1. Hatchet is a book about a disaffected thirteen-year-old city boy who survives a traumatic plane crash in the Canadian wilderness and learns to survive using only on his own wits and a crude hatchet given to him by his mother for fifty-four days.
I do not believe this is realistic; I believe the average teen who found themselves alone in the woods would do the following: masturbate and try to roll joints out of oak leaves.
2. Lord of the Flies: See Hatchet, but centuple the number of thirteen-year-olds. I think most teens are more interested in touching themselves than murdering each other’s heads, just my opinion.
3. Walden: Honestly, if you think Thoreau did not mostly retire to Walden Pond in order to masturbate in peace, you are living in a fantasy world.
4. Pilgrim At Tinker Creek: I’m just being realistic; if a book is set in the woods, it’s because the protagonist went there to jerk off.
Also, come on. Tinker Creek? Open your eyes, people.
5. Kon-Tiki. There is one reason, and one reason only, to try to sail across an ocean by yourself on a raft. (The reason is jerkoff-related privacy.)
6. I Am Legend: This is just a given, because everyone else normal is dead? You would have to, if only as a pressure valve to hang on to your sanity. Hang on to your sanity, and also your genitals.
7. Island of the Blue Dolphins: It would happen at least once, that’s all I’m saying.
8. Life of Pi: After he stops starving and starts catching fish, obviously. I’m not suggesting that a terrified person on the brink of death would be interested in self-abuse. That’s not realistic. It’s also not realistic to suggest that a creative young person alone in the ocean would not eventually seek to celebrate the fullness of life by masturbating. Just a bit, and then back to the business of catching fish and filtrating water and finding islands and so forth. But to clear the brain, and to relieve the anxieties of living on a tiger’s boat; it’s only human. If there is one thing you learn from this list, it is that people alone on a boat or in the woods are going to jerk off. They’ll do other things, too, yes, but jerking off is a not-insignificant portion of that.
9. Robinson Crusoe: Unless you are willing to re-title this book Thirty Years Without Touching Myself Even Once Or Having An Accidental Wet Dream Which Definitely Counts, I insist that you acknowledge that Robinson Crusoe masturbated on the island. IF YOU PUT PEOPLE ON ISLANDS, THEY WILL MASTURBATE.
Am I arguing that all of these books should be re-released with functional, practical, non-erotic masturbation chapters for the sake of verisimilitude? No. I am just saying that as they stand now, they do not stand in the truth. And the truth is always the right choice. I don’t have anything else to say about this.
Tags: books, things mallory does for no reason, things that are probably about jerking off
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Also Lord of the Rings.
I remember once reading a critique of LOTR that complained no one ever went to the bathroom in those books. And I was like, can’t we take that as read? I mean, you just know Merry and Pippin took whizzes off Weathertop.
What a weird critique. No one ever goes to the bathroom in most books, unless they’re going to be attacked by bathroom ninjas or have a significant daydream that changes their perspective or something, because it’s boring and doesn’t advance the plot or develop their character.
The only real example I can think of where a character spends a lot of time in the bathroom is in Anthony Burgess’s Enderby novels. (The bathroom is basically his office where he writes and stores all his poems. Also, he has to practice self-defense with a toilet seat on one occasion).
Re: Walden :
My understanding is that Thoreau basically camped out in his parents’ backyard, and his mother and sister brought most of his meals out to him.
So his whole “manly self-reliance and communing with nature” thing was more like when a five-year-old pretends they’re running away from home, but they’re actually just hanging out in a Batman tent behind the garage and eating peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that their mom packed.
SEE THE WALDEN ENTRY IN “TEXTS FROM JANE EYRE”
I certainly will!!
