I Masturbate, Therefore I Am (Civilized)

Nowadays, at least if one is to judge by the titles of the posts on xtube, you may get the idea that guys jerk off when they are bored. Boredom and masturbation have become, it seems, an inseparable pair. The new mal du siècle and its antidote? [for a classic statement, see here, Green Day's Longview]

A long time ago, a man who had his way with words, thought of it--jerking off, that is--as a powerful force of progress. He's probably the only thinker who imagined, before the moderns and the post-moderns, masturbation as a beneficial factor. What's more, he was willing to attribute the invention of this civilizing act to the gods. To one in particular, Hermes, the patron of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of orators and wit, of literature and poets, of athletics, of weights and measures, of invention, of commerce in general, and of the cunning of thieves and liars.

Masturbation and hermeneutics sprang from the same source. This surely explains a lot of things...

Here, then, is the myth that tells in humorous detail and with an obvious parodic intention the birth of masturbation as a force of progress.


"He used to say in jest"--"he" is the Cynic philosopher Diogenes, an illustrious masturbator, if any--that this kind of [sexual] intercourse is the invention of Pan, who fell in love with [the nymph] Echo but could not get her, so he was wandering through the mountains day and night" [bored and horny, I imagine]. "So, Hermes, seeing his son in such a frustrating situation" [divine blue balls], "took pity on him and taught him [how to jerk off]. And when he learned that, [Pan] was relieved of his tremendous suffering" [I bet he was! We all know the feeling...] And from him it was the shepherds who learned how to do it."

(Dio Chrysostom, Or. 6.20)

Well, jest or not, it's refreshing to think of the "solitary vice" as a factor of progress invented by a god out of compassion and transmitted to the world by the shepherds--the apostles of civilization.