. “Why put yourself through it?” they ask.

  “Why does a man climb a mountain or walk on hot coals or read Finnegans Wake?” I answer.

  I am doing it, first and foremost, to see if I can.

  Rivers Cuomo, the singer and guitarist in Weezer, first planted the idea in my head. He was explaining that he’d recently taken a vow of celibacy as part of a Buddhist meditation program. This meant abstaining from not just sex but also masturbation. As a result, he said, he’d never felt more energized, creative, or focused in his life.

  At the time, I interpreted it less as advice than as further confirmation of his peculiarities. But a few weeks later, Billy Corgan of the Smashing Pumpkins told me that he doesn’t let his band have sex or orgasm on the day of a concert, so they can release all that power onstage.

  Then, at dinner last week, I broached the topic, and a director at the table said that after he’d sworn off orgasms, he’d done the best work of his career.

  As one of my editors used to tell me, it takes three to make an argument. So these three people, all far more successful than I am—combined with lingering adolescent self-flagellation guilt—inspired the 30 Day Experiment: No ejaculation for a month.

  And today has been torture. Women I’m either sleeping with or want to sleep with have been calling nonstop. Then, worst of all, Kimberly decides to graduate from text sex to phone sex.

  While we’re talking about the Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, she starts breathing heavily into the phone.

  “What are you doing right now?” I ask.

  “I’m rubbing the outside of my panties.” Her voice alone—candied, coy, and playful—turns me on. From the moment she said “hi,” I was as hard as a crowbar—it doesn’t take much these days. Now the pressure is too much to bear.

  Rather than talking dirty to me, she just moans into the phone as she touches herself. This is actually hotter than ordinary phone sex because it seems more like we’re doing it instead of just discussing it.

  I bring myself dangerously close to the brink, then stop and take deep, calming breaths. I begin again, as she moans louder and sharper, breathes faster and shorter. I want her so badly. It feels as if there’s a cord of sexual energy shooting from my body all the way to her in New York. I’ve never experienced anything like this during phone sex, probably because in the past I was too busy working toward my own orgasm.

  After a few cycles of pleasure and denial, something else I’ve never experienced happens: my inner thighs and stomach—just above and below the crotch—begin tingling intensely. They feel simultaneously warm and cold, like they’re covered with those icy-hot creams people use for pain relief.

  “Did you come?” Kimberly asks after her orgasm subsides.

  “I can’t.”

  “What do you mean?” She sounds concerned.

  I hesitate for a moment, then decide to risk explaining the 30 Day Experiment. There is silence on her end. She probably thinks I’m a freak.

  “I want you to come,” she pleads. “It makes me feel inadequate, like I wasn’t good enough.”

  “You were so hot,” I tell her. “I’ve never been that turned on over the phone.”

  She hangs up, dejected. I’ve tampered with the natural order of things. Women are so conditioned to expect a guy to come that when he doesn’t, even if she has an orgasm, they tend to feel like the sex was incomplete.

  I haven’t met this girl yet and I’m already destroying her self-esteem.


  Two hours later, my thighs and stomach feel like cold needles stuck into hot skin.

  THE FOURTH DAY

  Twelve times twelve is 144.

  Eighteen times eighteen is 324.

  Twenty-three times twenty-three is 529.

  I can multiply any two numbers up to twenty-five together in an instant. I’ve become like a human calculator. It’s an unintended benefit of the 30 Day Experiment.

  Sex with Crystal isn’t easy. After a while, even doing times tables in my head is no longer enough to hold back the tides of pleasure. I make her stop when she’s on the brink of orgasm because I’m right there, too. She is not happy with this.

  “Don’t you enjoy orgasms?” she asks.

  “I love to orgasm. It’s like Nature’s own heroin. That’s why I want to see if I can kick it.”

  I now know how junkies feel. There is hardly a moment that goes by that you don’t think about the rush. Every cell in your body screams for it. And the longer you have to go without it, the more consuming the desire for it becomes, until it drowns every other thought.

  I suppose this is the other reason I’m doing the Experiment. I’ve been around some of the worst junkies in rock ’n’ roll, yet I’ve never been addicted to anything: not even coffee or cigarettes. I used to tell myself this was because I didn’t have an addictive personality.

  On further reflection, however, I realized that I was addicted to one thing. Whether with a woman or alone, I’d had at least one orgasm a day for as long as I could remember.

  To make matters worse, like most addicts, I’ve always been plagued by guilt about my habit. As a teenager, I used to think men were allotted only a few thousand ejaculations in a lifetime and I worried that I was using up my reserve too quickly. In college, every time I came, I thought it was somehow depleting my life force. And since then, whenever I masturbate, I feel not only dirty, but that it lessens my attractiveness and desirability when I interact with women over the course of the day.

  The 30 Day Experiment, then, was not an option. It was a necessity. I needed to find out if I had the strength and willpower to break this addiction—and dispel the guilt-generated superstitions I’d been nurturing since puberty.

  Of course, the Experiment would be much easier without all the sex, but by learning to enjoy the journey more than the destination, I’m becoming much better in bed. At least, I think I am.

  “You suck.” Crystal punches me playfully in the chest and dismounts. “I didn’t get to finish.”

  “Maybe you’re too orgasm dependent,” I tell her.

  Crystal is a six-foot-tall psychology student who used to pressure me to be her boyfriend. When I told her I didn’t feel as strongly about her, she stopped sleeping with me for her own emotional health.

  A month later, she changed her mind. “I decided you’re too good not to share,” she explained. The next week, I introduced her to Susanna and she had her first threesome. Since then, she’s been willing to try anything once.

  “I want to hear more about the orgasm thing and understand what you’re trying to achieve,” she says as I run to the refrigerator for water, enjoying yet another benefit of the 30 Day Experiment: no more rolling over and going to sleep. Sex now energizes rather than depletes.

