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Grad school jerk-offs

What is the connection between solitary study and private pervdom?

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By Betsy Andrews

April 30, 1999 | It is 1993. I am working on my thesis for a master's in anthropology from the City University of New York. We are staying in a friend's co-op, sitting for his gigantic tabby, Ludwig, a creature of four left paws. As Ludwig paces the high, thin ledge that rings the living room, jostled precious objects fall to the floor, and he watches them drop. I pace the office rug in tiny circles before the computer. I am caught on a sticky theoretical point. My brain is burning. I am pacing. Ludwig is pacing. Objects are falling. The burn travels the length of my body and lodges between my thighs. Ludwig paces. Objects tumble. I sit down and, spreading my legs on the folding chair before the text, finger my clit to orgasm. Then, as my lover sleeps in the loft above the ledge that rings the living room, I unstop the course of argument. I write, "The danger lies within the social proscriptions to which pleasure-seeking is subject." Later my advisor will respond in the margins, "If this is the case, it is a fairly narrow range of 'danger‚' relatively speaking."

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The year is 1812. For the past hundred years, since the publication of the seminal pamphlet "Onania, or the heinous sin of self-pollution, and its frightful consequences in both sexes considered, with spiritual and physical advice to those who have already injured themselves by this abominable practice," doctors and social theorists have wrung their hands over masturbation. In this year, Dr. Benjamin Rush will pen "Diseases of the Mind." He will caution young men that the ills of masturbation should be avoided through "close application of the mind to business, or study of any kind." But Jean Jacques Rousseau has already recognized the danger of solitary study. In "Emile," he has warned the tutor to never leave his student alone, lest he discover "that dangerous supplement." Others advocate the opposite of study. "The lad who plays vigorously, even violently ... possesses a great bulwark of defense against sexual vice," writes one author, "especially in its secret form."

Enlightenment thinkers concurred that jerking off led to stunted growth, bodily weakness, blindness, venereal disease, insanity and death. Clinicians imposed treatments ranging from cold baths and bland foods to shackling, clitoral burning and tubes lined with metal spikes fitted over the penis. Masturbation phobia spurred the growth of the psychiatric and gynecological industries. The proverbial ink was spilled. But as to the underlying relationship between study and self-abuse, the experts didn't agree.

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Dana is a Ph.D. candidate in criminal justice whose jerking off took off when she entered the program three years ago: "I found from the second I was in grad school it increased so, so much. I had to read so much, and then my hand would move to my legs, and then I'd read more. It would be like, 'You have to get to page 45, and you can jerk off again.' And then you set another goal."

Chris was recently awarded a Ph.D. in English for a dissertation on the complications of closure in Shakespeare's middle comedies. He tells me that, in the midst of the "isolating" doctoral, "My masturbation practices became more prominent. I became more of an exhibitionist, looking at my own body so much more regularly in a narcissistic mirror and getting off on it."

Next page | Federalist Papers as revolutionary porn


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