And they did his laundry for him!
also, i was looking for the kate beaton comic about thoreau to link, because it is always kate beaton time, but i can’t find it 🙁
He went to live on some land that Emerson owned, in a small house that he built for himself, where he got some writing done, and he went back into town on a regular basis for help and companionship. This is only scandalous because people later got the idea that “going to the woods” meant TOTAL ISOLATION AND SOLITUDE AND SELF-SUFFICIENCY, instead of “hanging out with trees.” He was really big on living deliberately and simply and honestly, but not cut off from other people–he cared about politics, and about his friends. It seems hypocritical mostly because of the way people talk about the wilderness now, as something pure and apart and solitary.
And, he didn’t pay his taxes, AND he started a fire, and accidentally burnt down the forest, which incidentally was his neighbor’s logging income gone, so there’s that. Thoreau: 1800’s rainbow gatherer.
He wasn’t a shirker; he resisted paying taxes because he didn’t want to pay to put down slave uprisings and fight the Mexican-American War. He was ready to serve jail time for this, until someone paid the tax for him against his will, and he encouraged others to do the same. The fire was dumb, and we have other, more impressive practitioners of civil disobedience to look to; but the way the Internet brings up the story about his laundry every time his name comes up, it’s like no one wants to listen to what he had to say (and put into practice!) about disobeying unjust laws so we’ve found a reason to ignore him.
Let’s be fair, though– none of this means he was NOT masturbating constantly.
I was amused to find out recently that Walden Pond had a railroad running along one edge of it in Thoreau’s time.
That makes sense, if you consider how much he vents about railroads in Walden.
Don’t forget #10, Mallory –My Side of the Mountain!!
A teen leaves his family’s crowded NYC apartment to escape into the wilderness…to jerk off in privacy, let’s be honest.
I knew The Toast would come through with this in my absence.
ngl, 14 yo me had a total crush on that kid…
almost entirely because it occured to me that there was a TON of privacy in that hollowed out tree and thus a lot of space for canoodling potential.
Lord of the Flies should probably get a pass from this critique because of the scene with the dead pig. (Ew.)
I’m a terrible person and LotF is one of my favorite books, but I skip that scene. Every time.
Lord of the Open Flies.
I was going to mention this scene. It’s one of my favourite books. There is definitely some below-the-belt symbolism going on in it.
One of the more trenchant critiques I’ve read of Lord of the Flies is that it’s not particularly indicative of what would happen if you set any random group of kids down on an island without adult supervision, because it’s written about the students of an upper-class British boarding school, with the kids already schooled in bullying and the casual cruelty of the upper crust. So, yeah, maybe we don’t want to go there.
In light of recent media surrounding the British prime minister, a pigs head and privileged boys sounds like a plausibly distu
*plausibly disturbing thing. (Oops, accidental hit submit too soon.)
Because only dudes masturbate.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is about a woman.
Also, I think that just in general, there are way many more books about dudes, and especially about dudes being stranded/alone in the wilderness.
Also many more especially about dudes masturbating.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is about a girl. Also, let’s be real, so much literature is about men.
Oh, jinx times infinity, Dexteress
Ha! I can’t sign into intensedebate on my work computer, and should have known that by the time my comment was approved by the moderator, several other Toasties would have said the precise same thing!
I love all of us
Co-signed.
THANK GOD someone got the “REAL MESSAGE” of this piece
I find this comment confusing, as Pilgrim At Tinker Creek and Island of the Blue Dolphins both have chick protagonists.
it’s less about gender and all about ISLANDS, Nicole. Proximity to islands = jerkoff rates go up
personally, if I even think about being alone on an island, i have to go to my bunk
Milky Joe!
Is that John Hawkes again?
But that’s the beauty of being alone on an island. The entire island is your bunk! You don’t have to go anywhere!
Also, masturbation would be a the top of the list of any island-stranded teenage boy because, as many of them know from experience, the quickest way to make another human that they weren’t previously aware of appear out of nowhere is to commence jerking it.
“God, knock on the lean-to before you — I mean, hurray, I’m saved!”
Haha, it’s like the lighting a cigarette at a bus stop rule only much, much more embarrassing.
Cf. Paradise Island.
