Great fun! The Masturbate-a-Thon was held Saturday, and competitors (looking to best the world time record) started at 11 a.m.; I was running around getting ice and stuff, that’s always my last-minute job, and got there at 3 or so. By 4:30 it was time to start the webcast (it was a little late; the whole thing is always a technical clusterfuck because we only do it one time per year and there’s a little whell-re-inventing involved, but our tech crew volunteers their time and expertise and they’re *amazing*).

So I put on my new sparkly Masturbate-a-Thon t-shirt (you can get a nice one from masturbate-a-thon.com, it’s an awesome Mona Caron design – but mine is the only one with sparkles) and sat and interviewed our special guests and random fabulous people in attendance, like April Flores, our pornstar celebrity co-host; Sister Roma; Kirk Read; the team from the Lusty Lady Theatre; Theresa from CarnalNation.com, who was one of our featured masturbators (and to date our #1 $-earner—we’ll know at the end of the month whether she stays ahead in that race, since people can still donate via the website and sponsored individuals may still have sponsor money coming our way). Also did a great interview with Ed Ehrgott, who for three years held the world record; now he is working with Nellie Wilson to do a masturbation education project online, the Sacred Touch School.

Finally it was time to screen the Good Vibes IXFF video (gv-ixff.org – coming soon to eight cities around the US!), which gave ME time to go into the masturbatorium. I was a feature, too, and who knows if I earned any money for the Center for Sex & Culture (since the whole shindig was a benefit, our largest of the year) – but I had a fabulous time watching the GV filmfest, enjoying the engineering marvel that is the Hitachi Magic Wand, and was smack-dab better Lusty Lady Violet, who was also Hitachi’ing her way to many orgasms, and Ed, who is a GREATE masturbator, and the ultimate winner of the time competition, Masa, all the way from Japan and there representing the next big sex product thing, Tenga (coming soon to GV!), a men’s masturbation sleeve that must work great, because he went for 9 hours and 58 minutes! Yes!! He is a Masturbation Jedi!! He got mondo applause.

Then we, like, mopped the floors until midnight. But it was worth it! We’ll be putting more details soon on the website – plus there’s more info there about our other sponsors, including LELO, Fleshlight, Big Teaze Toys, Hathor lube (GV), and Blowfish. We’ll schedule next year’s extravaganza soon – calendar it and come join us!

Tweet! – CQ

Are you going to the Masturbate-a-thon? You don’t have to go in person — you can participate (or just support) from the comfort of your own laptop. The event will even be webcamed (well, a portion of it — hose attending who wish to be on webcam will be seen).

Find out m… m… more!

at:

 www.masturbate-a-thon.com

Need proof? Just check out the Masturbate-a-thon. That’s right, it’s an event to rival all marathons… for those of you training for the AidsLifeCycle right now, I’m sure you’re secretly wishing the event was based on a different kind of pedaling!

Good Vibrations sponsors the event, held at the Center for Sex and Culture on Sunday, May 15th at 3:00PM. For those of you living outside the SF Bay Area, have no fear; you can participate from wherever you are, and, you can even tune into the festivities from the comfort of your own computer. That’s right, this year the even is going to be on the net in real time. Hosted by Nina Hartley and Tom Orr, it’s sure to be a hit so register now! Go to Masturbate-a-thon.

If you need some inspiration, be it vibration or suction, reading materials or a DVD, hit up Good Vibrations for some accessories. Good Vibrations created National Masturbation Month eleven years ago, under the premise that sexual pleasure is a birthright and that masturbation is a powerful source of sexual gratification.

Since May is Masturbation Month AND we are a sponsor of the Center for Sex and Culture’s Masturbate-a-Thon, I though it would be entirely appropriate to delve a little deeper into this site and the woman who founded it.

Introducing Boots Boccaleone!!

How long has www.redhandedporn.com been active? How did you come up with the concept? Were you involved in the adult industry before redhandedporn?

Red Handed Porn is the first project of The Good Porn Company. We started production and programming about two years ago, but didn’t open the site for business until mid-January of this year. We started making porn because we wanted to see real people having real sex. We veered towards masturbation because we wanted to give these real exhibitionists a way to participate in porn without risking sexual disease. Since then, the site has been evolving on its own. Our performers and volunteer staff have stretched and reformed any notions I had about masturbation through their amazing creative efforts. I am regularly surprised during the course of shooting, and I like it that way.

When did you first start watching porn? Do you have a favorite movie? Performer?

Well … I was 35, 2 years ago. I never watched porn until I started making it. I really find anorexic women and fake tits unattractive. Put those two characteristics together and my silicone cock just wilts with disappointment. I didn’t invest much energy into seeking what might be available until I accidentally happened into this career. I don’t yet have favorite performers or movie because I am still pretty uneducated about the industry. Sometimes I think this is a huge hindrance to making a profitable porn website, and sometimes I think my ignorance allows me to make more entertaining porn because I am not saddled with all the expectations of the industry.

I read on your site that you used to work as an mechanical engineer – how did you get from there to running a porn site?

Really, my first and only job in mechanical engineering was working on the largest particle accelerator in the world … really! I loved the work, but I hated the way my co-workers treated me. Between the physicists, engineers and tech guys, women and people of color were scarce and usually someone’s administrative assistant. My co-workers were visibly uncomfortable, unsure how to proceed now that the boy’s club also contained a woman. There were other genuinely well-meaning guys who were stunned and fascinated about having a woman in their midst. I really didn’t want that attention either, I just wanted to be a competent person doing a job. I started engineering because of a passion for green transportation. I started to get pretty distressed about the sexism as soon as I started working. I decided I was going to have to find a job where I would be the only engineer.

