Remember how great masturbation used to be? How you would ask to be excused from the dinner table because you had a “stomach ache,” and then rub one out furiously in the pantry? “All better,” you’d say, as you returned to the dining room with a suspicious look of satisfaction. How you would randomly leave the classroom to go pleasure yourself in the largely abandoned special-ed wing of the high school?

And then when you got back, you’d tell your students there was an emergency in the faculty room, probably something to do with coffee cake, or an incident down at “central.” Back then, your day would not revolve around eating and sleeping but around whacking and tossing. “Should I go to the movie with Jeanette at eight,” you’d ask yourself, “or might that conflict with my ten-thirty spank session?” Invariably, you’d play it safe and stay home.

Now, unfortunately, things are different. Now masturbation is just a perfunctory exercise in self-loathing. You never want to do it—or rather, you never want to want to do it—but still, it happens somehow. And it barely even feels good anymore. Every underwhelming release feels not like the magical fulfillment of a primal physical need but rather the merciful end of a self-imposed punishment, the sad punch-line of some big goddamn cosmic joke. “Well, I guess I can stop now,” you say, wondering how much a pistol and one bullet would cost down at the pawn shop.

Well, friends, don’t reach for that pistol just yet—but don’t get rid of it just yet, either—because I’ve developed these ways to turn back the clock to the golden age of masturbation. Or at least turn masturbation from something you dread into something you might kind of look forward to.

1. Go Public

   Because the fear of being caught will inject excitement into even the most lifeless sexual activity. So go buy yourself a nice trench coat—you’ll find it in the “Exhibitionist-wear” department at JCPenney—and search your neighborhood for nice, thick shrubs that will offer a serviceable screen for your sordid, pathetic activity. You may even want to cut a hole in one of your pants pockets so that you can do the deed while at, say, a local pizzeria, or a lecture about compost and green living, without anyone else being the wiser. Well, your audience might suspect something’s up when you’re about to climax (which you should aim to coincide with the culmination of your speech)—“So in conclusion, I believe, oh shit, that, uh, the use of compost, oooh shit, is, oh God, oh my God I’m coming I’m coming fuuuck, related inextricably to, uh, green living”—but they’ll tolerate it, as long as the rest of your lecture was informative and well-structured.

2. Turn It Into a Game

   Change the predictable, certain result of masturbation—tears, depression, binge-eating—into an uncertain one—win or lose, succeed or fail. This unpredictability, this element of challenge, will keep you interested in the game. Here are a few ideas to get you started:

   • See if you can beat it with one hand while beating minesweeper—on the hardest level, obviously—with the other.
   • Try to do it while balancing a stack of your grandmother’s old cookbooks on your head.
   • See if you can recite the whole Gettysburg address before you finish.
   • See if you can go the whole way without any thoughts of suicide.
   • See if you can do it while jumping rope with the neighborhood kids. Only do Double Dutch if you’re really confident, though, because that’s how my buddy Rick ended up losing a nut.

   And while none of these will actually make masturbation any more pleasurable in itself, they all will make the entire experience more enjoyable. Eventually, you may even decide to drop the masturbation part altogether and just play the games for themselves—playing minesweeper while reciting the Bill of Rights with a stack of TV Guides balanced on your head.

3. Get an Audience

   Whether you’re doing it for your fellow tenants in the cellar of your apartment building, on the internet via webcam for thousands of Asian men, or at your local community theater, performing in front of others will certainly kick things up a few notches. Having all those eyes on you will make you feel pretty, like a teenage girl on prom night, or pitied and loathed, like a bearded woman in a dirty carnival cage. Either way, though, it’ll get you some attention, which will be a nice change of pace.

   And if you decide to perform at the local theater, it’ll give you an opportunity to show off your acting chops, too. You could do a scene from Death of a Salesman as you abuse your body, although you might only have enough time for four or five lines, so choose wisely. I generally opt to play Mrs. Loman, because I feel it forces the audience to reconsider their normative conceptions of gender, and of masturbation-theater as a legitimate dramatic genre. But you may do as you like.

4. Give Yourself a Little Reward Afterward

   If nothing else seems to work, you can try some good old-fashioned Skinnerian positive reinforcement. Every time you finish whacking it, give yourself a cracker, or a candy bar, or let yourself watch an extra episode of Home Improvement before bedtime. Soon enough, your brain will associate the pleasure gained from eating the cracker or watching Tim Allen with the pleasureless act of playing with yourself. You’ll become like a demented version of one of Pavlov’s dogs, getting an erection whenever you see candy bars or hear someone utter the words “Tool Time.” But the bottom line is, you’ll want to masturbate again—even if really, you just want some crackers and cheese—and that’s all we’re going for.

5. Combine Masturbation and Crime

   After a while, doing it in public or in front of a live studio audience will lose its transgressive appeal, and adding other illegal activity to the equation is a great way to get back that edge. So give it a go while you’re double-parked beside a school bus, or fudging your tax forms, or illegally downloading episodes of All in the Family. You’ll be surprised by how much fuel this adds to the fire. Before you know it, you’ll be committing grand theft auto and jerking it as you speed away from a team of cop cars in fast pursuit. “What the hell’s he doing in there?” one of the cops will ask his partner. “I don’t know,” the partner will respond, “but it looks like he’s having one hell of a time.” And good God, he’ll be right.

Which isn’t to say that masturbation will be all that it once was. No, sadly, you can’t get back into Eden. But with these little tricks, you can at least make sure your solitary love life isn’t a living hell.