Years ago I was negotiating the large Holland Park roundabout, which was at the time called Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, and after a manoeuvre in opposition to a woman driver adjacent to me, which I cannot honestly recall as being my fault or hers, she shouted (indiscernibly) an insult and gestured with her hand what her opinion of me was — that I was a wanker (in US English, a jerk-off).
This morning, the question came to me (pun intended): why is being a wanker considered such a bad thing, that we can use it to slander another with the intention of making them feel less than a real man (I think it remains an insult towards men rather than to women mostly)? It’s something that apparently a large percentage of the population do, so we can I guess, call someone a wanker with some degree of accuracy, and yet it is not something we want to be labelled as.
It’s selfish. Being a wanker is a self-serving, self-centred and self-obsessed activity at it’s basic daily level. When I wank, it is (with exceptions) solely to satisfy my own “itch”, to sexually arouse and gratify myself to the exclusion of everybody else (with exceptions). I’m free of having to consider another person’s feelings or sexual needs (with exceptions). I can be as quick or slow, as indulgent or cursory as I want to be at that moment.
Wanking isolates me and insulates me, emotionally, in my mind, and most often physically too, from everyone else and everything else. I am not just solely focusing on pleasuring myself, but it also acts as a filtering out of the rest of my life. Wanking detaches me, just as sex can, and can even give me an ecstatic moment.
So, back in the 90s at Shepherd’s Bush roundabout, and on my ongoing journey east toward Notting Hill Gate, as the image of my accuser’s hand-signalling stayed impressed on my retinas, I found myself asking a question: what’s the psychological impact of wanking a lot?
I had read quite a few women’s magazines in my pursuit of understanding the opposite sex, during the 1980s, and was aware of a general and long standing trend in such publications and in many books, to teach and encourage women to get to know their bodies more, and to explore masturbation and the erotic art of self-pleasuring (these are observations not judgements), and it suddenly occurred to me that one strong aspect of female emancipation, at least in the latter part of the 20th century and up to the present day, had been to help women to become wankers. To become more self-centred, self-serving and self-obsessed. One could argue, which is what I concluded at the time, that this campaign for female onanism had not necessarily brought about pure liberation, but unintentionally had induced the wholesale, blind adoption of one of the, shall we say, least commendable and poorly regarded of male traits, alongside the subsequently associated mindset.
In my own early sexual exploration, I had noticed how different my feelings and energies were from climaxing solo, to climaxing inside a woman (vaginal), and even the subtle emotional and energetic differences produced by coming in her mouth or of withdrawing before ejaculation and coming on her. I expect many women will be able to discern and describe their own different experiences from the varied sexual permutations they have encountered.
So I ask the open question to you all: has the social conditioning of women to become as big a load of wankers as men, been of real benefit to the individual and to society as a whole? Are we better off having more wankers in the world now?
A suggestion before responding: make yourself comfortable and have a good, self-focused wank, and see for yourself what is going on in your psyche before, during and after satisfying yourself.
I’m genuinely interested to hear what people have to say about this, to have an open discussion, rather than casting aspersions over the practice of masturbation. I’m fully aware it will never stop, that almost every human will be a wanker at some time or another in their lives, that it can be very healing for the individual, even a sacred act, that it can certainly be relieving of stress and tensions, and it is not helpful to feel guilt and shame about doing it. So this essay really is enquiring and not aiming to be judgemental.
Declaration of transparency: I myself am a wanker.