Island of the Blue Dolphins is about a teenage girl. Unfortunately most of the “STRANDED IN NATURE” cannon is about dudes though. Someone please write me a YA novel about a genderqueer person being STRANDED IN NATURE plz and thx.
“Beauty Queens” by Libba Bray has a trans character! (Not exactly what you requested, I know, but the closest example I can think of.)
Julie of the Wolves was probably too cold for a really good masturbation scene, right?
I would also be wary of exposing my more delicate bits while near a pack of wolves unless absolutely necessary.
island of the blue dolphins does have a bit about her getting her period, which i remember seeming pretty realistic, considering
wait, really? where? we read that in 5th grade and i totally missed that part, apparently
I had that thought too and then got to Island of the Blue Dolphins and thought well, OK. But it was a grudging well OK. Also, as I type this, I realize that millions of others must also be typing this. Sorry in advance to Ladysplain.
I guess there’s a lot of other books that could have been chosen as well, though? Any of L.M. Montgomery oeuvre, Sweet Vally High, probably a bunch of the Wrinkle in Time series, Z for Zachariah (she’s by herself! What else she going to do!), etc, etc. PARITY IN PARODIC MASTURBATION.
if you are seriously going to do a VIDA count for a blog post about masturbation jokes, we are going to have to AGREE TO DISAGREE. Obviously you should assume pretty much all protagonists offly jerk, but it is especially egregious when you fling teens in the wilderness and try to convince us the only things they did there were chastely pick berries and build lean-tos. The Wakefields lived in a society of laws and their masturbatory habits were not germane to their survival. I stand by the books I have chosen to clown.
“The Wakefields lived in a society of laws and their masturbatory habits were not germane to their survival.”
Could this be a new and separate thinkpiece somehow? Please?
All righty then! I will get off your (blue dolphin) island!
Island of the Blue Dolphins made the list!
I feel like dudes are far more fictionally likely to be stranded alone in the woods/on an island/etc.
no, man is an island
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was written by Annie Dillard and is told from the her perspective.
Honestly, the fact that Thoreau didn’t even bother to stay at the pond, but would show up at his friends’ houses for meals and a bath, just proves your point, Mallory.
You know Robinson Crusoe was busy carving holes in coconuts to….ahem….simulate….uh…stuff. Sexy, sexy stuff. Probably drew a face on it, too.
This gives me worrisome thoughts about Wilson the volleyball. Worrisome but most likely true.
Additional scholarly commentary on Robinson Crusoe: “There isn’t any textual evidence that Crusoe and Friday were doing it.” — my 18th-c. literature professor in undergrad, after we had all commented on the non-trivial level of homoeroticism in the Pierce Brosnan movie adaptation. You have to imagine the implied “but there’s no evidence that they weren’t, either” afterwards.
Did you know that Daniel Defoe also wrote a long novel about gay Quaker pirates, called Captain Singleton? They are much gayer, spend most of the novel cosily sharing a room on the ship and being all couply, and then suddenly get married to women. In the last paragraph of the book, out of absolutely nowhere.
Wait, hold on — Quaker pirates?
Oh yes. Chap A is a pirate, ends up picking up Chap B who is a Quaker. I can’t remember exactly how he joins the ship, but he ends up hanging around, and happily turns a blind eye to all the piracy going on. Maybe he gives them the odd half-hearted lecture on how they probably shouldn’t be doing all that pirating, I forget. Someone once misheard this as “gay Quaker parrots”, which was a running joke for a few years.
That’s…man, Daniel Defoe was a weird dude. In his defense, the 18th century was a weird time.
Hmm. If Hatchet featured more masturbation, it would probably a) have not bored and irritated me quite so much or b) not been required reading in fifth grade, or c) both. Yeah, that sounds good.
Are we really to believe that Odysseus, having heard the Siren’s song while strapped to the ship’s mast, DIDN’T have an appropriately epic jerk session afterward? I see right through you, Homer.
How else was he supposed to resist their call?
