On masturbation and television

[chani]

Three things made me think of masturbation lately...

Yesterday, stormwreath  called for a beta reader for a fic and mentioned it was pervy and had female characters masturbating in it; I watched Mad Men episode named “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”, in which there's a masturbation scene, and read reactions on the A.V club and other online blogs afterwards; and a comment by sc_literati  led me to re-read a review I wrote about The White Ribbon.

It seems to me that, although we live in a time that considers masturbation (either adults' masturbation or children's masturbation) perfectly normal and healthy, and  American Pie overused the topic, we're still quite uncomfortable when it comes to masturbation in fiction. It's more taboo than sexual intercourse, more embarrassing for the viewers or the readers.
In other words, we don't mind talking about it, obviously!– in general or even with personal information– but seeing a fictional characters masturbate is another matter.

Is it because it's the ultimate form of voyeurism since there's hardly something more private than self-pleasuring ––with the exception of relieving oneself in the loo which btw isn't a scene we often see on the screen or that is often described in books/fanfics (and when it is, it's considered very weird stuff)? 

Or is it because in the back of our mind still lies the fear of being caught doing so?

Do you remember that scene in Mulholland Drive ? I found it more disturbing than most of Lynch's usual stuff.

I've read many Spuffy fanfictions in which Spike was masturbating, usually either for the viewing pleasure of Buffy and the readers or for the readers only. But those fics were written by women and mostly addressed to women...

I think that, unless you're in pure porn mode ( meaning you aim at sexual satisfaction rather than fantasy) , it's easier to write and read about masturbation when it's the other gender doing it which is funny given that we know better "how it works and feels" when it's our gender.

In Mad Men and The White Ribbon there's another embarrassing factor, for the masturbators are children.

Once upon a time children were told that it was a naughty thing that would make them deaf (in France) or blind (in the U.S). Adults have always been aware that children played with themselves but they didn't accept it. From the XVIIIth Century (before that masturbation in Western societies was both considered a sin and a healthy purge for boys, nannies even used to masturbate young boys into sleep!) to the end of the XXth Century, it was seen as a dysfonctional behaviour, a disease. It had to be repressed.

We've come a long way from those ideas but it took a long time. The characters of The White Ribbon are very religious and children's masturbation is of course a no-no.
Kids are abused by their father, a pastor, in order to prevent masturbation. It is very cruel and tied in with religious values but the condemnation of masturbation was mostly spread by physicians and psychiastrists then.

50 years later, the characters of Mad Men are getting to acceptance but aren't there yet. You can tell that the kid psychiatrist that Betty goes to see for Sally is more concerned by Betty's issues than by Sally's masturbating. However masturbation is still a social problem, especially for girls. Betty tells her daughter that it isn't something to do, neither in private nor in public! It's obvious she says what she has been told when she was a little girl. No masturbation, period. She forbids masturbation in general even if she said "especially in public", probably guessing that Sally would do it again in private and hoping that at least she would remember the humiliation of being caught later and would be more discrete to spare her mother. Betty is a lousy mother, we already knew that, but she's also a woman of her time, born in the 40's. Sally represents the next generation and its sexual revolution. She will burn her bra for sure! 

To Don, Betty points out that Sally was doing it in front of someone else (we know that her friend was asleep on the couch so Sally actually didn't masturbate "in public") emphasizing the "in public" side of the issue, which is slightly different than the condemnation she voiced when talking to Sally as if she knows she can't condemn masturbating per se when talking to Don. It's Don after all (he's mostly concerned about the gender of the friend who was with Sally!). When talking to her new husband, Henry, she reveals that her main concern is that the woman who caught Sally is going to tell everybody! What would people think of her? She does not care that Sally might be mentally ill, she's afraid of the consequences for herself.

To Don she also mentions that girls who do it are...."fast", even though later she tells the psychiatrist that she knows that all children do it. So what Betty really thinks is a mystery as she adapts her speech to the person she talks to because the way she comes across, appearences then, is what matters to her. I think that deep down she knows that masturbation isn't a disease (she had her own session with a washing machine in an earlier season!), but she also knows that proper girls don't masturbate, and when it comes to Betty formerly-Draper-and-now-Francis it's all about being proper (the idea of behaving properly was echoed by the Japanese plot and the title of the episode that is also the title of a book that was a guide to understanding the rules of Japanese culture). Fingers don't go there, period (she threatened Sally to cut off her fingers!). Girls have to repress that natural urge or they are lost. She tells Dr Edna (the child psychiatrist asked her to call her the same way kids do!) that she outgrew her own habit (washing machines come in handy though). In that scene she opens up and reveals that she hated her mother (just like Sally hates her). The last shot of Betty longingly staring at the dollhouse was poignant. She is a lost little girl, much more than her own daughter. Dr Edna figured out quickly that Betty needs therapy. 

Writing this I suddenly reallise how clever the show is and how consistent the Betty storyline is. In season 1, Betty Draper was a trophy wife who looked like Grace Kelly yet an unhappy married woman whose husband cheated on a lot and whom he sent to see psychiatrist. One of the symptoms of her "condition" was that she had episodes in which she could no longer feel her fingers. Later in the season she relieved herself with a washing machine (the biggest vibrator ever!). Now the same Betty threatens her daughter to cut her fingers off to prevent her from masturbating, and reveals that her own mother raised her out of masturbation. All that stuff makes a lot of sense. 

So this is the 60's, post-Kinsey's works for sure, but we aren't at  the end of the century yet and there are mny women like Betty. 

