Thursday, Jul 24, 2008
A former sex columnist answers the most common masturbation questions and wonders why it's still taboo to talk about what we all do.
May 23, 2001 | For many years, I've been part of a nine-man social group. We meet twice a month, take turns making dinner and end up talking sports, politics, work, marriage, children, money, parents and -- of course -- sex.
Within the bounds of self-revelation comfort levels, I'm pretty well informed about the sexual issues in several of the marriages in our group. But I'm relatively unaware of my friends' masturbation habits. And I haven't discussed mine. If the subject comes up, which it rarely does, there is nervous laughter along with acknowledgment that we all indulge.
It's not hard to understand why it's easier to discuss partner sex than the solo variety. Our culture is obsessed with partner sex. Depictions of it are ubiquitous, in both positive images (movies, books, music) and negative (AIDS, STDs and controversy over sex education and federal funding for family planning). Masturbation is still largely in the closet. It occupies the position partner sex held in the 1950s -- it's simply not discussed.
In 1976, I helped found National Condom Week (from Valentine's Day to Washington's Birthday) to encourage men to participate in contraception. But it took until 1995 for the staff of Good Vibrations, the women-run clean, well-lighted sex toy emporium in San Francisco, to launch National Masturbation Month (May). This tongue-in-cheek event features a Masturbate-a-Thon. (Sign up friends and relatives to donate money for every minute you masturbate, and the money will go to nonprofit sex-education organizations.)
But don't look for any mayoral -- or God forbid, presidential -- proclamations endorsing National Masturbation Month. In our culture, it's OK for MTV to show bikini-clad college gals being rolled into whipped-cream-filled tortillas while being ogled by buff college guys in tight swimsuits with major bulges. But a few years ago, when Paul Reubens (aka Pee Wee Herman) got arrested in a porn theater for masturbating, the media depicted him as pathetic.
A recent Kaiser Foundation study showed that more than 90 percent of American parents support comprehensive school-based sex education. But in 1995, when former Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders suggested that it include instruction in masturbation, faster than you could say "spank the monkey" she was forced to resign. Elders, now retired as a professor of pediatrics at the University of Arkansas School of Medicine, lectures nationally on preventive and adolescent health issues. But according to her lecture agent at the American Program Bureau in Newton, Mass., masturbation is not one of her current topics.
No surprise there. Publicly, America is simply not comfortable with masturbation. Privately, we have trouble keeping our hands out of our pants. In the original Kinsey sex survey (compiled in the late 1940s, several years before Playboy, the first of the "one-hand" newsstand magazines, first appeared), 94 percent of the men interviewed and 40 percent of the women admitted they'd masturbated to orgasm -- remarkably large proportions considering the prudishness of that time. Today, the Kinsey Institute declares that "the vast majority" of people masturbate: both sexes, all ages, single, married, divorced and widowed.
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