I mean, all the ingredients are there, too. There’s a light bondage situation going on, and all of his crewmates have their ears blocked, so he could’ve–and SHOULD’VE–really gotten down to business. All thrashin’ around and hollerin’, onanistically. It’s a perfect storm of pud pounding.
EXACTLY.
Also Harry Potter. Ages 11 through 18 and not one masturbation? Lies.
COLLEEN I SERIOUSLY THOUGHT ABOUT IT AND I JUST COULDN’T, WE FOUND MY LIMIT TODAY, I CANNOT MAKE A JOKE ABOUT HARRY POTTER JERKING OFF
he is also maybe the most sexless protagonist in history???
Maybe but you gotta admit Ron was definitely polishing his wand at least thrice daily.
ahaha, jinx!
You will not convince me that the curtains around their beds were not 100% for masturbation privacy. Also muffliato was probably invented for the same purpose (you just know Snape was a world class onanist).
jkr may have made her protagonists painfully chaste in canon but between the curtains around the beds/muffliato and the room of requirements she basically gave the keys to fanfiction writers to make hogwarts into the roiling sex palace it should have been.
Literally exactly the comment I was going to make!
I read a really good fic once where he was ace and it changed my view of him in the actual series significantly.
I want to read that! Do you have a link?
do you remember the title/author? I’m always down for Good/Accurate Representation of Ace Characters In Fanfic but it rarely occurs
Daniel Radcliffe in Equus really messed me up, is what I’m saying.
except that “lion in his chest”
chest=penis
Not even a polishing the wand joke?? Jesus fuck.
What about Ron, though?
Look, as I said somewhere else, there is a REASON that those beds all had curtains around them.
That and some anti-eavesdropping charms, and you’re good to go.
what’s the scene in the prefects’ bathroom? i don’t remember my harry potter specifics but that scene definitely seemed…suspect
Moaning Myrtle watches Cedric jerk it like, ALL THE TIME.
That’s why she’s moaning, of course.
And it’s not just that they any of them do, because that’s super common.
It’s the disaster-level outcomes of giving magical teenagers any degree of along-time. What would Fred and George have come up with, and passed around? What would the Maurauders have hidden for future generations? MYRTLE.
I think the fact that Hogwarts is still standing is proof that there actually is *not* any self-abuse in that series. Presumably because the House Elves are putting something in their food.
Guys, Guys, rewatch the first bit of the Azkaban movie again– I think it’s the first shot with Harry in it, which I think is at the very beginning. Cuarón was absolutely trying to suggest a certain eau de masturbation there.
Wizard’s staff has a knob on the end, you know.
There were six guys on Kon-Tiki, so it wasn’t exactly solitude. But one of my high school teachers said essentially the same thing about Thoreau (causing the entire class to blush and slump in their seats). She said wasn’t it funny he talked about practically every possible subject except sex, and someone said, “But he was alone in the cabin,” and she raised an eyebrow and said, “So? In the course of a lifetime, most sex is autoerotic.”
MS. THING, IT IS NINE-THIRTY IN THE MORNING ON A TUESDAY AND I AM SO NOT READY FOR THIS CONVERSATION.
WAIT, THOR HEYERDAHL DIDN’T EVEN RAFT ACROSS THE OCEAN *BY HIMSELF*????
He had a whole team.Maybe you can add him and his raft team to your next book, “Texts From Kon-Tiki”
Thor Heyerdahl was insane
#TEACHERGOALS
I just noticed the URL for this piece and choked on my lunch.
I am deeply offended that everyone pointing out that Island of the Blue Doplhins has a female protagonist is failing to ALSO point out that Pilgrim At Tinker Creek is also about a woman, mostly bc that book is inherently super masturbatory.
I don’t think most of us have read Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. We’re just pretending we know what it is.
Caught me there.
Glad someone else said, Yo, Pilgrim Creek is by a woman. Not clear on the masturbatory aspects. Meditating on the profligate wastefulness of creation not such a turn-on for me, though I admit it might be for Annie Dillard.