So, I looked on craigslist and the first job I saw fitting the bill was for fuckingmachines.com. They wanted an engineer to design better machines for their models to use in shoots. I spent a couple weeks thinking it over and trying to decide if I wanted to be involved in the porn industry. A lot of my friends had subscribed to kink.com sites or had been at kinky events in their space. So, I sent them my resume. When I showed up for the interview the job description had changed and they were now looking for a director/engineer. It sounded like fun, so I decided to give it a try. Really quickly I realized there was stuff I appreciated about their porn, and stuff that I thought could be better. When they decided not to hire me, I really wanted to take a stab at making the kind of porn that would appeal to me.

Why focus on masturbation? What do you feel is special about watching people masturbate as opposed to watching two people have sex?

The thing that I find hottest in sex is watching someone get really turned on and come. When you watch someone masturbating you get to see what truly gets them off. They don’t have to compromise for their partner, and we work hard to avoid their pandering for our cameras.

I think too there is an education value in what we do since we document people’s masturbatory fantasies. I find myself surprised by both similarities and differences to the ways I have masturbated or seen partner’s masturbate.

Redhandedporn features a lot of performers who are not usually represented in mainstream porn – trans, genderqueers, larger bodies, people of color. Can you talk about finding people willing to filmed? Do you seek out diverse representations?

Initially we had a really hard time finding performers. I think it is a hard thing to trust a stranger with your body and sexual representation. Providing a truly good time for performers has been a mandate from the beginning, and word quickly spread amongst exhibitionists that we were a respectful venue for pornographic work.

Sexy is really a skill. It isn’t about your equipment; it is about what you do. There are huge numbers of people who are amazingly sexy and exhibitionists too who fall outside the typical porn look. They are looking for an outlet and we are looking for them. It is a perfect match.

I do think about the diversity of our performers. We release six episodes a month, and it is my hope that at least four of them will be really hot for any given person. Tastes are so diverse that we really have to be broad in our scope. I also hope that all of our work will be entertaining. We feature expansive and candid interviews at the beginning of each episode. They are the types of glimpses into a person’s sexual history that are rarely heard outside of bed. I think that adds value to our site.

Did you ever direct mainstream movies? What was your training or was it all DIY?

I have never participated in mainstream production or post. I learned those skills in the early 90’s when I got involved with San Francisco’s cable access channel. I did a wide variety of positions as a floater before I worked with some friends to produce a show of our own focused on youth activism. It was embarrassingly enough called “Hellavision”, and was sponsored by some young and local communists. San Francisco supervisor Chris Daly was one of our producers. We dissolved in strife over the role of art in activism right about the time that a cable company was interested in running our shows to a greater audience.

My first degree is in fine art, painting. I spent years and years self-employed as a graphic designer before I started doing engineering and programming. Red Handed Porn has been a project where I have been able to combine all my skills … except engineering.

DIY sites with adult content are popping up all over the website. What sets redhandedporn and other DIY sites apart from the mainstream porn producers and culture?

It isn’t just adult sites that are popping up. News, entertainment, video, blogs and other interesting sites are popping up over the internet, and they have huge attendances. Audiences are moving away from TV and movies towards these more genuine and original forms of expression. It is a new fresh take. Alternative porn offers these same things to the hackneyed porn industry.

How is the site doing? What kind of response are you getting from the media?

Well we have only been in business for four months. April the site got enough members that we are covering our basic costs. That was a milestone. Hopefully sometime soon, I can start pulling a salary too.

I don’t know if our site will ever be a huge or even medium sized. The thing about alternative media is that it stands beside the mainstream, providing options. It doesn’t really take over for the mainstream. Also, the deeper I get into porn the more I am sensing that shame and exploitation is integral to the experience of porn. Most porn consumers don’t want sex-positive representations.

My goal isn’t to be a millionaire though. I have lots of ideas for new porn sites and what I would like from Red Handed Porn is enough thriving that we can continue and expand.

So you are a co-sponsor of the Masturbate-a-thon. Is this your first time being involved with the Center for Sex and Culture? The Masturbate-a-thon?

Yes, this is our first time working with the Masturbate-a-thon and the Center for Sex And Culture. So far so good. I am hoping that the CSC will get the money it desperately needs from this event.

Thanks Boots! It was great getting to know you and hopefully we’ll see you again real soon!

Yes, I’m insanely late. I thought I posted this three months ago. Is it possible that I’m too Luddite to blog?

Anyhow, this is how that notorious trip to London-town ended up. We just had a meeting yesterday to try to plot another one next summer! And the Brits will have had a whole year to practice masturbation; I’m sure it will be stellar. Word has it the Aussies may be interested as well. Now, the wayback machine, to August:

Did anyone ever have a better nights’ sleep than this? A successful Masturbate-a-Thon under our belts (well, some of us more than others — I bet that Ruth woman, she of the nearly-50 orgasms, slept the sleep of the angels, unless she ate so much chocolate that she tossed and turned). And by the time Saturday night came around, I was WAY less jet-lagged.

