Every now and then, I think about awkward situations that occurred in the past, and how I might handle them now I am older. There is one situation that happened when I was 14 or 15 years old, and even now I am not sure what I could have done differently, 15+ years later.
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Basically, I was at school, at the Library, sitting at a table with my good friend, and 2 girls who were somewhat friends, but mostly there just to chat during the lunch break. We were mid conversation, and then another boy from our year came up to me, specifically, and asked ‘Do you masturbate?’.
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Like, full blown interrupted the conversation just to come up to me, specifically, and ask ‘do you masturbate?’. I wasn’t a cool kid by any means, and quite shy…so I just kinda stared at him and said ‘yeah that’s inappropriate mate’ and tried to fob him off. However he continued to push the question at least 5 times ‘come on just yes or no, have you masturbated?’ all whilst everyone else at the table was not saying anything.
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I never did answer the question, but just kept dismissing him ‘get outta here’ ‘not answering stupid questions like that’ etc, and he eventually left after a minute or so. The damage was done though, I could see how awkward the situation was, and now everyone at the table would associate me with ‘masturbation’ so to speak – something that may have never crossed their mind, but now was the current thought in their brain.
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I think if I went back in time and could try again, I could have made a crude joke out of it ‘you should probably ask when I haven’t masturbated’ or ‘yeah I try to at least 50 times a day’. However it wouldn’t change the checkmate situation I was put in. You could do this technique to anybody: even the President ‘do you masturbate?’ and voila – suddenly everyone associates the President with that, in their head.
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What would you say the correct response to this kind of thing is? How would you have handled this situation?
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