Julie of the Wolves. A girl has to keep her hands warm somehow. Also Wuthering Heights. All the characters, all the time, except Lockwood.
But would it be a good idea to masturbate in the company of wolves?
That’s why Lockwood was being so cautious.
I very, very much loved Dances with Wolves when I was 13–so much so that I bought a book based on the movie. And the book has a (very mildly written but also very unambiguous) jerk-off scene. And it blew my little teenage mind. At that point I had read plenty of books with sex scenes…but never one that described masturbation.
This is me but with the Chocolate Wars.
Don’t forget #10, Mallory –My Side of the Mountain!!
You know, A Song of Ice and Fire has a reputation for lots of gratuitous sex but I’m pretty sure there has been no mention of the masturbatory practices of the Night’s Watch. I mean, it’s basically a nonstop sausage party on ice mountain! If we can waste 100 pages per book (modest estimate) describing exactly which foods were served at every feast there’s probably time for a scene of Jon accidentally walking in on Sam keeping himself warm on a cold night.
you know, I think I read this fanfic
“I am the sword in the darkness.”
What else would the watcher on the walls be watching?
Maybe he couldn’t be arsed with sex that was definitely consensual.
While I generally regret reading Martin, I rather liked the salad descriptions. There isn’t enough salad-oriented fantasy around.
I would have enjoyed Lord of the Flies significantly more (or, you know, at all) if it had featured masturbation more prominently.
No teen boy should ever be the protagonist of a novel, for the simple fact that he’ll be so busy masturbating that they’ll be no time for heroism,
OR. There’s actually way more asexual representation in books than we all thought, because almost all the books about male teen heroes are about aces!
See: Grasshopper Jungle.
The whole theme of The Omega Man (which is, of course, Hollywood’s best I Am Legend adaptation) is: Look, Charlton Heston is Still Quite Virile, Even Now That Everyone Else Is Presumably A Judicial Cult Zombie. One does not dress like an extra in Phantom of the Opera or solicit mannequins while shirtless in a post-apocalyptic world *not* to jerk off.
I’ve always thought of Omega Man as “The Last White Man on Earth with a Gun”
Let’s see… Omega Man came out in ’71… had Rosalind Cash in it … I was like 16 … it wasn’t only Heston jerkin’ it.
The Michel Tournier retelling of Robinson Crusoe (Friday, or the Other Island) has some awesomely weird masturbatory passages. If I recall correctly, Crusoe enters into a sexual relationship with the island’s vegetation, but I’m going to count that as masturbation.
I am so glad I trawled the comments first, because I felt it was likely another Toastie knew about this book and would have mentioned it already. I’ve never forgotten him carving a tree into a womanly shape — I was 8, and I remember looking up “reins” (I was reading it in French) to work out if it was a sex word.
Reading it at 8!! I read it in my 20s, and there were still things I couldn’t really figure out. (I’m super happy that someone else here knows this weird, great book.)
I had an illustrated edition of Island of the Blue Dolphins. 70% of the illustrations were Karana smiling wickedly and holding a HUGE fish. different fish each picture. 11yo me was sure it was a wink to female masturbation.
Did anyone else re-read Tinker Creek as an adult and conclude that Annie Dillard was high as a kite when she wrote it?
It’s not the “lone teen in the wilderness” thing quite, but…Swiss Family Robinson. For real. Four adolescent boys on an island. You can’t tell me Fritz didn’t head off to the woods to…”gather coconuts” or something on the regular.
I have definitely read fanfic that was an au based on this premise
I just re-read this book, actually. I don’t even want to know what happened when they were all locked in their cave house for the entire monsoon season.
that one study suggests the dolphins may well even have gotten involved
This is one of the greatest things I have ever read.
‘Left Behind’ is my submission.
Once all the squares are gone, things would get real weird.
Right? I always figured that even though I would eventually end in hell, the time left on earth after the rapture would be *amazing*!