Me, I slept well, and poor Robert slept all day. Really. He just couldn’t wake up, he’d put out so much of his already-low energy. So I went out to Camden Market with Clive, shopping for London snowglobes and Union Jack underwear, both of which can be had there, plus cute sexy dresses and punk clothing for people of all generations. I had to make it back to the Rookery Hotel to have an interview with London’s Bi Community News via Ian, whom we met aeons ago at a bisexuality conference. It was a pleasure to reconnect with him and we had a great chat — I’ll have to ask him if there’s an URL associated with that interview. We’ve been collecting links on the London ‘Thon, thanks especially to the amazing PR talents of Karin Tobiason, and a batch of those can be found below.

Karin, incidentally, has a secret life as an erotic artist. That’s how I met her, curating erotic art shows for Good Vibes back when that was my job; she just had a show of her torn-paper collages in the Good Vibrations Magazine.

Here are all the links I have at the moment: http://www.masturbate-a-thon.com/DC-pages/comments.htm

And here’s the one on YouTube, which is especially exciting because YouTube is so famous this week. Note, if you watch it, that it must have happened early enough in the ‘Thon that I was not yet entirely crispy-fried: http://youtube.com/watch?v=oORynpjNXkg

After the Ian interview wound down I managed to rouse Robert from his by-now-22-hour slumber. Maybe this is just how it is in Europe, and that’s where the Sleeping Beauty fairytale comes from. Was Sleeping Beauty really hellaciously jet-lagged? So the lot of us went out to a nice ’spensivo London dinner at a trendy joint called The Zetter. “The Lot” consisted of Robert and me, Karin, Ian, Clive, and his pals X and XX. We postmortemed the ‘Thon for everyone who hadn’t been there, but then talk turned to another of my pet enthusiasms: the Rocky Horror Picture Show. Like many of my generation, I found “Don’t Dream It, Be It” words to live by (can you tell?), but I note that the influence of the RHPC has followed me and succeeding generations down the years; in fact, I took the Center for Sex & Culture’s interns to see it at Oakland’s lovely Parkway Theatre just before we left for London. One of said interns was the Rocky Horror Club president at her East Coast women’s college. RHPC haas a college club? See, when you get older, naivite sets in all over again, just when you think you’ve shaken it off. Well, I’ll write about this more another time. But suffice it to say that the two new-to-me Londoners I met via Clive had a fabulous RHPC-related anecdote: They had honeymooned in New Zealand and happened to be in the home town of RHPC creator (and player of Riff Raff) Richard O’Brien when they *dedicated a statue to him*!

People, tell me there’s no future in being your own, freaky self. A *statue*!!

Say, if the Rocky Horror phenomenon changed your life, let me know. One of these days I’m going to write about it. And hey, does anyone have a picture of that statue? I’ll post it here if you send it!

And then we went to sleep, went to the airport, went home, and were jetlagged for Jesus. But a different Jesus, I think, than the one in that poor Green guy’s life.

I know, I know, it’s about time! I have a good excuse: All Has Been Chaos. We’ve had to rather suddenly move the Center for Sex & Culture (we knew when we went to London that it was pending, but we had given two whole months’ notice, and by the time we returned the situation had changed and we needed to get out by the end of August. Much gnashing of teeth and schlepping of sex books ensued).

More on this and our future plans another time, because I want to get back to the Masturbate-a-Thon. But if you are in a position to help CSC in its hour of need, please visit the website and see where to send checks or donate via PayPal: and thank you a million for pitching in.

Oh, AND — I was also distracted by yet another Masturbate-a-Thon, this one in Washington, DC, held last weekend. Well, it’s only right: that’s where we send all our big wankers here in the US. Right?

Geez, that verges on the masturbation-negative. I take it back.

Anyway, more about that one to come. Also a Londoner’s Masturbate-a-Thon testimonial, posted here a bit later today!

But let me take you back in the distant past (well, in blog years it’s ancient, huh? I know, I’ll get the hang of timely reportage eventually): It was 5. August in Clerkenwell, the London district neighboring on our lovely hotel across from Smithfield Market, where our friend Clive has managed to sleep okay on the Rookery floor in spite of the fact that the nervous North African night clerk has called to snag the sofa cushions back. By noon that day, we had gotten our jetlagged asses over to Drop Studio and entered the altered state that was the world’s (to date) most successful Masturbate-a-Thon.

Now, at a normal Masturbate-a-Thon (that is, one WE run), we would have spent the day frantically setting up a nice cushy masturbation-friendly environment, copying age statements and releases, and generally acting like crazed bureaucratic hostess-weasels. None of this was necessary at the UK Thon because other people did all that. And it was going to be on TV, so actual trained professionals did it: the seraglio look was very pretty and my only worry about the place was, as it had been when we saw it as an open, undecorated space, that there’d not be enough room for all the wankers.

But at noon they were just adding finishing touches, the cloth-walled rooms the large space had been subdivided into were not full of people yet, and Robert and I took seats in the small lounge to talk to the press.

And people, I am not exaggerating here: I talked to the press for the next six and a half hours! To put this into wank perpective for you, that’s the 2004 duration record, both male AND female. The men’s record has since been broken twice, as you may know, but that women’s record stands; neither were destined to be broken at the UK ‘Thon, though the shiny trophies to be awarded the winnders sat on the entry table to inspire people as they signed in.