Nowadays masturbation is no longer officially repressed in western societies, it's even commonly mentioned in movies, tv show, literature. I think it's still a bit of a taboo though. It's mostly dealt with in comedies, as a comic relief. As usual laughing is a way to handle things we aren't quite comfortable with.

Also I am not sure that masturbation is as encouraged or even as banalized as we'd like to think, especially when it comes to children.
Theorically educated people know that masturbation starts very early (scientists even talk about foetal masturbation now!) as a body discovery and pleasure testing, that toddlers play with themselves to achieve orgasm, but most people don't want to think of children as sexual beings, at least not until puberty. So witnessing a kid's masturbation feels the audience with even more uneasiness.

In Mad Men, Sally Draper is a 10 year old troubled girl for who has been trough a lot of things lately (her grandpa whom she loved died while living in her house, her parents got divorced and her mother has a new man in the house). She seeks attention and began the episode with cutting her hair which drove her mother furious. 

The masturbation scene was very well shot. We knew what she was doing without seeing anything. Basically she's watching a tv show ( The Man From U.N.C.L.E.)while her friend is asleep on the couch, next to hair. She seems tensed, and there's a that gesture of her hands gripping her nightgown on her thighs, slightly lifting it up, that clued the viewers in what was to come, but the camera then just zoomed in and all we see is the look on her face as she's mesmerized by...David McCallum's face on the screen and the intensity of her stare lets us understand that she's all hot and bothered and therefore tells without showing what she's actually doing down there. That and her friend's mother entering the room and yelling at her and Sally's reaction at being caught.

Reading the reactions on the A.V Club or reviews in various blogs was quite interesting. Everybody agreed that masturbating was the most "normal" thing Sally Draper has done lately and that even though it got her in trouble it isn't meant to show that she is messed-up (the show is a bit ambiguous about that though, doing it at a sleepover at her friend's house with her friend asleep next to her might be suggesting that she has issue and wants to put herself in trouble, besides she had that mental patient look after chopping her hair) but some people seemed to have been in denial, not getting it until the friend's mother brought Sally back home from the slumber party earlier than scheduled (thus interrupting Betty/Henry marital sex) and told Betty that she had caught Sally "playing with herself".

Other viewers got it but were uncomfortable and tempted to change the channel. Others joked about not being able to see David McCallum the same way again (btw I really don't understand Sally!!! David McCallum, really?). Most reviewers or commenters said that it made sense for a girl her age to start masturbating. I guess they meant "to start masturbating knowingly" for much younger children pleasure themselves but in a more "innocent way" without being aware of doing something sexual and therefore "naughty"(while Sally knew what she was about to do, she checked on her friend before gripping her thighs). I saw a reviewer (on what looks like a professional online journal not a blog) who questioned Mad Men's accuracy and wondered whether a 10 year-old girl would have masturbated in 1964-1965 as if little girls have not masturbated before Madonna and the 90's! The journaliste didn't say it wasn't accurate but he wasn't sure it was.

Sally Draper is a city girl of her time so her lack of accurate knowledge when it comes to sexual intercourse makes sense. Girls talk in school but that's about it hence her telling her baby-sitter that she knows what happens when a man and a woman "are doing it" (a phrase she learned from Glen, another messed-up kid who used to have a crush on Betty but is into the daughter now) and then saying that "the man pees inside the woman".  Knowing how sexual intercourse works beforehand and masturbating are two different things.
Another reviewer said on his blog that "despite the horror of Sally masturbating" the episode was a keeper...  

Anyway that scene prompted a lot of comments everywhere .

 Kiernan Shipka, the young actress who plays Sally, is 10 years old too. I guess that part of the embarrassement is knowing that such a young actress had to pretend masturbating and being caught. Besides even it's a fiction, we are supposed to believe in the characters, so the omniscient point of view the audience has turn viewers into voyeurs, and since it's a 10 year old it prompts the fear of paedophilia. No matter that there's no nudity and real sex on screen. 

The perversity of the scene (not that I think that masturbating is perverse of course!)also lies in the fact that Sally is masturbating while watching a tv show while the audience is actually watching her on a tv show. 

The Masturbating Sally scene is spot-on in terms of the Betty's arc or in terms of reviving the 60's, and bold because it plays on our fears and makes the viewers ill at ease. The episode deals with stuff our 2010 minds aren't comfortable with, like Roger's nasty attitude and offensive anti-Japanese speech.  

PS: You won't believe me but I left this post unfinished this morning for I had to go to my mother's in the suburb and guess what happened in the train? I swear it's true!
A man sat down next to me, in front of another woman (she was black, young and pretty so it's probably she who was his David McCallum!). I was reading the newspaper but something caught my attention finally, I probably sensed the move of his hand or saw it in my peripheral vision.  He was jerking off under his shirt (that wasn't tucked in his pants). First off I thought I was wrong (it couldn't happen just after this post I had begun on LJ. No way!); I tried not to look and focuse on the political article in the newspaper (the Pope's speech admonesting Sarkozy's policy), but a few minutes later I caught the other woman staring at his crotch while talking on her mobile phone and it was obvious that she thought he was really doing it! She left the train then (perhaps it was her stop anyway), and I got up too, pretending to check on the sign showing the stations. I noticed he had taken the woman's place so if I had returned to my seat he would have been in front of me. So I went and sat elsewhere in the car, far from the wanker.

As soon as I was seated, I saw him passing by and going to the next car!

Either he was seeking new inspiration or he had realised he had been caught and prefered to leave. I think it's the former. Of course there's also the possibility that the whole point, the stuff that really got him off, was to be caught and make women uncomfortable, and there were more cars to try on...

Do you think I am a psychic or something?