SEXIS WRONG

Sin, the Elder Boys Teaching it to the Younger....)
(1724)
~
My sad Case is, that when I was a young Girl of
between 15 and 16 Years of Age, at the Boarding-
School, being entic’d and shew’d the way by 3 of
my School-Fellows, older than my Self, which lay
in the Chamber with me, two Beds being in the
Room, I did as they did...and I thought it was pleasing
enough. (1724)
The later medical classic Onanism, by respected Swiss doctor
Samuel Tissot, is considered the source of all of those
terrifying myths about masturbation—that it would make you
go blind and crazy. Tissot also referred to groups:
[A] whole school sometimes strove by this practice,
to...keep themselves awake during the lectures
upon scholastic metaphysics, delivered by a
sleepy professor.... Some years since, it
was discovered in the city, that a company
of libertines, fourteen or fifteen
years old, used to assemble to practice
this vice, and that a whole school is still
polluted by it. (c. 1760)
The other thing that I found out pretty quickly was that group
masturbation had been virtually unstudied, in kids or adults.
While the phenomenon theoretically had been under everybody’s
nose since the early 1700s, I couldn’t find much about
it, and I found far more in popular writing and on the Web
than in scholarly work. Could this be a new intellectual find?
An unexplored Island of Interesting Stuff? Lemme at it! I detoured
from my masturbation book for a while to intensely
focus on this almost unacknowledged variation.
Boys Have Circle Jerks—Do Girls?
I started with a little study of my own about circle jerks—
because, paraphrasing Willie Sutton, that’s where the data
were, or at least more data. Circle jerks have been considered
a guy thing, but Onania mentioned girls. Would I find girls’
stories? From every printed source I could lay my hands on, I
collected over 100 anecdotes about youthful shared masturbation.
(I avoided the Net since I wanted old as well as new
stories, and because on the Net fantasy mixes unpredictably
with fact.) Most of the stories came from published books
and from issues of that Celebrate the Self magazine (CTS ).
The editor—by now, one of my co-conspirators—included a
flyer about my research with one issue, so I received more
stories in letters and emails.
In addition, I added questions about group masturbation to a
longer sex survey conducted by an academic friend of mine.
He had recruited several classes of Midwestern college students
to fill out his questionnaire, and I managed to piggyback
onto the project. Among the students, four supplied stories
about youthful groups.
Of course, these 100-plus anecdotes would never impress
the statistically savvy. But I could not be accused of wasting
taxpayers’ money! And the stories did give an idea of the
types and range of experiences among both boys and—as I
found—girls. Here are a few of the men’s stories about childhood
and adolescence:
The circle jerk—that’s one of my first memories.
We all stood around in a circle, told stories about
girls, or rubbed our penises until we got hard-ons.
Then we ejaculated. The purpose was to see who
could ejaculate the farthest. (#41 – Farrell, The
Liberated Man, 1974)
~
Circle jerks have been considered
a guy thing, but Onania
mentioned girls.
Did you guys ever have a Boners Club? It was just
about the time a lot of us were getting our puberty
hairs [sic]. In the evening, around bedtime,
we would all sit around and try to get a boner.
We’d sit and think and think as hard as we could
about some girl we couldn’t quite get all the way
with, and hope we could get it hard. (#42 – Farrell,
1974)
~
In a certain [high school],…boys had holes in the
pockets of their trousers ad stuprum mutuum faciendum
[to faciliate mutual defilement] during the
lessons, in the presence of their professors. (#100
– Talmey, Love, 1919)
~
Friends had been telling me about “this neat feeling”
and I had also been checking things out on my
own. Eventually a friend and I tried masturbating
together and we both found out what it was like.
(#6 – Haas, Teenage Sexuality, 1979)
~
When I was in about the 7th grade...[t]wo of the
other kids in the car pool and I were tight j/o [jack
off] buddies.... I would sit in the middle and lean
forward against the back of the front seat and talk
to the guys in front.... [T]his made it impossible
for anyone to see that my buddies each had one
of their hands in my crotch, rubbing my hard cock
THE CIRCLE GAME 91