So as I talked about masturbation, The Discourse, safer sex, and the differences between London and San Francisco with a stream of press people (and at least one author working on a book about sex in the UK), the actual masturbators themselves streamed steadily in. Some came by and picked up a copy of Razzle or one of the gay skin mags that had been donated. They self-selected into the room they wanted to occupy: women could pick a room with no men, and men could choose one with no women; anyone could occupy the mixed-gender space or step into the room full of cameras, where Liz and Rob stood ready to document anything and everything that happened.

The press conference commenced about noon. The official ‘Thon began at 2 pm. By that time we had our one picketer — word had it we were going to Be Picketed, but this was all the outrage, apparently, that London could muster: a lone fellow carrying a sign plaintively asking something along the lines of “Is This the Sort of Behavior We Want in Clerkenwell?” Interestingly, so fraught is the conversation about the effect of the press (already swirling, as I wrote in Part One, around this event because of Channel 4’s involvement) that people accused the picketer of being hired by the TV production company. Myself, I was rather sorry not to have had ten biddies wearing flowered dresses that made them look like sofas. That we did not was all the proof one needed, I think, that the TV people did NOT hire the one lonely guy. Wouldn’t they have arranged for soemthing more colorful?

Inside, as the wankatory rooms filled and the clothes check staff got in the swing of things, I talked to reporters from Spain, New Zealand, and all over England. There were podcasters and mainstream papers and everybody in between. A partial listing of press hits is on masturbate-a-thon.com, if you like looking such things up. Almost everyone was full of truly thoughtful questions, and I’ve never had such a day’s work in my life (nice if you can get it, as Billie Holliday sang… I used to hum that after punching the time clock at the Lusty Lady, on my way to the booth to masturbate all day). Substantive discourse about masturbation with the press! Well, how about that?

This love fest was interrupted occasionally by ‘Thon participants who came over to chat. Some were hijacked into press interviews themselves, some didn’t want to be put in the spotlight. Almost everyone said nice things about us bringing the ‘Thon to London, and the only real complaints we registered seemed to do with overcrowdedness and the fact that some of the straight fellows seemed to think there were not enough good-looking women to stare at. We pointed out that none of the pr had promised such a thing, and that in fact, if visual stimulation was important to them, the stack of Razzles was righton that table there.

Meanwhile the Marie Stopes gang, primary party staff, worked like troupers to get the people in the door and get them into the rooms where they could get themselves off. They did a completely professional and lovely job, even when Liz came out with her camera and bathed them in the glare of future minor celebrity. And they had even brought a Marie Stopes counselor, a lovely older lady who was on hand just in case the stress of public masturbation became too much and someone broke down. That did not appear to be a danger, so after several hours (and a few of her own press interviews), she went home.

Karin, GV publicist extraordinaire, had been working out some sort of press link with a Brit band who’d done a remake of the Good Vibrations song and wanted to sing it at the Masturbate-a-Thon. While this had seemed like a good idea when they cooked it up, there was some complicated TV reason why it couldn’t happen — but the whole band, Anti-Product, DID show up and hang around for a while, in their punky glammy band drag: they were quite fetching, and made me for a moment, before I realized who they were, believe that London’s old punk scene had turned out to masturbate. (There was one bisexual Brit with a mohawk in attendance, so perhaps I could be forgiven for thinking momentarily that we’d entered a time warp.)

Unbelievably, when the press finally filtered away at 7 pm or so, the ‘Thon staff sent us away to eat some dinner! Gosh, what a civilized land. Nice place around the corner, I believe called The Well. Then back again to see the whole thing wind down, and this, of course, is one of the most exciting times at any Masturbate-a-Thon, because people stagger out from the crowd and announce how many orgasms they had, or how long they’d been at it. In this case we had a clear winner for the “Longest Time Masturbated: Male” category. A lovely young man stumbled out (”I feel a wee bit unsteady on me pins,” he said, or something to that effect), followed by Liz and her cameras, because he was the Winner, with six-plus hours of time… and, as it turned out, six orgasms to his credit! VERY impressive indeed; that latter is a new world Masturbate-a-Thon record. The Brits, it seems, are good with orgasms, because the “Most Orgasms: Female” record was set at this event too, by Ruth from Coventry, at 49 orgasms. (”I was going for 50, really,” she lamented. “I guess I shouldn’t have foold around this morning!”) Ruth also made a case for being the next Cadbury spokeswoman, because she had done the math with her orgasms and the number of calories they burned. At about 60 per, she figured, she was allowed to eat a BIG chocolate bar to offset her losses!

We’re still waiting to hear what the total financial take was; it is very possible there will be a world record set in that arena as well. Many ‘Thon attendees stated specifially that they had come to support Marie Stopes International; it is clearly a respected entity in London, and the success of the event has everything to do with how involved MSI was. And the excellent work of the Marie Stopes crowd also paid off with another record: Most Attendees at a Masturbate-a-Thon. 154 people came through the doors! Our SF record is more like 125.

As the participants melted into the night it was champagne all around for the staff, then off to bed: and the supreme irony of the Masturbate-a-Thon organizer, who at the end of a fine event is often too tired to wank.

No, that’s not right. We came, they all came. One lady came 49 times! But I’m getting ahead of myself.

What follows is my travelogue of the days leading up to the first London Masturbate-a-Thon: Robert’s and my Tour de ‘Thon. Consider it the behind-the-scenes dish to accompany the forthcoming documentary which will air on UK Channel 4’s Wank Week.

