The Circling, Tumescent Male Animal

Deconstructing Patriarchy

This is a series of articles that are building up to a book on Patriarchy and it’s Deconstruction. It is an attempt to examine Contemporary American Culture from the limited point of view of one Woman on the Planet.


One Beluga Whale in San Francisco leads to an epiphany on the nature of Sexual Dysfunction in American Culture today.

I’m remembering here one particularly spectacular male and his (oh, my God, did you see that?) must-have-been-three-feet-long, penis. I’m remembering the white Beluga Whale in the San Francisco Aquarium many years ago. It was generally acknowledged that this whale had a problem. ‘He’s just an animal, so he couldn’t help it.’ His environment was to blame of course. The institution had him in a small circular tank. I guess some brilliant person thought the whale is so dumb he wouldn’t notice that he was in a virtual water treadmill, swimming in circles for years. It was a public curiosity, embarrassment, cause for concern within the community of people that capture and cage animals for public display. It is a common phenomenon.

Animals masturbate. This is nothing new. My children giggle, as all children do, once they became aware of the significance of an erection. Whenever they see the cat’s penis sticking out, it is cause for domestic mirth. Masturbation has a long and glorious history in the public discourse, varied, clinical, amusing, literary, comic and otherwise. This fascination is perhaps, part of our conscious adjustment to being both ‘intellectual,’ evolutionary, big brains and our reconciliation with our animal bodies. The generally understood mature response to it, is that it has its place, Generally speaking it’s considered private for those of us that walk on two legs, indecorous (or so I once thought) with too much emphasis; immature if we reference it too much too vocally. For those of us that want to be mature, or ‘more highly evolved,’ it hardly seems to warrant much discussion. Unless of course, one’s subject is Sex itself.

There is something spectacular about seeing a Beluga whale masturbate. I’m human and curious. Is that what a whale penis looks like? Wow? But after a few moments and the giggles are over what kicks in is sadness for the poor animal. Ultimately as I stood there and watched this magnificent animal swim, it’s entire body seemingly one big muscle intended to flex and propel itself through its life at full capacity, its humiliating situation became too sad to bear. I had to walk away. The damn whale seemed mournful.

My father raised and bred animals his entire life. I grew up with pigeons, fish, dogs, cats, birds, snakes, even a goose in the house. He bred many animals for many years. He always said to me that an animal that fouls its ‘nest’ is a sick animal. He indicated that animals follow natural laws. This is not news, not today. Or is it? So I know right away looking at that whale that it’s thing hanging out in the water like that ain’t a normal response. I don’t need a college degree in anything to know that.

So what, you say? So animals whack off. Big deal. Let's talk about my thing, or her thing, or Britany's thing, or some human's thing. After all, Janet Jackson's breast falling out of her cup last year was a worldwide media event. A friend of mine, I’ll call him Bill, another single parent who travels in the world of blended, mixed families as do many of us, came to me one day to tell me that he’d been visiting a friend’s house and walked in on her 7 year old daughter who was watching television. Bill reported that he’d found it disturbing to find her masturbating while watching cartoons. He thought it was a sign of a neurosis. Just like the whale really, he indicated that she led a limited life, not much stimulation or variety in her life. Like the whale, she was bored, left with limited options.

Bill also reported having walked in once on a male roommate watching pornography in their shared living room while masturbating. The adult male in question didn’t even skip a beat, so to speak. Seemed to show no concern whatsoever that Bill had walked in on him. Bill again thought it indicative of a neurotic response. Felt it reflected this man’s history of neglect and sexual abuse as a child. He felt uncomfortable and insulted, disrespected on some level. He didn’t view it as normal at all. He viewed it as a breach of privacy. OK to masturbate, but do that in your private quarters. Don’t put it in my face.

Interestingly, Bill recently expressed a different and contradictory viewpoint with regard to explicit, masturbatory content in today’s public discourse. Bill and I talk about television, fiction, non-fiction, news, music, writing, etc. Sex is everywhere! Explicit sex is everywhere. It is inescapable. At least in New York City. We were referring specifically to the column in the Village Voice called ‘Lusty Lady,’ which I had just discovered and read.

Bill, obviously titillated by the extremely explicit content of Lusty Lady’s writing, expressed a general enjoyment and acceptance of this kind of writing in the public domain. If you’re not familiar with the column, I’ll tell you this. It is generally a well-written, first person narrative memoir and commentary not on sex in general, but very autobiographical recounting of Lusty Lady’s sexual experiences with her many sexual partners. It is explicit. It includes everything from sexual techniques and instruction to a more sociological commentary. It is pornographic in that it describes which tab goes into which slot and how wet or dry and what kind of toys are being used. Names are given and at least in the few articles I read, no one’s identity is changed to protect the innocent; sexual acts are described in full living color. There are no innocents anymore. Innocence has become passe.