“Once all the squares are gone, things would get real weird.”
this actually points out the greatest artistic lack in those books that I have never thought of before. Kudos.
It is true that this list is heavily male-slanted, but honestly teen boys are only ever
1) smoking
2) attempting skateboard tricks
3) jerkin’ it
The true horror of “Alive” is that there’d be nowhere to masturbate in peace.
But they compensated by taking their friends’ meat in their mouth.
(too soon?)
I appreciate that the list is dude heavy, tbh. it’s the perfect take down for the myth of the Noble Solitary Man who goes into nature to think Deep Manly Thoughts, far from the distractions of frivolous wimmenfolk. like nah brah, they just want to jerk it in quiet.
Goddamnit, idk if it’s my work computer or what, but the page keeps auto-jumping back up to previous comments, and I can’t read through all the cock-bucketing threads and it’s really irritating me. It’s been a long week, and Hannibal got cancelled, and my lower back feels like somebody’s wiggling an ice pick in it, and I just need the Toast.
mine does that all.the.time. Using Chrome.
So it seems as if Chrome may be the problem. I use Firefox at home, so that’s a further piece of supporting evidence.
Pretty sure it has to do with the autoplay video ads.
Try disabling Flash. Worked for me. (disclaimer about how website should just work, etc etc).
I just gave up and went for coffee instead. Spending my lunch break continuing to stare at my computer, before returning from lunch to stare at my computer, probably isn’t the best thing to do anyway.
Once in Grade 6 (I’m Canadian shut up) our teacher took us to see French film because we were in French immersion so education.* Turns out, it was about a young teenage girl who gets stranded on an island with her adult developmentally handicapped male cousin, and they proceed to have quite a bit of sex, and honestly, that movie could also used more masturbation and less sex.
*That poor poor teacher, honestly. He looked shell-shocked when we left.
“I like the way they think…”
I did not masturbate as a teenage boy, or since, and now I feel like I am supposed to be missing out on something? Should I have stranded myself in the woods?
I don’ t know about Life of Pi, though — the second his eyes roll back in his head, that’s when the tiger would pounce, no?
Call It Courage, where a boy escapes to another island to jerk it (and kill animals), then returns home, now A MAN
I read a book in middle school or maybe 5th grade called Touching Spirit Bear which was about a delinquent teen who was punished for beating the shit out of a fellow teen (to the point of damaging his brain) by being sent to live on an island alone. They provided a cabin and firewood and food and stuff for him. He promptly burns down the cabin and gets mauled by a bear. He survives, and his new punishment is that he has to start his old punishment all over again from scratch– has to build a new cabin and collect his own firewood and stuff, but NOT by himself. He has to live with an American Indian man who teaches him what to do and the guy he beat up and maybe one other guy? I don’t remember but later he meets the bear and doesn’t get mauled by it. There’s also a part in there where they all hang out in a hot spring. This takes place, like, off the coast of Alaska. Nobody even thinks about jerking it even once.
Flowers in the Attic should have definitely removed all sex and replaced with masturbation.
In Lord of the Flies, Simon liked to go be alone in the woods to maintain his sanity. I had a friend who was convinced this meant he had discovered masturbation.
I submit the Hunger Games. If you knew you were going to die but managed to escape the initial bloodbath your first priority would be to find a safe place to masturbate. I also think the career tributes were so keyed up that they would have had an orgy.
Um, only if you wanted your parents to see you masturbating on television…
Think of all the stuff people do on reality TV now. And that’s without facing near certain death!
I’ve considered that possibility and concluded that the game makers would edit it out like anything else deemed subversive.
Reflex, Steven Gould’s followup to Jumper (a pretty great book – forget the movie) was quite surprising in that it explicitly mentions that the protagonist, confined to a room, had a little corner out of view of the security cameras where he would etc. It’s quite possibly the only book of its kind where I can recall it being mentioned. But then, there’s a good deal of bodily functions in that story.
