Unlike girls, boys lack a biological marker that signals their passage into manhood. For girl’s it’s the unavoidable onset of menstruation that regardless of most outside forces is ruled by the time clock of Nature. Therefore, the only comparable would be the first experience of seminal ejaculation in males. According to the Swiss Medical Journal “Helv Paediatr Acta,” the average age for a boy’s first ejaculation ranges between 12½ to 15½ years. Only, in males, this experience must be willed; unless ejaculation is in the form of nocturnal emissions. In girl’s, Nature is the ultimate determinant – in males; it’s the workings of the imagination. Here, most tellingly, in contemporary culture, according to a report printed in both “Forbes Magazine” and “The New York Times,” American males typically have their first exposure to online pornography at age 11; and from the same study - the largest consumers of pornography are 12 to 17 year old boys. Like myself, most of my friends came for the first time while looking at porn and masturbating. Therefore, in our minds, the act of sexual release, masturbation, and porn is forever linked within the neurosensory web of the brain. As we grew into adults, this connection is solidified by pop-culture which deifies the sexually available woman; first epitomized by the ditzy blonde ingénue played by Marilyn Monroe in the film “The Seven Year Itch.” Especially when she walked over the subway grate and the wind blew her dress – she ceased to be an individual and became iconic; a trope of sorts that embodied male desire. Across cultural boundaries, this pin-up type of image hung in automobile garages, barber shops, and men’s clubs around the country. Staring at it became a sort of rite in and of itself. Later, that rather naive character quickly descended, during the sexual revolution, into the modern-day porn star, who is nothing more than a 3-dimensional incarnation of a “whack” magazine; hence the bizarre practice in porn of male actors always pulling out, masturbating, and spewing across their moaning female partners. This display inevitably drills into the male viewer that self-sexual gratification, male release, and female pleasure are all one. Consequently, by the time I was of age, the sexual symbol had become more explicit and vulgar: the Monroe like Dorothy Stratten had morphed into hardcore. Now, the porn star is the new paradigm; and altar that all boys must approach in order to become men. Yet, they are inescapably enslaved, not freed, by the image. For, it signals, not a progression, but a form of immobility that results in a failure to develop both sexually and emotionally.