My own experience of it once my curiosity was satisfied, once my own subjective sexual engagement was finished being stimulated, and I’d had a moment to breathe a full breath and walk away, was that I came away feeling that it was public masturbation. Pure and simple. I kept wondering to myself why would a woman, or anyone for that matter; want to masturbate in such a public way? After reading only three of these articles and then following web links to her other writings in other magazines I came away with the understanding that most of this woman’s life is spent having sex with lots of different people, in essence, gathering material for her work, and then coming back to her computer to write about it. She’s not discussing her sexual experience in an overriding academic way, not in a particularly literary way, not much metaphor going on there. She does steer the writing to a slightly elevated level as observer of modern sexual life. She is purposefully titillating. She is masturbating on paper, and in the sense that she’s making a living doing it; she’s prostituting her sexuality for monetary gain.

I suspect that Lusty Lady may very well embrace Prostitution and Pornography as the both the right to self-expression and freedom of speech. She’s evidently worked hard to get to her place of total sexual freedom.

How is she different than the Beluga whale? Why is she not a neurotic animal? If my father were alive today, being the animal guy he is, atheist, etc., he would merely state that only a sick animal masturbates excessively. Is it normal to have public displays of sex? Animals are certainly prone to this, I’ve read that bonobo Monkeys do it sometimes. Whales obviously do.

I don't want to single out Lusty Lady. Her articles are not much different than what the Hip-Hop artists are doing. Not much different than what a lot of commercial television stations are doing with their sexually explicit shows. Calvin Klein does it, so why can’t we all? Is that the answer? I’m convinced myself that he must make enormous contributions to the Republican Political machine in order to get away with his pornographic advertising. He’s got young models greased up and sliding all over one another kissing each others' buttocks in large scale on billboards around NYC.

Sex in the City, Desperate Housewives. My daughters will not need to go buy “Everything you Ever Wanted to Know About Sex but Were Afraid to Ask.” No one will ever have to buy another sex manual again. One merely has to turn on the radio, listen to music, turn on the television, listen on the street corners or read articles like Lusty Lady and you’ll pick up all the sexual technique and vocabulary you need. You'll get everything but the heart and soul of sex. My kids are growing up in such a sexually explicit culture that they can’t get away from it. I actually have to work at preventing their-what I deem- unnatural propulsion into sexuality not so much before they're ready, but before they've had a chance to entertain the idea that there's a couple of other things available to do during the course of any given day.

So, why are 'we' masturbating in public? Why has our culture come to tolerate it? How is it that Bill, a virile, American Black Male in his mid-thirties, finds it disturbing in his personal life to walk in on people masturbating, yet finds it tolerable and ‘normal’ to have public discourse masturbate all over us? My hairdresser recently described a Christmas Party where the hostess, probably on ecstasy, she said, stripped nude and danced on her dining room table for an hour. It wasn't a sex party. It was your average holiday party with cookies and pecan pie. She also said everyone was bored by it all. I don't think I'd be bored by a naked lady on the table. I went to a casual coffee with a neighbor recently and he very soon began telling me about his parents’ sexual abuse of him in very very graphic detail. I hardly knew this man. Another friend reports that there are dating services for adults only where people post photographs of their genetalia instead of head shots.

We have articles appearing that report, men--young, virile, sexually viable men, are logging on to pornographic web sites to such a degree that their sexual activity with their partners is either eliminated or diminished considerably. We have news reports that say couples who have had previously long term sexual relationships are now ‘Re-Virginizing’ before they get married so the wedding night is more special and exciting. What? What's going on with that?

Bill and I have these discussions we think because we are both what people generally consider, attractive, handsome, sexually attractive people. We find that our physical Pulchritude makes us different. I refer to it as being pretty much 'Trophy or Target.' It makes us more aware of sexual dynamics because we are often the subject or object of others' sexual projections. Neither of us has been able to escape our public sexual personas since puberty. Our own sexual appeal has created a hyper-awareness to it. If standards of sexual attractiveness were different, we’d probably be talking about gardening.

So between being hit on all the time or having relative strangers and merely casual friends start to declare their undying or uncontrollable love and attraction for us, we cannot escape it even if our own individual libidos were such that we led quiet sedentary lives. Sex, for better or worse, has also become my subject. Or rather, the sexual relationship has become my subject. Sexual relationship to Self, to Other, to the Culture at large.