Hatchet is pretty dire throughout. Maybe things would have gone that way if city-boy wasn’t rescued when he was.
“Am I arguing that all of these books should be re-released with functional, practical, non-erotic masturbation chapters for the sake of verisimilitude?”
[Philip Roth comes tearing into the room yelling I’LLDOITI’LLDOITI’LLDOITI’LLDOIT]
“No.”
[Roth tries to stop; skids, reminding everyone of their dog trying to stop on a tile floor and sliding under the kitchen table instead; attempts to leave with dignity; utterly fails; retires from society in shame; moves to island; spends two years trying to wank the pain away]
I’ve always felt a strong attraction to Annie Dillard, author of -Pilgrim at Tinker Creek-…I think I have an even stronger one, now.
THE SECRET GARDEN. What the dickon is even the point of a private garden if you’re not gonna jill one out in it?
I always confused that book with My Secret Garden, which is all about jillin’ it.
“What the dickon”.
I SEE WHAT YOU DID THERE
Think of all the stuff people do on reality TV now. And that's without facing near certain death!
Cf. Paradise Island.
That's why she's moaning, of course.
What else would the watcher on the walls be watching?
But they compensated by taking their friends' meat in their mouth.
(too soon?)
I always confused that book with My Secret Garden, which is all about jillin' it.
Ahem. There is a white whale sized necessity for (manly) release in Melville. Perhaps there was only an actual harpoon in the shared bed of Ishmael and Queequeg. Perhaps Ahab spent the rest of his spare hours after rescuing Pip and taking him in as cabin boy teaching the lad his numbers, scriptures, and knot-tying. But come ON … Not every man aboard had those relationships to pass the time.
Ahh super-late comment, but in high school someone made me read this memoir of an Oxford don (Kenneth Dover 1920-2010) and he wrote about being in Italy during the Second World War and seeing a really beautiful landscape — and then sitting on a log and masturbating. God love an autobiography that is honest about masturbation.
(He also details how he purposefully failed to prevent a colleague’s suicide, suggests at one point that he *could* have cheated on his wife, he had a really good option, but he didn’t do it, and generally makes it clear he’s emotionally strange)
One of my housemates is convinced that “Tomorrow When the War Began” contains a scene of Ellie jillin’ it (adds ‘jillin it’ to vocab list of the day), but refuses to tell me where in the book she reckons it is.
I may or may not have skim-read the book since to try and figure out where. I am certainly not interested in your guesses no sirree.
When I was about twenty, freshly out as bisexual and part of the uni LGBT group, my friends got me to read Emma Donoghue’s novel Hood. It’s about a woman whose girlfriend has just died in a car crash, following her in the first week after the loss and her reminiscences about the relationship. It has masturbation, remembered sex, sex dreams, talks about masturbating while in a relationship to a fantasy of stranger sex, talks about how grief affects masturbation, and it is all perfectly normal, well-written, and often pretty hot. It is possibly still the only book I’ve read which achieved all of that.
Right now I’m listening to the first Sookie Stackhouse novel in audiobook form while I work on a dinosaur baby quilt, and as well as some truly dubious consent issues, it has that annoying trope of a woman having sex for the first time and coming from PIV sex (well, it’s not like they’re having any other type of sex). Possibly with simultaneous orgasms too. Gah, why do women writers keep pushing that myth? I mean, it’s possible for all that to happen the first time, but really, really rare, and what’s wrong with writing about sex as it actually is? I still remember my first sexual partner guilt-tripping me because I wasn’t coming from PIV sex, whereas he felt we should be having simultaneous orgasms.
“Catchier in the Rye” because one doesn’t merely go into the woods to masturbate. Or was the whole book just one long masturbation?
Glad someone else said, Yo, Pilgrim Creek is by a woman. Not clear on the masturbatory aspects. Meditating on the profligate wastefulness of creation not such a turn-on for me, though I admit it might be for Annie Dillard.