CARNAL NATION

Once upon a time there was an influential African-American public servant who stepped up when called to national office, changing the character of the country at least a little, changing the terms of the debate.

Her name was Dr. Joycelyn Elders, she was our Surgeon General under Bill Clinton, and the debate in question (though she had worthy opinions about many other things) was about masturbation. Specifically (this is the question she got fired for answering), is there room for discussion about masturbation when we talk to youth about sexuality? Elders said, as every historian and politicized self-love fan knows, that masturbation "is perhaps something that should be taught" about when sex ed class rolls around.

Fewer than ten words—ten eminently sensible words—and the groundbreaking doctor was out on her ass.

And the Solo Sex-Positive revolution had begun.

Actually, saying this is a little misleading. That revolution had been going on for twenty years by then. The real public launch of the Pro-Masturbation Party was probably the National Organization for Women's conference on sexuality in 1973, when Betty Dodson, "the Mother of Masturbation," presented a slideshow of her vulva drawings. These lovely images were done in the context of her art—Dodson was (and is) a notable fine artist, at that point indisputably the most famous female erotic artist in the world (maybe even in history)—but also in service to the sex education quest she had undertaken: helping women learn to masturbate and to get comfortable with it and their genitals. Betty made her reputation over the course of the next couple of decades teaching women, and to a lesser degree men, about masturbation—first in her Bodysex groups and then via her influential book Sex for One.

By the time Elders said her sensible words, I'd also been educated in a profoundly unexpected and powerful way by someone with the same message: Bob McAllister was a guy who in the 1980s ran the state office of HIV education in Oregon. When he got the job word flew around the state, from one community-based organization or queer group to the next, that he was a Mormon, and people freaked out—til they met him, and realized (probably a reasonable thing to remember in the wake of Prop 8) that not all Mormons are created equal. Bob caused big waves in Eastern Oregon when he toured around to talk to parents.

"What would you say if I told you there's one foolproof way to prevent your kids from contracting AIDS, but we're not talking about it in the high schools today?" Bob would ask, and the parents would clamor to know what the secret was.

You guessed it: Masturbation, then as now pretty much the safest form of sex anyone can have, at least if you keep the vacuum cleaner out of it.

So the public health community had it well, ahem, in hand. After McAllister and before Elders there was, of course, Surgeon General C. Everett Koop, who looked like the Kentucky Fried Chicken guy but included masturbation very prominently on his list of safer sex practices, mailed at government expense to every household in the United States in 1988. Maybe this unexpected degree of sensibleness from a Republican administration—Ronald Reagan's, yet!—had lulled Dr. Elders into a false sense of security (and perhaps, too, the very fact she was asked the question was a set-up), but soon William Jefferson Clinton, the president whose later antics made the world wonder if he in fact knew the definition of the word "sex" (and, come to think of it, who might himself have been well-served by masturbating a little more often), had shown her the door.

That's when Good Vibrations stepped up to the plate, and that's why we celebrate May as National Masturbation Month today. Good Vibes staff (I among them) met to vent our spleen about the outrageousness of the Elders firing. What could we do? It couldn't be left to stand without major, ongoing public comment—not just a spike in editorials and then a slow, or more likely quick, fade. National Masturbation Month—birthed by a group of women at your friendly San Francisco sex toy store—intended to do two things: keep up the discourse about Elders and her unjust firing, and make people talk about masturbation... and never stop talking. Who better than Good Vibes staff to know how many people needed support and advice about the very act (or thought) of masturbating? The first things we had to do for many of our customers involved reassurance, making sure they knew it was OK to masturbate in the first place. And now this! We felt we absolutely had to strike at the heart of the shame so many people felt about solo sex, an activity so commonplace, natural, pleasurable and healthy that it's said that "ninety-eight percent of us masturbate, and the other two percent are liars."