And to think that the point of the whole thing (well, one of a number of points) was to compare how edgy we are in wank-friendly San Francisco with the shock of the Brits and their stiff upper lips. Hey, *they* have a Wank Week on TV, and we don’t! Who’s ahead of the game? And as you noted if you saw my Saturday (5. August) entry briefly noting the Masturbate-a-Thon’s success, more than upper lips got stiff.

CSC’s Masturbate-a-thon

I’ll be addressing the role of TV, actually press in general, in a future entry, so if this interests you, stay tuned. Apparently a fair amount of the UK press attention to this event had to do with Channel 4’s involvement, which was a good deal more controversial there than I think it would be here. And I want to get right on with telling you about our trip, so I’m going to address that topic later.

DAY 1:
That would be Monday, although, since we traveled from San Francisco to London, it telescoped into two days. It was a long and half-arduous flight; travel is hard for Robert, with his pain-related disability, and walking and queueing in airports is pretty awful too. The first step of the journey had us up way before dawn and then standing in a Delta line at the airport for 90 minutes; they literally had to hold the plane for us. But in New York we switched to MaxJet and traveled as comfortably as we ever have; good thing, because (as we’d told the documentary producers, who got us there in the first place) if R. were wrecked by traveling, there’d be no real point in bringing us over in the first place.

DAY 2:
Liz and her doc crew met us at Stansted airport, the better to document our jet lag. We met Liz in the spring when she came over to film our San Francisco Masturbate-a-Thon, and this time she had Rob with her doing sound, as she had in SF, and they walked backwards with their equipment, immortalizing our unsteady trip down a ramp with all our luggage packed onto a cart with a bum wheel. A London cabbie had brought them out to get us, in one of those taxis with jump seats, so while England’s green and pleasant land whizzed by outside, the camera looked up our noses as we foggily speculated at Liz’s insistance how the London ‘Thon would come off. They taped the cabbie giving his opinion too (he, like every cabbie we had, thought it was a dandy idea. “Why not, then?” seemed to be the united cabdriver response.)

I should note that Robert and I have been in London together only once before, a very brief visit that commenced at about 11 pm on a summer evening in 1994. We had just come over on a jetfoil from Belgium, through which we had trained while eating bread and chocolate. We’d been in Amsterdam at the AIDS conference, the one moved quickly from Harvard when the US refused to relax its policy of barring HIV-positive people even long enough to let the international delegates get in. In London we’d stayed in a not-very-charming neighborhood in a horrific bug-infested hotel which was our cabbie’s recommendation. It turned out to have upper floors populatd by dole cases, which meant that we ate baked beans and flabby bacon next to other bewildered tourists and a lot of resident junkies.

That having been our prior London experience, we were quite pleased to be delivered to the fabulous Rookery, a new-ish hotel meant to look very, very old (and occupying a seventeenth-century building). Our olde London experience, complete with a room named Clarice of Cokke’s Lane (for a whore who had once plied her trade on the alley just outside the city’s gates), promised to be a perfect cure for our heroin-and-limp-bacon memories, and indeed it was, complete with a basket of hot croissants every morning. But before we would be allowed to eat any of London’s newly fabulous food, we had a dragon to slay: Liz had booked us to debate a Christian homophobe.

SURREAL LIFE:
Around the block, in a vacant bar with good daytime lighting, Liz sat us on a sofa and aimed her camera at us while we argued with Stephen Green, a Brit holy-roller who, in a much different accent than we’re used to, assured us that we are going to hell. It seemed to us that he was in hell already, since he insisted that the Masturbate-a-Thon was a homosexual event and lost no opportunity to talk very graphically about gay men’s sexual practices. Now, there’s a word for this, and Robert and I coined it: absexuality, an orientation in which a person gets erotic pleasure or focus through a highly sexualized kind of opprobrium regarding other people’s sexual practices. (I write about it in Real Live Nude Girl, if you’re interested.) This guy could *not* stop talking about rimming, etc., and he could not handle it when we told him that people of all genders and orientations did all the things about which he was fulminating.

“The whole point of this,” I said, as he explained how the homosexual agenda (with a little help from the secular humanists) had coarsened England beyond compare, “is that people of every orientation and gender masturbate. This is not a gay event at all — this is for everyone.” It didn’t parse in Mr. Green’s anilinguistically-inclined brain. And maybe it was just the jet lag, but I felt myself in a time warp, as if it was the 1970s again and people actually talked about secular humanists and seemed to have just discovered that gay men had sex.

Poor guy. Liz had us talk to US anti-masturbators, too, back in May: a couple of adorable churchy white rappers from Sacramento, who hadn’t picked up the true gift of fulmination but had the best logo on their stuff: “Satan’s a pimp, don’t be his ‘ho!”. They even agreed with us, ultimately, that it was OK for you to masturbate on the phone with your wife when you were out on tour. Stephen Green couldn’t wrap his brain around this… not that he probably indulges in lustful thoughts about his wife at all. Those synapses don’t leave the topic of sodomy for long: only long enough to work in a Bible verse, or, proving that he isn’t really an American after all, a snippet of a John Donne poem.

I told Liz, who hadn’t actually gotten very much masturbation-related footage out of him, that she had succeeded in creating the most surral morning of my life. (Of course, this is partly because in Jet-Lag World, it wasn’t morning at all: it was 3 am at best.) She grinned the grin of a perverse media svengali. Hey, I’d have been proud of myself, too, for getting something like that odd hour to transpire. TV, playing god!

