Good Sex Illustrated (13 page)

“Yes, it’s called masturbation. That big guy from eighth grade’ was discovering the pleasure gotten from his own body, without a partner. That’s why it’s “for one.”

“Andyou do it all alone?”

“You touch your sex organs. In high school you’ve probably heard the expression jerk off,’ haven’t you? (but I prefer using the accurate term, masturbation).”

“Ah, yes!”

“Well, that’s the way you have pleasure for one. And I think that the graffiti by the big guy from eighth grade is only a sign that this boy is unhappy and can’t talk to his father about the problems he’s having with puberty… When parents refuse to provide their children with information. .. the troubled child becomes anxious, he feels abandoned. Losing interest in work, he withdraws more and more. He’ll end up, for example, writing on the door of his locker, merely to protest his sexual destitution!”

“Is masturbation not allowed because it’s dangerous?”

“No, masturbation isn’t wrong or dangerous. But if a child gets to like it, it will be harder later to love someone else… And pleasure is better when it’s shared. It’s doubled, you know what I mean?”

Sylvie
(who “listened absent-mindedly”)
concludes logically: “Jean, no writing on doors for you! All you have to do is reread the book with Dad…”

Don’t worry, little policewoman: Jean will never write on doors, nor walls, nor protest posters. This is a
fully devebped high school student,
he’ll be a hardworking schoolboy, a manageable conscript; he won’t “protest” his “sexual destitution”—nor anything else, either.

Actually, what is a “sexual destitution,” and how do you cure it? By masturbating? No. By having sex with a girl? No. With a boy? No. With a goldfish, a double amputee, a pair of ankle boots, an enema tube, a corpse, a piece of calf’s liver? No. With Mom? No. With Dad? Aw, come on…

No. You take care of it by avoiding three dangers designated by the book, and thus imposing upon yourself the three severe rules that follow:

“don’t ‘isolate’ yourself;

“have a ‘taste for work’…;

“talk with your father about the ‘problems brought on by puberty.’”

How novel: when temptation seizes you, you don’t pray any more, and the book you run to to save your soul is no longer a missal, either; it’s the
Hachette Encyclopedia.
Aside from that, the formula is still the same—the nudist father replaces the priest in his cassock, that’s all.

What’s Dad going to say, since any positive solution to “sexual destitution” has been prohibited? But of course he’ll say the most positive thing in the world: stay near us, work and wait. Let’s reread the book together. Look at the father, mother, baby. It’ll all be yours some day. Doesn’t that make it worth suffering a bit? Yes, Father, I’m ashamed of myself, I will think of Saint Family and I won’t do it any more. I don’t want to ruin my chances of being a Father “later on.” Excellent, my son. Besides, when you’re 14, I’m going to let you masturbate—the accurate term.
Moderately: 2 times a week at 14, 3 to 4 times a week at 16,
according to the magazine
Parents,
1971. And you wonder: how do the parents in question manage to assure these healthy rates; does it have to be done in front of them? By what kind of spying on bedrooms or dirty linens do they become
aware of the fact that their child is incurring the habit of devoting himself immoderately to practices of such a nature,
which will prompt them,
Parents
continues, to
notify the doctor or psychologist who alone will know how to design the appropriate treatment.

O.K., a treatment: since jerking off is “neither a vice nor a danger,” but is prohibited even so, it certainly had to be a disease. Can you catch it from toilet seats?

Seems that you can, if you stay on one too long. All of a sudden, an icy dizziness seizes you, with horror you notice your own fingers “touching” your own “sexual organs,” and—boom!—you’re sick.

Detailed and precise as it is when it’s a matter of orgasms leading to breeding or of the positions of a foetus, the text remainsquite vague when it comes to this strange childhood disease. Let’s reread the father’s explanations and try to put them together into a coherent whole.

A boy, it says, discovers this solitary pleasure because his parents refuse to inform him (about the subject of conjugal pleasures?). He feels abandoned, so he isolates himself. Hmm. Strange remedy for abandonment. Once he’s alone and upset, he touches his own body, a bizarre, paradoxical action that people with healthy minds don’t do. But it’s because nobody loves him, and this isn’t very smart, because it will keep him from loving others later on. In other words, he’s touching himself because he’s alone, and he’ll remain alone because he’s touched himself.

