34th Street’s sex survey issue has certainly been a thumping success. Yesterday, I heard people talking about it all over campus, and multiple people asked me which part of it I was blogging about. The answer came when I spent an hour arguing with a friend about masturbation. (When else does inspiration ever strike?)
The Street statistic says that “the majority of guys … claim to have a wank 4-8 times per week.” Sounds about right to me. My friend, on the other hand, fixated on the high end of the scale. “Eight times a week?” he said. “That sounds excessive.”
My female friends all agree with me — guys masturbate more often than they eat, sleep, or breathe, right ? Every teen comedy we’ve ever seen has told us this. The guys I talked to, though, had the same opinion as said male friend. Excessive.
“If you’re jerking off 8 times a week, you’ve totally given up on your sex life. You’ve just accepted that you’re not going to get laid. And you’re not engaging in enough human contact,” they said.
“But people have drives, right? Needs? Guys want to get off all the time, so helping out with morning wood every day and then a quick bedtime jerk once a week sounds normal,” responded Penn women. (Yes, all of them. Simultaneously. You didn’t hear the roar across campus?)
I finally came to the conclusion I always reach when I talk sex with Penn guys: like the academics they are, they’re mutants who prefer theorizing about something to doing it. All talk and no action. If almost half of the men on campus are masturbating 3 times a week or less, and 69% are getting ass less often than once a month, that’s a lot of guys not having orgasms. (We’re not going to discuss the fact that the highest frequency some of us — less than a THIRD of us — could reach was “more than once a month.” It’s almost as sad as 58% of Penn women not getting themselves off at all, and I don’t want to talk about it.)
No wonder guys keep exposing themselves.
Tags: 34th Street, masturbation
An RSS feed of The Spin is available