SEXIS WRONG

The Circle Game
Playing With Yourself Together
Martha Cornog
“We have termed onanism a solitary vice, and
nothing is more just. It has also been termed a
contagious vice, and nothing is more true.”
—Walling, Sexology, 1904
Writing a book about masturbation wasn’t a solo effort. In
the process, I met all sorts of co-conspirators who fed me
articles, factoids, tips, and encouragement. And I found out
along the way that solo sex isn’t always solo.
The other thing that I found out pretty
quickly was that group masturbation
had been virtually unstudied,
in kids or adults.
Naturally, I knew about circle jerks. I had been reading about
them in a curious little magazine called Celebrate the Self, published
for men who are masturbation aficionados. Personal vignettes
dominated its pages, and more than a few described
collective masturbatory camaraderie among childhood buddies.
But a surprising (to me) number recounted pud-pulling
circles of adult men—”close encounters,” as one writer put
it. I side-filed this intriguing information while continuing to
order books, visit libraries, dig out more sex magazines, write
to wildly assorted experts, and make copious notes for my
manuscript of The Big Book of Masturbation.
Then one of my research trips took me to the library of a sexology
organization in California. I found a fair amount on my
topic, only some of it new and interesting to me. Then I chatted
up the librarian, whom I shall call “Dr. Woof.” (He knows
who he is.) Would I, he commented diffidently after a while,
be interested in hearing about the San Francisco Jacks? And
what might they be? I inquired. A men’s masturbation club.
Yow. I went on red alert, yanked out my pad, and sat down.
For the next two hours, I scribbled frantically and murmured
occasional questions. Eventually I staggered out with a large
bag of documents to the drugstore across the street, which
had a photocopier. The machine faced a floor-to-ceiling window
on the street, so it was rather skittishly that I copied my
way through copious and explicitly illustrated articles about
the Jacks, back issues of their yearbook, flyers and handbills
about sex parties, and the kind of sex “ephemera” that both
Alfred Kinsey and Edwin Meese might have killed for—for
different reasons.
Hot damn, the adult phenom was sure bigger
than I thought, and that put the boys’ camaraderie
in a much more interesting light. What
else could I find out? I went digging in all kinds
of sex books, I surfed the Web, and I went
back to Celebrate the Self. One lead eventually
led to another, sometimes in surprising directions. For
example, for a while Rodale Press put out a magazine called
Men’s Confidential, which had actually surveyed readers in
1996 about “group masturbation.” Hmmm. Dr. Woof had preferred
the term “social masturbation.” Hell, either way, the
whole concept was an oxymoron. Since Dr. Woof’s expression
evoked for me a nice game of bridge or perhaps charades,
I decided to think of my topic as group masturbation.
What struck me pretty quickly was that the earliest known
book on autoeroticism—the eighteenth-century anti-masturbation
tract Onania—mentioned both boys’ and girls’ groups.
In utter horror and disgust, of course:
Would all Masters of Schools have but a strict Eye
over their Scholars; (amongst whom nothing is
more common, than the Commission of this vile
90 EVERYTHING YOU KNOW ABOUT SEX IS WRONG