Likewise, in summing up the arguments that “define” masturbation, we discover in condensed form a remarkable assertion:
pleasure for one is obtained by means of the expression
to jerk off,
an inaccurate term.

That’s what feels good, inaccurate terms? And what is it, exactly, touching? What do you touch? The “penis”? The “testi—
ahem?
” With your thumb? Your index finger? The cat’s tail? A pair of tweezers? Like when you wash yourself, pulling down that little
fold of skin, the foreskin
? Holding all of it in your hand? which one? Do you do it roughly? gently? for how long? Is it “enough” to touch it with the end of your finger and then take it away very very fast, like when you touch a candle flame? It stings? Is “the penis” having an “erection”? Even when you’re not sleeping? “Do you have to move” your hand? Do you “discover the movement”? Do you have to “have sperm,” or does it work without it? So, is “sexual pleasure” possible before puberty? Why didn’t you say so, Dad? Do girls also “touch” themselves? How do they do it, if all they have is “just a vagina”? Is it “orgasm,” like when Dad makes a baby with Mom? Are you sittingdown? Standing? On all fours? Hopping? With your legs in the air? Is it okay to watch? Can you sniff it? Can you put a finger in your butt? Two? Should you hide? In “a locker room”? And what if I touch myself in front of someone, is that still “for one”? It’s not “shared”? You’re sure? But if I touch him and he touches me this time, isn’t it sharing? Why do you say no? It’s no longer “sharing” as soon as you put your fingers there? So, you need a knife and fork, like at the table, when you “feel like some pastry”? Do you keep your hands behind your back when you make love? Where are you allowed to put them? Do you smack Mom in the face if she “touches” your “sex organs” before your “penis slips inside instinctively”? Is that why people get divorced? And why does “pleasure for one” make “the other guys in my class” laugh? Then, is it fun to be “unhappy”? Since our friends touch themselves, why haven’t we ever tried, whereas we’re free and not “ashamed of our bodies”? Why is it we never know anything any more when Dad explains things but know a bunch of things when Dad explains nothing? What about you Dad, do you jerk off? {
9
}

Explain the math to me, too, Dad. Why is pleasure “doubled” when it’s “shared”?

If I cut an apple in two, two of us can eat it, but each of us only gets half. What’s more fun, eating an apple all by yourself or half an apple with somebody? It depends on whether you really like apples or that other person, right? But if I want to double the pleasure, I need two apples, not one. So if I jerk off twice, won’t that double it?

And let’s say: today I have an apple, and I give all of it to somebody; but tomorrow I have another apple, and I eat it all by myself. Is that bad? Do you really have to cut up pleasure for it to exist? But if it’s doubled when there’s two, it must be tripled when there’s three, quadrupled when there’s four, centupled when there’s a hundred of you, right? Can a hundred people do it together? And if I get used to sampling it all alone, why is it that I won’t love anybody else any more? Is it that good all by yourself and that bad with others?

It’s clear how the prohibition against masturbation is reinstated: jerking off is neither physically dangerous nor perverted, you can’t catch tuberculosis or, as family medicine has confirmed for less than a century, Pott’s Disease. But this is a thousand times worse: you become unfit for love, unhappy, lonely, a deviant—a pariah. In short, jerking off is a psychological sin followed by social damnation.

Thus, in the discourse of the educator, we have a prohibition that no longer functions by the threat of direct punishment but by a kind of blackmail using “happiness.”

Such a metaphysics copies that of the Church, and serves the same purpose. In the past, you lived your “earthly” life in preparation for your Salvation in the next: you had to suffer temporarily in order to be eternally happy. Brought down to earth, that system hasn’t changed: the human being has some years of apprenticeship (family/school) that redeem him from his original sins (bestiality, ignorance, pointlessness, perversity, oedipal behavior) and prepare him for the beyond: adult happiness (production, ownership, power). And depending on what you’ve done during childhood, you’ll go to paradise or to hell, once you grow up.

There is therefore nothing new about what I call blackmail using happiness: it’s the stakes that have been brought nearer and that have been incarnated here down below. Indoctrination merely works better. The writers of the past denounced the “impiety” of their contemporaries, whom the prospect of eternal happiness wasn’t enough for remaining resigned to the suffering inflicted by the class in power. Now that the happiness isn’t consumed beyond the clouds any more, these moralists have nothing left to criticize: because by the most complete submission, each of us strives to obtain these visible, factory-made pleasures that come from familiar sources. It’s just a matter of social conformism, rewarded day after day; and the only hell becomes being different—not belonging to the privileged bourgeoisie, or at least to its workforce.

