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When I was shown down the floor of my residential hall, the first thing I noticed was how tightly packed the rooms were to each other, with the slightest movement giving away our activity. At first, the only concerns I had about this was how much sleep I would be able to get and if my music would bother my neighbours, but soon there was another, far more awkward dilemma that presented itself later in the night.

It was 11pm and all was (mostly) silent on our floor. Then, as I lay on my bed staring at the ceiling, half-way through my nightly routine of reflecting on everything (which includes my whole life so far and my plan for the next ten years) a sudden whining noise begun: ... Uhhh ... HHHMMmmmm ...... Uhhhhh HHmmmmm .... AHHHhhhhhh ....

It was low at first, kind of like the noises someone makes when they are having a nightmare. But quickly it got louder and louder and stranger and stranger. There were moments of one-second pauses: “... Huahhhk,” like someone was holding their breath for a moment, followed by a release of “Auhhhhh ...” and then the standard noise would continue. At this point it became clear the person next to me was, for lack of a better euphemism, “punching the clown.”

Is it possible to express the action of someone masturbating without a twitch breaking on your face each time you say it? Even now, as you read these words, do you glance around you, bringing your face in closer to the page just in case someone gets a glance at the topic you are reading about? Have you already got a fake answer at the ready in case someone asks you what are you reading about, like, “Oh, I was just skimming through,” followed by a continuous flicking of all the pages until you reach the end and put the magazine down so it’s like, “see, look how fast I was skimming through, couldn’t of had the time to be reading about anything awkward as fuck.” If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, you should be at ease. Your level of discomfort at this moment is not nearly as close to the levels of discomfort I had during some of those following nights.

20 minutes later, the noise had built up to a grand finale, with the last piece sounding like the dry wretch a cat makes after spewing up a hairball. Okay, I’ll try writing it out for you: AAAOOOUUUHHH.

It never occurred to me that some people have more dramatic or vocal experiences when masturbating. Afterward, for a personal laugh I let out a loud yawn just at the same volume he’d been playing his orchestra at, just to indirectly let him know that he had breached the sound limit in which all things can be heard through the wall. For some reason, my reaction had made me want to laugh my guts out, so I tried to unsuccessfully hold my breathe to keep my laughter from releasing, only to have it burst out of me at a volume the person would have definitely heard. To save serious embarrassment on his behalf, I tried to tune the laughter into a coughing fit to provide my neighbour with a benefit of the doubt-type feeling, like, “Oh, he was just coughing and didn’t actually hear my jamming the man session.” If I’d ever been caught in that situation, my safety line would be that the noises your sick mind had mistaken for fapping was actually me practicing writing my essays, which just happened to cause a slight vibration given how hard and fast I was “writing.” (Yeah, you can use that one).

After my coughing fit, or because of it, I also gave up on the efforts of holding back the 20–30 farts I drop daily. I know you can drop them silently, by slowly releasing your ass-valve one part of an inch at a time every few seconds, but that just required some intense dedication I couldn’t continuously produce. I also felt I had the liberty to let out my farts any way I wanted in my own damn room. And I’m not walking all the way to the bathroom just to let out a few farts – a ritual that makes up 95 per cent of my journeys to the bathrooms at the university. This ritual is made doubly worse by the fact that I don’t feel comfortable farting until I’m sure either a) there is a cover-noise over-tuning my farts, like someone drying their hands, or b) the bathroom is completely empty, because there’s no fucking way I’m walking out of the cubical after making noises that sounded as if I was busy blocking the toilet with an electric chainsaw. That night, if you were wondering, my farts were bountiful, like the fart-journey was a slide and they were all lining up waiting for a turn to scream as they went down.

After several nights of adjusting to living in a hostel again, I began to think about what privacy meant. I suppose the things that are the most private to us become the hardest things to talk about. These days, everyone just puts the most awkward questions through Google. When I thought about how I’d do my own sessions in my residential room, I started panicking, wondering, “how the fuck does everyone else actually get away with this?” I’ve read (Googled) that many other guys just do it in the shower. But this can’t be everyone’s method because I found my experiments doing it in there a chore.

First of all, you’re standing up, with hot water relaxingly pouring over you, making your body so hot and limp that it’s really hard to ever finish it off. Secondly, when other people walk in to the bathroom, I have the idea that what you’re doing becomes obvious because the shower noise of the water hitting the drain while your tugging your arm back and fourth makes a particular splashy splashy beat that gives you away; this always makes one stop until the person has left. And, thirdly, by the time your 20-minute shower is over and you walk out, how can people not think, “Yeah, so it was you who was in there for a good 20 minutes? Oh, what’s that you say: you decided to have an extra round of washing your hair out with shampoo? And you dropped the soap a few times, that’s what added another 15 minutes? Oh, it all totally makes sense now.”

