Review
Let's get right to the point, no tiptoeing around the edges, no silly euphemisms, no hiding behind the niceties of church, religion, morality, politeness, and our tender feelings, no shhhhhhhhhhhs, no whispers from Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts: This is a book about masturbation. There. We've said it. It wasn't so bad, was it? 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. This isn't your ordinary Sunday school or public-school fare. Certainly it's the most talked-about subject on the planet, and next to eating and breathing the most practiced of all human activities.But talk about it? For most of us, it's uh, uh, Look what happened to Dr. Jocelyn Elders, when U.S. Surgeon General suggested that high schools talk about masturbation. She was gone faster than Dad's fist could slam on the locked bathroom door bellowing, "What's going on in there?. 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? Tiefner says masturbation should be recognized as a "positive aspect of childhood. While Blank's book won't be on any Sunday school reading lists, or show up any time in the next few centuries in public-school health courses, its publication is another small stamp of approval merely by its appearance. Blank, with this book, peels back another layer of the onion of existence of what it means to be human. -- From Independent Publisher