All those who blemish the smooth, clean image of capitalist prosperity are put on the sidelines, far from our streets, public places, daily life, contact with others; countless official or secret prisons hide the millions and millions of men and women who don’t match the proper model—underpaid workers, whether French or immigrant, indigent old people, orphans, the physically ugly, the “handicapped,” the infirmed, law-breakers, “deviants,” those “with a screw loose,” dissenters, loners, simpletons. And now we know what the Elect we were told about in the catechism look like, those to whom paradise-society opens its gates: the
Encyclopedia
has 90 pages of photos. The young-but-not-too-insipid-looking senior executive in perfect health, with his orthodox values, a model consumer and high-techproducer with a hyperregulated brain; he and his livestock represent both what you have to be to deserve happiness and what kind of happiness you get. (No need to point out the similarity between these images and those used in ads for ordinary or luxury products: advertisings “modern man” has only one face, whether it’s to sell pro-birth values or razor blades, the government in power or cheese “slowly and naturally ripened in cellars.”)

And in a society where all people talk about are defiance, challenge, revolution, never has the respect for social codes been so great, adherence to the system more unconscious or avid, never have we had to do so much to receive so little. Vigilant spying on one another; the deprecation and expulsion that results from the slightest deviance from class stereotypes, from the clan, the family; that unbelievable mixture of aggression, greed and denial that define our relations with others; our “private life,” conceived as a state of blissful retreat in comparison to our unbearable “social life” (institutions, work, living under the same roof with someone): all of it adds up to a host of pressures that are so overwhelming and so irrefutable that it’s redundant to preach that human beings should submit to them; they know very well what happens when they’re careless enough to deviate from them, no matter how slightly.

Because deviance signifies a lot more than difference: it means that you’re placing yourself in the hands of the other, the hands of power; that you’re ceasing to be an independent—i.e., redeemed— individual and that everyone will have the right to cast the first stone; that you’re becoming a “special case”—a discredited member of society.

Too long a nose, too short in height, a slightly flat chest, an idea that’s a bit new immediately put your right to exist in danger. And among our people, prosperity, a great upsurge in racism andsegregation are the most visible aspects of a mania for discrimination found everywhere, about everything, all the time, a paranoid mechanism that degrades our perception of others and of ourselves.

Beyond what is politely called the social classes, our society tends to fragment into an infinite number of “minorities,” families, formed officially or not by those whose particular peculiarity differentiates them from the accepted model—they’re everywhere. From “Handicapped Family Names” (for people who think they have a ridiculous last name) to the homosexual, the range of the “abnormal” is limitless, because everything that refers to a human being, everything that makes him visible is now a reason for persecution— or creates the feeling that you’re inferior to others and therefore ill adapted for the path to happiness. In addition, normality is sold to those who can pay for it; it will increase their value on the sexual, professional and cultural—not to mention, ethnic—market. Among plastic surgery for the nose, boobs or butts; the rectification of brains and morals; enculturation by mail; huge sales of uniformity of every feather (clothes, furniture, food, newspapers); even the array of dyed-in-the-wool antiestablishment stuff that allows you to pass unnoticed (noticed/valorized) in student neighborhoods (the book you must have under your arm, the American-style thrift-store junk you must have on your ass), we see the same business frenetically distributing signs of belonging, transmitting order, self-effacement, orthodoxies—accesses to happiness.

I’m recalling these obvious things to point out that propaganda based on blackmail using happiness, far from being an easing of an old, repressive system, is resorting to real forces and sources of authority that currently regulate coexistence among human beings. Hand in hand with this theoretical order, these laws and this explicit ideology is that empirical and voracious order that allchildren and adults, rebels and reactionaries, poor and rich, clever and imbecilic understand, respect, reproduce without being asked to and reinforce without being forced to. At a last degree of strangulation, faced with the impossibility of existing and desiring, members of a moribund society are using the following tactic: they collect from the rubbish of a ruined order any shred of code, rules or prohibition available and fashion it into an instrument of savage power over others—then use that weapon pitilessly, until they’ve managed to save their own hides.