This is not a right wing conservative reaction or backlash response to the sexual and social freedoms propelled forward in the 1960’s. I am not Right Wing. I am not a social conservative. I am not a prude nor am I sexually inexperienced. I came up during the mid-seventies. I’m part of the demographic I’ve defined as culturally-sexually ambivalent. If the word ambivalent here is perplexing, I’ll explain.

I graduated from high school in 1974. Dumb, naive, working class, I missed the struggles of the 60’s that led to our ‘modern’ sexual liberation. I inherited it. For a good 15 years I took it for granted and was long and slow in realizing it wasn’t really quite what I’d believed it to be. I can clearly remember our sexual discoveries, our feeling, for those of us that were of liberal minds within the working class, that we could do what we wanted. I had a ‘feminist’ father. He rarely ever circumscribed his expectations of me based on gender. For those of us who didn’t think we had to fight the battle for freedom as women, who naively believed at the time, that the battle had been won, that it was simply a matter of our using our new freedoms, we went out blindly pursuing our cultural mandate. We had birth control and easy access to it without our parents knowing. I cannot remember the number of friends I drove to Planned Parenthood for either abortions or birth control. This was Pre-Regan, Pre-Aids, Pre-STD hyper-awareness, Post-Sexual Liberation. A special time. When I went to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas with a friend years ago we were mortified at the contact high we got and how very close it was to our own experiences. Scary. We got out alive and functional too.

We did it all. Or in ‘my group,’ we did it all. We had multiple sex partners without guilt. We were breaking away from Patty Duke and Annette Funicello. But most of what we were doing wasn't on anyone's radar yet. One girlfriend and I even exchanged boyfriends, which in 1973 was very daring. We taught each other how to give blow jobs using coke bottles. We discussed sexual techniques. We tried to distinguish between sexual freedom and plain old-fashioned slutiness. We did drugs, of course. We went to concerts, some of which we remember. We went to college. And then life went on. The ambivalence of this group-- and I have no formal measures or sociological data to give you here, this is just a matter of life’s accumulation of information-- the ambivalence of this group didn’t become apparent to me until many years later at a party, again in San Francisco. And the scene I’ll describe here repeated itself many, many times over the years. It is emblematic of the experience many of my girlfriends had.

It’s a party. It’s an office party. Nearly everyone here is in their 30’s. By the end of the night there’s a group of women discussing their college years. Some of us are married, some still single, some divorced. But the over arching theme is this discomfort, this unease with our sexual pasts. We believe our sexual liberation and freedom is good, necessary, fair. Right. We believe we have the right to have sex when we want to. But what we’re all saying as we tell the stories is that it didn’t feel so good. Nearly all of the women at all of these parties had the same kinds of stories to tell. They used to fuck around a lot. At the time we thought we were doing the following: using our bodies for their god-given purpose; having fun; giving the gift of our bodies to whomever; drunk; fucked up on drugs, experimenting; in love; revenge fucking for some betrayal on the part of another lover; alleviating stress; bored, whatever.

During the part where we count how many lovers we’ve had, (the numbers range from a modest 5 to an alarming, ‘I stopped counting at 100 but not before I had Eric Clapton), the women say they wish they hadn’t gone so far. They stopped long ago. Some admit they have a few ‘no names’ on their list. I admittedly took some questionable pride in the fact that I didn’t have any ‘no-names.’ I always got at least a first name. Whether or not they gave me their real name is a different matter. Many of us could recall the particular day or early in the AM moment when after 5, 7 or 10 years of wild, uninhibited fucking of anyone and anything that came along that we suddenly felt like 'What is the point?'

I had a friend of mine recently express alarm at what he viewed as my new found conservatism. What? He asked? You? You were always my heroine. At the height of my sexually liberated days I was known for the following saying: “If you can’t be monogamous, be discreet. If you can’t be discreet, be out of town.” I wanted my freedom, to protect everyone's feelings, and not to have to face any uncomfortable questioning or accounting.

I felt and still do, that one’s choices in sexual behavior are private, subjective and individual. They’re also a matter of the personal progress and to steal a phrase from a recent movie title, one’s ‘Personal Velocity.” So I have no beef with Lusty Lady in her pursuit for find herself sexually, to explore and experience. My beef-- if it can be called that--is with the Public Masturbation of our Modern Media Content. A large degree of our public discourse now is effectively one giant exercise in masturbation. A person can walk around NYC today and within blocks have one's libido assaulted and all you did was go to the deli and the dry cleaner.