A few nights later, I couldn’t deprive myself of having my own session any longer. At first I tried being real quiet, all slow-jam like. But my God, if you try doing it slow it just takes fucking forever. I begun speeding it up. I was 80 per cent of the way there when suddenly I heard a noise of movement in my neighbour’s room, causing me to instantly stop. For fuck’s sake. I tried to start up again, because once I get into the rhythm there is no stopping the flow, but then another noise of movement came forth through the wall. Was this my neighbour’s version of my cough? I then dropped all the fucks I gave and begun speeding it up just to finish it, in the same impulse you get when you’ve been binge watching your favourite TV series (for me, Breaking Bad) and even though it’s 1am, there are only three more episodes until the end of the season so you just drop your fucks and go full steam ahead. But this time, there was a knock on my door.

“Hey, Eugene, we’re going down for dinner, want to come?”

Awh. Fuck.

For most guys, there is a certain sequel of responses that will happen if you’ve just knocked on his door while a guy has been getting amongst it. Let’s call these the “red alert four responses.” The first is always a five-second pause followed by a “movement noise.” What is happening here is that the guy is in a state of shock, being caught “white-handed.” He doesn’t know what to fucking do. This is because no guys will begin a session if they think they will be interrupted, so it is always a surprise when they are. But he doesn’t know if you know he’s in his room, so he can’t do fucking anything, because then it’s like, “why aren’t you answering the door; what are you hiding, motherfucker?” Once realising this, the five-second pause will end, then you will hear a mix of these noises: 1) him tucking his thing back into his pants; 2) a sudden vigorous sequel of clicking noises (it’s him closing all his porn tabs); and then a give-away, 3) he’ll respond with a shaky voice saying some variation of the words “Who’s that?” Now it’s not like he actually cares who it is, he just needs to buy time while he pushes his boner down and switch to his casual face. But this is the fourth give-away. When he does answer the door, he’ll try acting extra fucking casual like, “no, wasn’t up to anything, just chilling.” He will even be extra responsive, following your inquires with a response question, just to come across as extra, “nah, you weren’t bothering from anything, especially not the wankathon that’s been occupying my last three hours.” Or, if he’s really sly and it’s a person he hasn’t met before, he’ll even shake their hand just to push out any doubt as far away as possible. These four sequels are what make up the “red alert four reactions.”

However, I am not most guys, and when that person knocked on my door, my giveaways were much worse. “I can’t open the door, it’s jammed,” I yelled out even though it wasn’t jammed at all. I even pretended to wiggle the locked door at my own miserable attempt to buy time while I did my pants up. “What do you mean it’s jammed?” The person replied. Think, Eugene, think. “I was eating jam sandwiches before, and now the jam is on my knob – the door knob that is, and the jam has gotten stuck in such a way that has made the door knob ... well, jammed.” I kid you not; this has been my fucking idea of an answer.

I was just about ready, when I realised if I opened the door but there was no actual jam on the door knob, that would be suspicious. “ Wait, I’ll try something,” I yelled through the door. I then grabbed some jam from beside my bed and smeared some of it on my door knob.

“What are you doing?”

"I’m just using some stuff to get rid of the jam.”

“... Were you just wanking?”

“Haha, NO, I’ll be a second.”

I then hid the jam away, opened the door and pointed to the jam-smeared door knob, the same way a kid points to the family dog after breaking his mum’s furniture as a way to shift the blame for the mess.

“See, I told you.”

However, after we had finished dinner down in the hall, I admitted to my friends about the episode before. It is amazing how much more comfortable you can feel after admitting the uncomfortable. One person told me that in her flat the previous year, one of her flatmates went at it like they were performing an exorcism, and just as they were finishing they’d cry out the same way people cry out after completing the ice bucket challenge. It made her so uncomfortable she bought earmuffs just for those occurrences. Another person at the table said that after becoming good mates with his floor neighbour, they had gotten all open about it and they’d even have “wankititions,” where they’d compete to see who could finish first, and even, sometimes, watch porn together.

I wonder how many people had never even talked about the subject with other people, even though, for many people, it’s a ritual performed multiple times a day. It’s bizarre to think how something so dominant in people’s lives has received so much silence. What makes it so embarrassing to talk about? Maybe it’s that it’s associated with the shame of being lonely, because if you have a girlfriend/boyfriend or a line of fuck buddies swiping your way on Tinder, you’d supposedly never need to.

Maybe it’s also one of the few ways we can really embrace our own fantasies, which can be a really private experience and a publicly shameful thing if they were ever to be known. That is, while sex is a social thing with someone else, masturbating is something you’ve got to delve into your imagination to experience. But then again, that is not totally true, given that many people use porn. It’s also interesting to wonder what the norm is when having the experience. What I mean is, what do you have in your mind when you do it? Are you even having sex with the person, or is it just the image of them, like a poster view, or even just someone you briefly passed on the street? Do you even think of an existing person? Or do you let your mind go between many different people, not focusing on a single one?

But for now, most of us will be keeping our fingers curled on the pages after this article, ready to flick them across as soon as anyone looks like they are having a peak at what we’re reading, ready to avoid any brief moments of being “caught” in the act of exploring the deeply personal.