That afternoon we had to go back to the bar for another documentary responsibility, this one *far* nicer: meeting Tony Kerridge from Marie Stopes International, our beneficiary organization. (The Terrence Higgins Trust had also said a very reluctant yes to involvement, but they sent literally not a single volunteer, did not help with the press, and were clearly very nervous about any undue attention they might receive). Tony, a very savvy guy who had no problem working the Marie Stopes mission of international sexual health and family planning into the attention being given the Masturbate-a-Thon, came to the meeting with Helene, a MSI nurse who planned to be onsite at the ‘Thon to help ensure the health of all.

We had to stay up late enough to do a phone interview at 8 pm; then the jet lag was over, at least for the night.

DAY 3:
Karin Tobiason, Good Vibes press specialist extraordinaire, arrived. She’d been sent to help wrangle the whole thing, which had already promised to go out of control, media-wise. We had *far* more press attention for the London ‘Thon than we’ve ever had for a US event, and given that the Masturbate-a-Thon arose from a Good Vibrations think tank early in the history of National Masturbation Month (which also arose from GV’s brain trust, just after Joycelyn Elders was fired), it seemed wise to have someone on hand who could keep track of everything. We stumbled out to synchronize our watches at the closest awesome restaurant (The Fence on Cowcross: check out its sophisticated take on bangers and mash) while Robert slept. The neighborhood, once home to Clarice of Cokke’s Lane and other whores and cutpurses, is now crawling with young businesswomen in sexy shoes.

DAY 4:
Thursday; two more days til the Masturbate-a-Thon! And today the press attention starts in earnest. We went to Marie Stopes International’s HQ in Fitzrovia for the official press conference, though most media, Tony told us when we arrived, were holding out to attend the ‘Thon itself. On the way down the street we saw a curious sign on a door: right above the bell a little plaque read, “This is not a brothel!”

MSI, founded in 1923 by suffragist Marie Stopes (who is sort of the Margaret Sanger of the UK, if you will, and MSI something like our Planned Parenthood), has been providing family planning information and health services for lo these many years. One of our UK friends, on hearing that MSI was to be our beneficiary, said, “Oh, I went there as a kid with my dad. It turned out he’d gone in to get a vasectomy!” Posters about condoms and safer sex adorn the walls of the media offices, where Tony works. Since MSI has offices and clinics around the world, some were aimed at very different audiences, culturally.

We gave our pitch: the Masturbate-a-Thon’s history, our expectations of the event (we had no clue, in fact, but said we hoped for at least as much participation as we had in SF, and of course there was a world record to perhaps break). Questions, while pretty sophisticated, still focused closely on the “Shock the Brits” trope. Have these people forgotten they gave us punk rock? Goodness me. And they had a kind of brothel for everything under the sun back when the Americans hadn’t figured out how to make wooden fences yet. Brits *invented* kink! But perhaps the press is not being invited to sex parties these days.

We learned something new and useful: that the angle of erection considered inappropriate to show is derived from the shape of a peninsula in Scotland, the Mull of Kintyre. Of course! This from a nation that gave us our arcane system of weights and measures based on the length of kings’ thumbs and such; it made perfect sense. This tidbit for your (and my) next cocktail party came courtesy of the journalist from Razzle magazine, a fine old porno which, our friend Clive later told us, had not changed a bit since the 70s when he used to find discarded ones in trash bins. Razzle actually donated a case of mags to the ‘Thon. ID Lube had offered itself as a corporate sponsor: with porn and lube taken care of it seemed the only variable to a successful ‘Thon would be the lengths of peoples’ arms.

(I had pointed this out to Stephen Green, actually: “God made peoples’ arms just the right length.” He seemed unmoved by this ecclesiastical proof of the rightness of self-love. Come to think of it, he didn’t like the phrase “self-love,” either.)

At a lovely lunch post-press conference with Tony’s boss, an elegant lady named Patricia, we learned historical information that explained the “This is not a brothel!” sign. That is, everything in Fitzrovia had pretty much once been a brothel. It was the neighborhood where Oscar Wilde had made the fateful acquaintance of Bosie.

EVENING WITH THE SHOCK JOCK:
Howard Stern has better things to do than talk to us about masturbation, it seems, but that wasn’t true of Tim Shaw, award-winning maniac star of Kerrang radio’s night program. (Also way smarter and cooler than my average US shock-jock guy, so many of whom have been middle-aged and bitter.) We trained up to Birmingham to be on his show with sidekicks Juicy Lucy and Four Fat Blokes (whose surname appeared to be On A Shopping Trolley). The TV crew, whose car had been impounded, got there late, by which time we had already gotten into trouble with the W word: Wank. We use it without thinking in the US, but then, it’s borrowed from the Brits… and who knew it was considered obscene? And to confuse us further, that’s just on radio… but not TV, as Channel 4 is already demonstrating by preparing Wank Week for the masses! What? TV can use the term after 9 pm, but Tim will get fined.

Porn stars had been promised, masturbating — no rule against that, apparently. But they were no-shows, and so strippers, phoned in at the last minute, arraived instead. A Dutch businesswoman on a busman’s holiday, where she strips and lives like a maniac for one month each summer: living her dream, surrounded by cute-as-bugs Brit birds (that’s what Tim called them) and one Latvian with a perfect ass. They couldn’t focus on masturbation, though. We were actually lucky to get out of there with our pants.

