Tweets of Our Time: 50 Cent Quits Masturbating

(Top image: Illustration by Sam Taylor; 50 Cent album cover: G-Unit Records)

"Tweets of Our Time" is a new series where we usher 140-character missives of great note into a sort of unofficial hall of fame. Listen, I'll be straight with you: it's basically just an excuse to talk about old, good 50 Cent tweets. Okay? I'm not going to pretend anything otherwise. It is just a great excuse to talk about 50 Cent tweets.

50 Cent is a wise man, a spectacular man. 50 Cent is an under-appreciated gem of a man. You are thinking: if 50 Cent is so wise and good, why did that gunman riddle him with bullets that time? That is some very 10 cent thinking of you. Think bigger. Think massive. Think 60 cents, a hundred cents. 50 Cent made $200 million selling water. Can Jesus do that? Can Jesus make that much money with water? I'm looking at the Bible here and I'm not seeing Jesus do anything remarkable with water. Not in comparison to making $200 million, in one day, selling it. Turning it into wine is just a process of fermentation. Turning it into money is alchemy.

So we have established that 50 Cent is some sort of roving hip hop hyper-wizard: OK. But he is other things, too: a mogul, a linguist, a teetotal, a health nut. And, for at least one afternoon in 2012, he was a non-masturbating man.

— 50 Cent, September 24 2012

I think it is safe to assume from this small series of tweets that 50 Cent had briefly had enough of masturbating and decided to stop. A man does not tweet anti-masturbation advice unless he, too, is on a period of dick sobriety. You cannot preach from a place of debasement. It would be like me tweeting about how to stop drinking, or eating entire cans of spaghetti hoops for dinner direct from the tin, a five-step on how to quit writing overlong sentences about things of deep unimportance. What I am edging around here is hypocrisy, and I like to think 50 Cent is not a hypocritical man. So to tell his followers how not to wank, we must assume that he, too, was residing in a no-jack zone.

We can only speculate as to what drove him to this point. Which is exactly what I am going to now do.

Some questions:

i. How much had 50 Cent been jacking off to get to this desperate point? How many is too many wanks for 50 Cent to have in one day? How many consecutive days did he hit that number? How much of his time was spent on the boom-and-bust cycle of masturbation? What incident forced his hand; forced him to say, "Alright, enough is enough now"? 50 Cent, dried spit around the edges of his mouth, emerging blinking into the Connecticut sunshine after an eight-hour pornfest? 50 Cent's hands, too locked and crippled in a dick-grip for him to throw up his signature hand signs, plunging his aching forearms into ice? What happened in the days preceding September 26, 2012? What happened to 50 Cent's dick?

ii. That said: does Fiddy even know what a porno is? Dude just said the words "lust filled magazine", like some sort of robo-vicar condemning his wanking followers to eternal damnation in a sticky damp hell. Calling a jazz mag a "lust filled magazine" is like calling a woman "a vagina haver" or calling a car "wheel machine". Which, if anything, makes it more astonishing that 50 Cent can wank off so much he has to absolve himself of wanking forever: he is wanking to VHS when Blu-Ray exists; he's wanking to a plume of steam when we have jet engines. He is wanking exclusively to defunct erotic technology and he still has an issue controlling himself with it: imagine how insane he will go on his dick when he figures out Pornhub exists;

iii. Do rich men masturbate in different and more decadent ways? Does 50 Cent masturbate with caviar lubricant, into a silk 'kerchief? 50 Cent, resplendent in velvet, tugging Lil' Curtis off to a live-action sex show? Does he still get that horrid little pang of grief and disgust when he jizzes onto a stack of $500 notes?

iv. How turned on does 50 Cent get when he sees a woman in the street? Because Step 2 is "make a conscious decision not to turn your head after people walk by you". The assumption here is: 50 Cent has a habit of turning his head after anywhere between a dozen and 100 asses, in the street, each and every day. Do they immediately render him in such a state of erotic frisson that he has to masturbate, right there and then? Is this his crucial flaw? Is 50 Cent Superman, and looking at asses is his Kryptonite? If so: does Floyd Mayweather know about this Achilles dick of his?

I think the ultimate takeaway here is: 50 Cent, based on my exploration of the topic, is a man who likes to jack the heck off. But he once had a moment of weakness: he once did it too much. If 50 Cent can fall to the bottom – to the very bottom, 50 Cent at 3AM in front of a flickering 60" TV, surrounded by crumpled tissues, right down to the dust, a horror of an epiphany in the depths of post-wank despair – and then clamber his way out, then surely you can too? You don't have to be addicted to wanking, or drinking Vitamin Water, or smack: anything you are trying to overcome, you can do it, with relentless Fiddy-style mind-over-matter positivity. And so we are back to 50 as Jesus: his journey an inspiration to our own, his story our path. 50 Cent's five tweets about giving up masturbating are not five tweets of filth, of corruption. 50 Cent's battle against his own dick is a story of hope. Thank you, 50. May god grant you peace and good asses in the kingdom of heaven, amen.

@joelgolby / @SptSam