  I explain the rationale behind the Experiment to Crystal. She considers it for a moment, then asks, “Can women do this?”

  THE FIFTH DAY

  Kimberly is slowly taking the place of masturbation in my life. Every day, I look more forward to our bedtime conversations. Today, she confesses her feelings for me, and I’m not even scared. “I want to know you inside and out,” she says. “I want to see a picture or a shirt or a toothbrush and know it’s yours. I really, really care about you and what happens to you and how you feel.”

  I tell her that I have to speak at a seminar in New York in six days and am extending the trip to spend more time with her. We imagine every detail of our first night together, until she comes screaming my name. It is a sound that strikes me more profoundly than the greatest symphony or the most musical bird or the noise Windows makes when loading.

  Afterward, I reach a new threshold of discomfort. The triangular area of flesh just above my dick feels tender and sore. And it is nearly impossible to take a shit, because when I squeeze my muscles, unbelievable bolts of pain shoot through the area above my crotch. When I look at the skin there, it seems swollen. But then again, I don’t look at it that often, so maybe it’s always like that.

  It is now glaringly obvious that I’m doing this wrong. Something supposedly beneficial shouldn’t hurt so much. In one of my favorite self-improvement books, Mastering Your Hidden Self, the author, Serge Kahili King, says that quitting a habit takes more than willpower. When you stop doing something, he explains, it leaves a subconscious void. And this void must be replaced by a new activity. This is why people who quit smoking cigarettes, for example, chew gum instead.

  But I can’t think of any type of gum—even Freshen Up—powerful enough to take away the urgency and pain I feel. The new habit would have to be something more physical, preferably an activity that alleviates the ache, like bathing my balls in cold sour cream.

  I drift off to sleep, praying for a wet dream to relieve my burden. I’ve never had one before, probably on account of my compulsive masturbation. I’m awakened, however, by the phone.

  “I want to do it with you.” It’s Crystal.

  “Now?” I ask, horrified perhaps for the first time in my life by the prospect of a booty call.

  “No, silly. I want to do the 30 Day Experiment.”

  I’m happy to have a female partner in restraint. I tell her about looking for a replacement habit and we decide on something constructive: exercise.

  So, for the next twenty-five days, whenever I’m aroused, I’m going to do push-ups instead of masturbating. And I will master my hidden self.

  THE SIXTH DAY

  I’m getting turned on by everyone and everything. The words “polymorphously perverse” come to mind for the first time since college.

  I spend twenty minutes scrolling through the numbers in my phone, thinking about women I’ve never even found attractive. I want to send them dirty texts and tell them to come over.

  I hit the floor and do thirty push-ups. The blood begins to circulate through my body instead of amassing in just one place.

  Later in the day, while I’m watching South Park on Comedy Central, an advertisement for Girls Gone Wild flashes across the screen. This is my first exposure to anything even resembling porn during the Experiment, and, in my weakened state, the montage of censored breasts and college girls making out seems like the greatest filmed entertainment our culture has ever produced.

  I press the back button on the TiVo, and watch the commercial again, pausing to admire a few choice Mardi Gras revelers. As my hand slips under my belt, I have an epiphany: When I touch myself but don’t ejaculate, I don’t feel guilty or unclean. This means that I never had masturbation guilt; it was ejaculation guilt the whole time. And this makes sense. The trope that every sperm is sacred is hammered into childrens’ heads, by everything from the Bible to Monty Python. Even in the second century, the philosopher Clement of Alexandria warned would-be auto-eroticists, “Because of its divine institution for the propagation of man, the seed is not to be vainly ejaculated, nor is it to be damaged, nor is it to be wasted.”

  So I’m not crazy: By wasting a load of sperm, I’m harming the future of my species. Or maybe I’m helping it. Depends on who you ask.

  Thirty push-ups.

  South Park is back on and I’m safe. The kids are on a road trip with Cartman’s mother. And Cartman is calling his mom a slut and a whore.

  I look at her, all crudely drawn circles and rectangles, and think that it would be awesome to sleep with her.

  My hand is down my pants. I think I’m losing it: I’m getting turned on by Cartman’s mom, or at least the demographic of desperate housewives that she represents.
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  Thirty push-ups. I’m going to be buff in no time.

  Then Kimberly calls. She is drunk. She says she misses me. I miss her, too, and we’ve never even met. We have phone sex until every nerve in my body is tense and ready to explode. I start imagining what it would be like to pull out of her and just spray all over like a tube of toothpaste hit by a hammer.

  I apologize for the simile. But I keep teasing my body and it’s taking its revenge on my mind.

  More push-ups. Until I can’t do any more.

  I can’t go on like this.

  Perhaps it’s not enough to simply swap habits. The entire concept of the Experiment could be a misunderstanding of the wisdom of Rivers Cuomo. Maybe the magic energy shift happens not through refraining from shooting out a milky white fluid, but from actually being desireless. This is, after all, what most great spiritual disciplines advise. To paraphrase the Buddha, craving leads to suffering. And I am definitely suffering, which is pathetic considering that it’s only been six days.

  THE SEVENTH DAY

  Crystal calls and updates me on her first day of self-restraint. Unlike me, she did due diligence. With Google on her side, she discovered a spiritual backbone to the Experiment that I’ve completely neglected—more out of laziness than ignorance.

  “You’re just withholding and that’s not healthy,” she says.

  “I know. It hurts when I sit now. I’m worried that I’m going to get prostate cancer or something.”

  “See,” she says self-righteously. “You’re supposed to take the life energy and, instead of holding it back like a dam, circulate it through your body.”

  “And how does that work exactly?”

  “It’s supposed to be done with a partner,” she hints.