Heading south in the documentary crew’s new Prius we had a minor car accident on way home, which delayed us by at least an hour and ensured that Robert’s jet lag would never resolve. Finally I lived out the Tom Robinson Band song “2-4-6-8 Motorway”: “Another motorway sun coming up in the morning light.” And we got back into London at dawn.

DAY 5:
We slept all day. No food really since Thursday lunch with the Marie Stopes people, at that charming fish restaurant Pescatoria whose motto is “In Cod We Trust.”

But the Brits had decorated a car, want us to flyer Piccadilly Circus and announce the ‘Thon through a bullhorn — oh yeah, they’re LOTS more conservative than us, these Brits. (The cute car can be seen pictured on Saturday’s blog entry.)

Most passers-by seemed to try not to react; plenty of smirks, some double-takes, but the upper lip was stiff, if only because they saw Liz hanging out of the car pointing her camera at them. This, I suppose, may have disappointe Liz a little; she was looking for action, after all. But we saw a suppressed smile on the lips of a nun on Trafalgar Square, which caused me to cry, “You people don’t need me! Your *nuns* are smiling! I should go home and see to our own nuns!”

Of course, this is the country that gave us Sister Wendy, so I really shouldn’t have been surprised.

Carnaby Street was the ticket. At just about 5 on a Friday night they were spilling out of pubs and wanted to be on TV. We handed out flyers and, who knows, made some recruits. A swing around Piccadilly Circus revealed it and the theatre district to be far too populated with families for my taste.
I am NOT bullhorning in a neighborhood with kids, sorry, a sex freak has to have a limit.

Well. OK, I’ll bullhorn for a Guardian pic, but not on a street with kids on it. (There’s a word for this = media whore — but still, I’m a trained professional and I need to act like it.)

Finally we got to see Drop Studio, where the ‘Thon will be held. The decorators, hard at work to make it look like a Moroccan seraglio, pounded nails and hung drapes while we tried to stay out of the way. The space is a photo studio; seems small, given all the pr fuss! Will we all fit? I wondered.

I had a date to do a big TV news show. They call August the “silly season” when parliament is off on break, with little serious news to focus on; of course, this year most serious news is from the Middle East. But there was time to focus on a Scots MP’s messy divorce, and then I went on to give the show a little fillip of sexological discourse. (I said “This event is about the discourse” so many times that if I had a pound each time, I could have paid for another night at the lovely Rookery.)

I managed not to say “wank”; good thing, it was before 9 pm. While I was there, R. did Colourful Radio. Raced off for dinner with our friend Clive at Sake, a gorgeous Japanese restaurant on the other side of Smithfield Market, then hied back to the hotel for BBC Radio call-in (with Liz in our hotel room documenting — done from bed, in homage to John and Yoko).

More wine and chat in the Rookery’s charming conservatory. The perfectly ordinary-looking Brit foursome already drinking there were breaking into song. A Rod Stewart tune? Goodness. And then Roy Orbison.

We put Clive to bed on our floor, swiping the sofa cushions from the conservatory. Who will miss them?

Oops, an early morning call from the nervous front desk man proved what a together hotel this really is: “Did you take those cushions?” I confessed and stumbled out to put them back. So much for unbroken sleep on the eve of the First Ever London Masturbate-a-Thon!

The Longest Time Spent Masturbating record for men was set this year at 8.5 hours in San Francisco; for women the SF record was set in 2004 at 6.5 hours. Our Londoner contenders didn’t beat those records, though they did very well. But Ruth, a long-haired lass from Coventry whose husband had been a real pal and dropped her off so she could compete, set a world Masturbate-a-Thon record at 49 orgasms! And to think we were about to give the trophy to a woman who’d come six times!

Photo by John Moulton

We’re not certain whether financial records were broken, as pledges have yet to be collected. But one man, after masturbating for 200 minutes, announced he’d raised 450 pounds in pledges, which may well be the London record to date. And the Longest Distance Come to Come trophy remains unawarded until peoples’ addresses can be compared, but one poor chap from Slovenia reportedly came over, only to be told that because he just wanted to watch, he couldn’t come in.

The real records were number of people attending: 153 signed in and out, several more than any SF Masturbate-a-Thon thus far. And tons more press came through — I literally spent at least six and a half hours talking to print, radio, podcast and television reporters, plus one author working on a book about sex in the UK. A conservative guess is that we hosted 40 reporters at the site itself, plus a bunch of people offsite; we’ve been doing intrviews all week.

Whew! While Ruth motors back to Coventry and the reporters go to file their stories, I’m off to bed. More detail tomorrow about this trip and the amazing afforts that went to make the UK Masturbate-a-Thon such a great success.

The real records were number of people attending: 153 signed in and out, several more than any SF Masturbate-a-Thon thus far. And tons more press came through — I literally spent at least six and a half hours talking to print, radio, podcast and television reporters, plus one author working on a book about sex in the UK. A conservative guess is that we hosted 40 reporters at the site itself, plus a bunch of people offsite; we’ve been doing intrviews all week.

Whew! While Ruth motors back to Coventry and the reporters go to file their stories, I’m off to bed. More detail tomorrow about this trip and the amazing afforts that went to make the UK Masturbate-a-Thon such a great success.

But I’d never been followed around by a spritely director from the UK while planning my own annual National Masturbation Month hoedown: the public Masturbate-a-Thon, which we host at the Center for Sex & Culture, with the kind permission of GV. Now, it seems, we are to be Part One of a two-part series on the UK’s esteemed Channel Four. Perhaps it will be called A Tale of Two Masturbate-a-Thons, because we’re following our usual San Francisco event with one in London!