To me, our culture has become the Masturbating, Tumescent Beluga Whale, circling his limited, unnatural environment, wishing like hell he could bust out and just go be a total whale. If one could measure the energetic output of the cumulative cultural masturbation that is put out on a daily basis, if it could be quantified, we’d find that a significant percentage of our energies and intellectual and emotional output is being directed to this cultural masturbation.

Take one song of Ludicrous, Usher or Fifty-Cent. Any one song will take hours to write, hours and hours of rehearsal, hours and hours of production and recording time. Tens of thousands of dollars are then spent on these activities and the promotion of the music. One song that explicitly talks about inserting a penis into a vagina will require possibly 1000 man hours and $100,000 of production costs. This required costumes, dancers, choreographers, hair stylists, make-up artists, producers, etc. If those hours are billed out at let’s say $200/hr then around $300,000 has been spent on a message that says to get excited take your tumescent member out and slide it into the nearest slot available.

What are we doing with our time and money if not wasting it by telling everyone to do something that by my account is one of the few things that doesn’t require a lot of teaching. Most simple animals can figure out how to take a hard dick out and put it into a wet vagina. After the first few times, it’s a matter of practice and like any activity, the more you practice with heart and soul, the better you get. Is the public domain really the place for the practice and refinement of sexual excellence? If one looks at the needs and requirements of what it is to be human and to be a society, a culture, a community, is public masturbation a truly necessary activity?

By now everyone of adult age and in fact many pre-teens have figured out the rudiments of sexual intercourse. So these masturbatory efforts in the public discourse cannot be viewed as instructional. The basic mechanics of sex are universal. Tab A, B or C. Slot D, E, or F. Apply moisture, friction, verbal cues, etc. The mechanical aspect of sex is fairly limited. The psychological aspects are more complex. Historically Sex has been explored exhaustively, so the wealth of material on the subject would present a good argument against calls for enlightenment as well. If instruction and enlightenment are ruled out then there’s little more value to it than the sheer, titillating quality that masturbation provides. I have my ideas about why 'We're' masturbating and I'll get to it soon.

Does everyone involved in the promotion of sexually explicit, so-called creative output really think they’re instructing the world on something significant? Fucking is the oldest activity in the ‘book’ after eating and sleeping. Why are we spending so much time advertising it?

If, as humans, we are meant to wake, eat, produce, survive, create, then how much of our output is meant to be dedicated to ‘ the manual excitation of the sexual organs, most often to the point of orgasm?’

The virtual public masturbation manifesting currently in public discourse is something akin to an adolescent rebellion or an insurgent rebellion against an authoritarian regime. As the Right Wing Conservative movement has progressed in what I view as their now evident 40 year plan to recapture the hold on America's Cultural Mind, it has inspired a reciprocal, complimentary response in terms of sexual lasciviousness. The tighter Dad's hold on the teenager, the more he/she wriggles free. The radical left or social and personal, sexual liberals involved in creative output and media generation are caught up on the war.

That is the political side of the coin. The psychological side of the coin is more complex. It’s often stated that the end of the Roman Empire was characterized by a similar sexual licentiousness. It’s often stated that cultures at their end, become obsessive and self-destructive. It’s not the sex aspect itself, but the root cause of the sexual obsessiveness. It’s the neurosis behind it. We’re in a neurotic stage of cultural evolution. Sexuality is one of the most apparent manifestations of this phenomenon.

There are so many now out there, the snowball is barreling down the hill, getting enormous as it collects the debris and builds in mass. The purveyors of hyper-sexual cultural output seem to think they’re being wild, modern, daring, outrageous, courageous, adventurous, cutting-edge. BOTTOM LINE IS they're making a shit load of money collectively doing it. They're waking up the old gray-hairs in St. Louis and the Dakotas, they think.

Wow, I’ve got a vagina and I can use it. Big deal. Every woman I've known for the last 35 years has been doing just fine in that department. Lusty lady, you’re not doing anything new at all. Nothing that ain’t been done. You’re just doing it out in public.

I happen to think a bit like Dad in this regard. Human beings have certain characteristics that make them human. Hidden ovulation is one. The Big Brain is another. Creativity is one. Public sex is not one. Private sex is and has always been one of the traits that make us human. Dad would say, "...they're a bunch of sick bastards!" I happen to think we're in a neurotic, adolescent, sexually perverse, cultural regression.





Why we're masturbating and further commentary on the Deconstruction of Patriarchy will appear in future posts.