Read John Irving’s A Widow For One Year which talks a lot about masturbation in the context of strong women and weak men. It’s a confused failure of a novel but the masturbation is interesting.

    Eddie, 16, masturbates secretly for Marion, 39, his wife’s employer ; she catches him not only masturbating in the nude but surrounded by her scented underwear. Eddie is mortified (he weeps in front of her) but Marion who sees her own dead sons in him, comforts him. She encourages him to continue using his fantasies about her when he masturbates. Then, they briefly become lovers at her initiative (Marion thereby fulfilling an incestuously subconscious desire for her lost boys).

    Marion will leave Eddie with a lifelong yearning for older women – he eventually has lovers in their 70s and 80s – but it is implicit that his basic sexual identity is as a masturbator. He writes novels which entwine Marion and masturbation.

    Eddie’s public persona is that of a weak man – a wanker – held in contempt by strong women of his own generation if not by the old women he sleeps with.

    Marion’s husband Ted is also a masturbator but implicitly. An artist, he seduces the models he draws. He also photographs them and keeps the photographs together in a hidden envelope. A characteristic of Ted’s sexuality is that he enjoys the process of seduction and the anticipation of sex as much as the actual bedding of his women. In other words the real thrill for Ted is in masturbatory fantasies about the yet unachieved women and later their photographed bodies. Ted too is essentially a masturbator. Women are merely the instruments of his masturbation.

    Ruth the daughter of Marion and Ted knows from Eddie’s autobiographical novels that he is a masturbator and from her discovery of the photographs that Ted is too. At the age of 36, she herself goes to bed with an adolescent boy, Wim. They do not have sex together but he asks for and receives permission to masturbate in front of her. Later, when she is pretending to be asleep, Wim furtively masturbates again. Much later, Ruth confronts Wim in front of his wife with the public humiliation that he was not a lover but a masturbator.

    The story further involves a serial killer of prostitutes who photographs their bodies, obviously with the intention of using them for masturbation afterwards. The photographs are taken with a polaroid camera, as are Ted’s, which emphasises their secretive nature and that of their purpose. No third party will know about them.

    Irving makes both Eddie and Wim ashamed of cumming in front of the women who control them. Both rush to the bathroom to wash away the stain. The intention here is to equate male masturbation itself with shame. In front of woman, even when she is complicit, the elation of the act is replaced immediately by remorse and humiliation.

    Freud talked about female penis envy. In reality, far from empowering men, their penis becomes a source of enslavement which women can control. In the end men’s masturbation and their need for women to be part of it empowers women. Masturbation is weakness.

    There is only a single mention of female masturbation in the novel. Ruth thinks about it but doesn’t do it ; women possess a power of self-control that men lack and this is what makes women strong and men weak. There is always an element of humiliation for a man when he allows a woman to masturbate him or he masturbates in front of her.

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Update: The beautiful moment when Marion catches Eddie masturbating nude with her clothes spread around him still intrigues me. The boy's deep humiliation and his anguished tears which all her tenderness and compassion cannot assuage. The inexpungeable shame of it is both frightening and intensely exciting to the imagination not just of a vulnerable adolescent but of a man at any age. Would I survive it if my wife caught me like this, exposed in my deeply secret me which she would never otherwise know? What would she do with the knowledge ? Eddie does survive and with Marion's complicity accepts the simple legitimacy of his masturbation. The humiliation itself becomes an instance of unique joy which is unrepeatable because although Eddie can re-enact the circumstances, he can never again experience its immediacy and spontaneity. He has lived a supreme moment of sexual pleasure. It would be psychologically devastating to undergo it, but yet...