You’ve been meaning to go to London, you say? You feel moved to book your flight right now? Hurry up, friends, so you can join us! The date is August 5th, or 5. August as they so efficiently say over there, and I will certainly follow up here for those of you who can’t make it across the pond to participate. It’s a charity ‘thon just like ours, with HIV organization the Terrence Higgins Trust and sexual health nonprofit Marie Stopes International as our beneficiaries. Look for detail at www.masturbate-a-thon.com.

Meanwhile, here’s how this year’s live Masturbate-a-Thon, benefiting and hosted by the Center for Sex & Culture, went. Please note that Good Vibrations still sponsors the private version of this event, where people self-pleasure at home, or wherever they usually do it, generally by themselves, or perhaps with a partner. The CSC event is, yes, held in public (that is, at CSC, with the door closed, but with plenty of people in attendance). This year, as was also true in 2005, there were around 100 people in the room.

We have a new world record: a very, very self-possessed gentleman broke last year’s “Longest Time Spent Masturbating” record, which was about 7.5 hours — roughly an hour longer than the previous year’s, which was won by a woman writing the event up for Marie-Claire magazine. This year the record future masturbators must beat has been set at eight and a half hours! How, you ask yourself, did he manage this? I believe his secrets were going veeeery slowly… and lube. Can’t go for the time record without lube, matey.

We also added an entirely new trophy category this year, inspired by the entry of a woman who had just that day arrived from Hong Kong! So now we will forever after bestow the “Furthest Distance Come to Come” award.

The “Most Orgasms” award, again claimed by a woman, went to an intrepid female who, well-stocked with sex toys, came 36 times.

We’re still figuring out who won the “Most Money Raised by an Individual” trophy, and consequently the amount raised by the event as a whole, because one woman is still collecting her pledges. We’ve given her extra time, since it’s clearly in our own interest to collect all the money raised. You know how this works, right? The Masturbate-a-Thon is like any other whatever-a-thon: you get pledges from like-minded friends, participate in the event itself, and then collect the money you raised. In the case of a walk-a-thon, you generally collect for each mile you walk. For a masturbate-a-thon, you’d get money per minute or hour you masturbate — or, alternatively, by the orgasm, but we feel this might put pressure on people to fake orgasms so as to raise more funds, so we don’t really recommend doing it that way. Another clear difference between walking and masturbating: usually the feet have a more prominent role in one activity than the other. But, I suppose, not for everyone.

A gang of volunteers helped set up a large room full of nice, cushy nooks. We webcast the public Masturbate-a-Thon, so we needed a room that could fulfill multiple roles: part had to be a studio from which our webcam crew (from the lovely and generous bondage.com), Liz Friend and her UK documentry crew, and various other media folk could broadcast. Then the rest of the room needed to be sucessfully off limits to them, so non-media masturbators could get down to it. There was an area in the studio for people who wished to jack or jill off on-camera, on their own steam or with a toy — perhaps even a fucking machine! Several fuck-machine folks were on hand; the lovely duo from monkeyrocker.com even donated a machine to the cause. And also in this studio area were chairs for me, Your Host, and porn stars Nina Hartley and Michael Soldier, Your Celebrity MCs — though I noticed that midway through the event Michael had gone AWOL and was later found out on the floor, masturbating with a bunch of guys. Nina, too, went missing for a bit, and I was delighted to discover her walking aroud the room being followed by a gaggle of masturbating men. I swear, they looked like duckings. Well, ducklings with hard-ons (I don’t think Konrad Lorentz ever had to deal with that).

We had a women’s area, hosted by the super-adorable Tassy Pink, who spent a lot of time webcamming for the viewing pleasure of our international online audience. Then a men’s-only space, hosted by our good friends (and charter Masturbation Hall of Fame members) the San Francisco Jacks. A mixed-gender space, of course, for everyone else, plus a Voyeur’s Corner for people who wanted to come watch, but not masturbate. Oh, and clothes check, because at erotic events, it harshes our mellow to have people in street clothes wandering among us. This has, in the past, given some members of the press pause (we made Human, from Alice Radio, take off his britches once; he retaliated against me recently at the DNA Lounge, cornering me and trying to get me to sing).

A good time was had by most. I don’t think everyone actually had orgasms (which, after all, is optional in any sexual situation, though it’s also true that if you want something done right, do it yourself). One couple left, peeved, when an overzealous monitor asked them not to touch each other while masturbating; we later ruled that was appropriate behavior, so if that couple reads this, we hope they’ll accept our apologies and come back next year and touch each other all they want. There are, after all, many ways to accessorize masturbation, and if your favorite sex toy is your girlfriend’s hand on your nipple, who are we to judge?

Oh, and we found a lovely man to provide background music by playing the piano. It’s hard to come up with sexual firsts, you know… hasn’t everything already been done?… but it is just possible that we convened the first room in the history of the world full of people wanking to live piano music. I realize Fats Waller may have done something similar, but surely not just to masturbation.

The point of the public Masturbate-a-Thon, if I have to spell it out, is promoting masturbation pride, not to mention open discourse about that which is usually one of the most hidden elements of a person’s erotic life. That’s why we’re going to London in two weeks — because the chance to promote public discussion is worth the trip. My only regret? When you’re running the party, as Robert and I are on Masturbate-a-Thon Night, you get too damn busy to masturbate!