An email notice from Good Vibrations in San Francisco ("Educate, Explore, Empower") arrived this weekend. The notice informs me that May is "National Masturbation Month". What can I do but sigh in exasperation?
That notice isn't meant for me. I'm absolutely not the demographic for the ad, let alone the celebration itself. I'm male-- cishet male. Everything that I am falls outside the target demographic. I'm a gentleman of a certain age, of course, and I'm sure that aging cishet white nominally-middle-class males aren't aren't the people Good Vibrations is targeting.
Educate, Explore, Empower... All good things, I suppose. But masturbation is not something that aging white cishet males are supposed to engage in...or even admit to. It's assumed in popular culture that males don't need any education in the activity, since it's something they've obviously been doing compulsively since something like age twelve. It's also assumed that any exploration in the activity by males, aging or otherwise, is by definition creepy and unacceptable. All male sexual fantasies these days are considered to be creepy and tantamount to sexual assault. And male participation in the activity-- in the Solitary Vice --is regarded as pathetic, creepy, and risible, and never as "empowering".
Male participation in the Solitary Vice is regarded as a sign of sad failure, never about learning about pleasure and what to tell a partner about how your body responds. Sex toys and masturbation aids designed for women are seen as charming, sexy, something to be proud of. Women of the target demographic can talk about favourite vibrator or dildo preferences (Lelo seems to be the choice of hip, late-twenties young ladies in the know). It's impossible to imagine anyone male-- straight or gay --talking about Fleshlight or inflatable doll comparisons.
Consider the moment in "Stealing Beauty" where the young Liv Tyler is almost discovered masturbating by Jeremy Irons, who's in the next room. She's reasonably blasé about what she's doing. Her concern is about being seen three-quarters naked by a stranger, not about what she's doing. Compare that with the moment in "Pulp Fiction" when John Travolta mutters to himself that he won't risk making a pass at Uma Thurman-- his boss' wife --and that he'll just go home and jerk off. The audience is supposed to laugh at him. The very terms used for the male Solitary Vice ("jerk off" or "wank") are regarded as pathetic and open to instant mockery.
At my own advanced age, there isn't a way I could indulge in the Solitary Vice without feeling the instant lash of self-contempt. Admitting that I found physical pleasure in any activity (sexual or non-sexual) would be far too risky. I am not now and will never be in any sort of target demographic for someplace like Good Vibrations. I suppose I might be a target demographic for the Blue Pill or ED clips or penis pumps, but that's yet another reason why I'd never go into any shop that markets sex toys.
Here this May I have nothing whatsoever to celebrate about my body, or about sex, or about avenues to physical pleasure. I wish I could find a good cultural history of attitudes towards male masturbation in the last hundred or so years...or even since the 1960s. How did the male version of the Solitary Vice become so treated with contempt and derision? How did male desire itself become derided as inherently creepy? I'd read about those issues. A monograph with the full academic panoply of footnotes would mean something to me. Educate, Explore, Empower can't (by definition) mean anything to me.
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