A Stroke of Success: A Look at San Francisco’s Masturbate-a-Thon
Part of National Masturbation Month, the event celebrated solo sex and togetherness
After sexologist Dr. Carol Queen*, along with her colleagues at San Francisco-based sex toy company Good Vibrations, created National Masturbation Month in the nineties, she looked for creative ways to promote it. This included partnering with other sex-positive companies like Babeland, which had started doing private events where people masturbated together. After hearing about this — as well as a live masturbation event hosted by a group in Salt Lake City, Utah — Queen, along with her partner, sex educator Dr. Robert Morgan Lawrence, decided to create the San Francisco Masturbate-a-Thon to help get the good word out about both Masturbation Month and the validity of masturbation itself.
Sounds great, right? Get a bunch of people together to do what they would naturally do at home alone and a host of erotic pleasures would ensue. After all, Queen and Lawrence, who cofounded the Center for Sex & Culture, were no strangers to hosting sex parties. In fact, by the time they started organizing the Masturbate-a-Thon in San Francisco, they had already been hosting a safer sex party called Queen of Heaven, from which they amassed a sizeable mailing list of frisky folks who would also be happy to attend their new event. So surely, this was an incubator for all sorts of devilish debauchery, wouldn’t you think?
“…he had to run down nude to the street and get his clothes….” — Dr. Robert Morgan Lawrence
Think again. Although a Masturbate-a-Thon may sound like the prelude for a complete sexual free-for-all, there were rules — and lots of them.
“There’s more rules at an orgy than you could possibly imagine,” Lawrence explained. First and foremost, people who attended a Masturbate-a-Thon were not allowed to touch anyone without permission. One of the two people who were ejected from the event, a woman who was clearly inebriated, broke this rule, albeit in a light-hearted manner. As Lawrence described, she was “running around very gleefully, slapping butts and yelling ‘wheeeee.’ She was having a grand time.” Although her intentions may not have been malicious, the woman was put in a cab and sent home.
The second person asked to leave a Masturbate-a-Thon also broke this cardinal rule and, after repeated warnings that he ignored, found himself — along with his clothes — being thrown out of the venue.
“We told him, ‘you need to chill, back off against the wall, smile at people, touch yourself, but don’t go touching people’,” said Lawrence. “He stood back up and walked over and touched somebody again and we said, ‘you’re going to have to leave’ and he said, ‘no, I don’t want to leave’. I told him, ‘you have to leave because we’re throwing your clothes out onto the sidewalk’ and we went over and dumped everything in his bag out the window, so he had to run down nude to the street and get his clothes to leave.”
It all boiled down to basic respect — the same respect that anyone would be expected to exhibit when they’re dealing with people sexually in any other environment. “You can’t touch people without permission there,” Lawrence said. “One of the things you have to learn is how to ask and how to stop when somebody says ‘no’.”
Other rules Masturbate-a-Thon attendees had to learn were to refrain from leering at other people touching themselves in the room, clean up after themselves when they were done, and not use drugs and alcohol inside of the venue. Also, it was a no-no to engage in any kind of partner sex, even in the context of partners helping each other masturbate.
“If there was a dildo, the other person could hold it, but they couldn’t move it. We really wanted to make sure that we were not setting up a situation where people would just come and do what they would have done at the safer sex party, but leave masturbation behind because it was so many people’s default — to default to partner sex,” said Queen. “This was really important to the Masturbate-a-Thon and Masturbation Month theme and we wanted to honor masturbation as not just valid, but a valuable thing to do. That’s how we split that hair.”
And those who successfully followed these rules could split the glory: Masturbate-a-Thon gave participants the opportunity to win prizes for the most orgasms achieved, the longest time spent masturbating, and the farthest distance ejaculated. This helped to get people more excited and focused on their stroking, and was, as one would imagine, the source of some entertaining anecdotes. Like the time when the ejaculation contest caused Lawrence to become concerned about his costume, much to the amusement of the reporters who were covering the event that year.
“I wore a ringmaster’s outfit for the front door and my top hat was upside down,” he said. “There was a very active young man pleasuring himself at a distance, but it was right over my top hat and I looked at him and said, ‘please, Sir, do not come in my hat’ and it made the San Francisco Chronicle the next day.”
Also noteworthy, and newsworthy, was the participant who won the award for the longest time spent masturbating one year by servicing himself for nearly twelve hours.
Twelve. Hours.
