Joani Blank, Leonore Tiefer "First Person Sexual." Women and men write about self-pleasuring.
In "First Person Sexual," Joani Blank has collected 43 accounts by men and women of masturbation experiences, many of them the first time they "got off," that is, had an orgasm. Certainly it's the most talked-about subject on the planet, and next to eating and breathing the most practiced of all human activities.
In the foreword, sexologist and author Leonore Tiefer writes: "Sexuality can be subversive, as activists and theorists on both the left and right have known. Literary and artistic depictions of masturbation symbolize resistance to authority and display an existential commitment to sensory and sensual pleasure." While reading about how others "pet the kitty" or "play the one-man band" is mildly titillating, in the end it's like watching hard-core porn videos: There's so much sameness that sex becomes ho-hum. What Joani Blank offers in "First Person Sexual" is permission-giving. Hey it's all right to masturbate. Everybody does it (and, as a friend of mine once said, if 9 out of 10 guys admit they masturbate in the shower, it's a good guess that the 10th guy is lying) so why shouldn't you, and not feel guilty about it? Blank, with this book, peels back another layer of the onion of existence of what it means to be human.
Paperback. 1997.
New book. Very slightly warped from sitting on a shelf.