When asked by reporters how this was even possible, Queen explained it matter-of-factly: “Lube and tantric breathing. You have to go really, really, really slowly.”
And this idea, according to Queen, tends to go against how we generally view masturbation as a wham, bam, thank you ma’am affair.
“When most people think of masturbation, they think of a fair amount of speed and friction. For most people, there’s this way in which masturbation is done relatively quickly: You’re turned on and you want to relieve it, you’re anxious and you want to calm down, you need to go to sleep and you want to try to relax through masturbation,” she said. “There’s a lot of contexts, but it usually doesn’t look like, ‘I’m spending the whole weekend doing this’. That’s a very special situation that some sex explorers decide they want to get into, but mostly not.”
A Sexual Laboratory
In addition to establishing rules that would make Masturbate-a-Thon a safe environment for people to publicly pleasure themselves — as well as offering fun prizes, such as sex toys, to those who went above and beyond the call of duty — Lawrence and Queen had to create an environment that would get people in the mood. This meant paying attention to every minute detail in an evidence-based manner. For example, the space that was reserved for each participant was carefully considered.
“…I looked at him and said, ‘please, Sir, do not come in my hat….’” — Dr. Robert Morgan Lawrence
“We had to design space that provided architectural cues for people to move down from where they stood,” said Lawrence. “Spaces were designed so people would go from big open areas into spaces that would have them drop down lower, so they would either have to bend over entirely or crawl to get through to the next space.”
This meant the room needed to be designed to give women eight to nine square feet of space — because they tend to lie down when masturbating — and men two to four square feet. In addition, the temperature was controlled to create an optimal environment for people to take their clothes off, which was 75 degrees.
“People like taking their clothes off right around 80,” Lawrence said. “If there are 200 people in a room and you have the temperature at 75, the temperature will go to 85 in ten minutes.”
Lusty Logistical Challenges
In addition to the heat of the room, Queen and Lawrence were also tasked with taking the temperature of the community that attended Masturbate-a-Thon — which, they found, revealed some challenges.
One issue that came up was due to the sex education fundraising component of the event: Masturbate-a-Thon requested a suggested donation — no one was ever turned away for not being able to pay it — and people were encouraged to ask for donation pledges that would be calculated based on the total amount of time they spent masturbating. While the participants were happy to self-service in front of a group of people at the event, they oftentimes elected to self-sponsor, seemingly from not feeling comfortable enough to discuss their participation with their friend groups — which of course, defeated part of the purpose of the event.
“If there was a dildo, the other person could hold it, but they couldn’t move it.” — Dr. Carol Queen
“Mostly people just paid the basic admissions fee, which we called self-pledging, and came in and did their thing,” Queen said. “This is one of the things that over the course of many years we got really frustrated about. People were not even bothering, it seemed like in many cases, to think about whether there was any friend group they had that was sex positive enough to talk about masturbation in this way. That’s fair enough; in many circles this would be TMI — it wouldn’t be appropriate, much less welcomed.”
Also, over time, Queen said the ratio of men to women at the event became a problem.
“We started to get a pretty significant gender imbalance, and that made the whole event much more challenging to throw. It meant that it was a room that had mostly men in it — some were straight, some were gay, some were bi. The sexual orientation part on the one hand shouldn’t matter if you’re masturbating — it’s you — but on the other hand, if anybody was homophobic, then a room like that might be an issue for them,” she said. “In addition, the heterosexual guys felt like they wanted women in the room because that would be a more erotic space — and a more erotically comfortable space I’m sure — but it brought up the question of, we didn’t invite you here to make an erotic space that was your idea of a sexy afternoon. We invited you here to make a point about masturbation and to masturbate to raise funds. You could be masturbating at home, but instead you’re here, and if you were at home, we would not have sent over a bunch of cute girls.”
A Stroking Success
Despite the challenges that eventually led to the end of Masturbate-a-Thon, Lawrence and Queen say they were happy with the results, and they accomplished what they set out to do. Over the course of about 15 years, over 10,000 people total had attended Masturbate-a-Thon and with each event, the core message about the legitimacy of masturbation was spread every time attendees laid down in a venue to share the self-love. But of course, Masturbate-a-Thon wasn’t all about the educative element — it was also a lot of fun for participants.
“They were exploring their sexuality and this was an interesting thing to do,” Lawrence said. “You really have never lived until you’ve gotten down on your hands and knees and looked across the floor at 150 people, and it looks like a forest of Hitachis and hard-ons.”
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