Shared Fleshlights In The Barracks
I’m reluctant to share this story at all, because the woman who put it on the internet framed it on both ends with misandrist generalizations about male hygiene. More on that, below. But first the story, which comes from clinical sexologist Danielle Kramer, talking about a time when she was under contract to provide sexual health clinical services for the military:
The base I was associated with…had barracks full of 18 to 24 year olds. A young enlisted guy comes in, tested positive for gonorrhea and chlamydia. Classic combo. Easy enough, we treat it, safe sex talk, you’re done. But the next day, two more guys came in with the same combo. And the day after that, three more guys. At this point, I’m like, okay, there’s either one very busy person on this base or something else is going on.
Then this one guy comes in, he tests positive, but he swears he is not sexually active. And I hear this all the time. So I’m like, hey, no judgment. I don’t care who you’re having sex with, but we gotta talk about this. And he’s like, no, there is no way. I’m not having sex with anybody.
Where do you live? The barracks? Who do you hang out with? And slowly, slowly, the truth comes out.
Turns out, a not small group of men in the barracks were sharing a Fleshlight. Two of them, to be exact. And none of them had been washing it for weeks. They were literally passing around a communal petri dish of gonorrhea and chlamydia like it was a Nintendo Switch.
Yes, I had to tell their commanding officer. Yes, I had to do an emergency Powerpoint about this. Yes, every single one of them had to get treated.
Not quoted are several sex-negative generalizations about men and cleanliness and safe sex, none of which are supported by the facts of the anecdote. I don’t prefer to share misandrist propaganda, especially when young men under military discipline in barracks are by no means a fair sampling from which to extrapolate general male behavior.
So why share the story at all? Because it ties in, conceptually, with the public Fleshlight art installation at Burning Man that’s gone viral in a hundred internet places over the years. Everybody who sees that installation or hears about it or talks about it feels a certain kind of way about public masturbation and/or shared sex toys, and a lot of those conversations include phrases like “nobody would” or “that’s too disgusting for anybody to…” or… you see where I’m going with this. The anecdote about young men under authoritarian control, in a sex-segregated barracks with very little privacy, establishes a sort of outlier of human behavior that I think is useful to that conversation.
That’s why, even though the story came wrapped up in sex-negative “men-are-filthy-beasts” packaging where I found it, I thought it was worth scraping it clean (as best I could) to bring it here.
Update: While curating the list of similar posts to appear beneath this one, I was amused to discover a prescient post from the very first year of ErosBlog’s publication, all the way back in 2003. (Am I allowed to call my own posts “prescient”?) In responding to a conversation outside the sex blog community (which was then very small) about why sex toys for men (male masturbators, pocket pussies, Fleshlights, and such) were considered much more taboo and icky than sex toys for women such as dildos and vibrators, I pointed out that men don’t have any sort of hygiene problems at all when it comes to cleaning things they care about, like, say, guns and military equipment:
[I]n objective terms the hygienic concern is arrant nonsense. Men have mastered cleaning tasks of a far more intricate nature, and will even voluntarily indulge when the object of their cleaning affections is, say, a much-beloved rifle. Nor is it implausible that a truly decent technology for assisted orgasm would command every bit as much gadgeteering enthusiasm as gun guys lavish on the contents of their gun safes.
So there! You can be sure that the very same military guys who supposedly passed around these dirty Fleshlights have been taught to field strip and clean a complicated rifle under challenging conditions, when given supportive social conditions for that cleaning task. The problem in that barracks was the social conditions, not the filthy-beastliness of the men.
Similar Sex Blogging:
Shorter URL for sharing: https://www.erosblog.com/?p=34942
Wow! So much to unpack.
First off unless things have changed the armed forces (at least here) have been very hot on safe sex and genital cleanliness. I vaguely remember a statistic about one of the Asian conflicts (maybe Malay, or Korea) where crotch rot was responsible for more casualties than bullets. Certainly the necessity of washing under the foreskin for those us so equipped is trained out in the UK military. I’m hoping that these Fleshlights may have been rinsed, at least well enough to remove lube and any other ahem deposits. But bacteria can be difficult to remove, and I’m guessing that there were no provisions for sterilising them. Either boiling or suitably silicone friendly antiseptics. But then, there’s also the possibility she’s right, and the branch she was working in provided her in lieu of the other lectures on hygiene. Possibly those lectures were expected to fall into her responsibility and she had either not delivered them, or had done so in a manner that hadn’t stuck, though from the ’emergency’ nature of the Powerpoints perhaps she expected them to all arrive from home fully trained, or someone did.
Secondly, someone probably didn’t limit themselves to the Fleshlights in all likelihood, and there’s a question over where the infections started from. I’m assuming she tracked down patient zero in the barracks and backtracked their connections? Having checked my assumptions both those spread only through bodily fluids, and so there will probably be a patient zero up the chain that picked them up off base. Though the only case of chlamydia I’ve ever seen we regarded as spontaneous, but from what I’m reading, she was definitely stepping out on her monogamous, and uninfected partner, something we dismissed at the time as her housemates.
Next up, from her tone and the phrasing I”m guessing she breached medical confidentiality by ‘reporting them to their officer’, so I’m also guessing her contract was not renewed. I could be wrong and she just reported a rise in cases, scheduling a general sexual health talk, and arranged to see everyone quietly, but somehow I suspect not.
BTW as part of checking this apparently condoms are only 78% effective during penetrative sex at preventing transmission of chlamydia. I’ve not got my Violet Blue in front of me, but she has lots to say on avoiding this kind of transmission, too much sometimes, but definitely useful to these young men.
Back during COVID, the NHS sent out an SMS asking the recipients to get tested for STIs and to only engage in monogamous or protected sex henceforth in an attempt to ‘wipe out STIs!’. I don’t know the coverage but I got it. Since then they have instigated automatic checks on all blood tests in my area, with optional opt out, if you spot one of the posters hidden in corners that is.
I wonder if the barracks had female quarters, and if so whether the ladies were engaged in similar shared toy situations, but had avoided an outbreak?
Hey! Who bought the Fleshlights I wonder?
So many thoughts…
As for sharing sex toys, I’ve only found a problem if the toys predated the relationship.
Even as a poly, toys were freely shared as long as only amongst us, and those of us who stayed within the group, but only as long as they were bought after joining.
Having been in a couple of long term relationships I’ve found it can be quite expensive or even impossible in a couple of cases replacing everything one has accumulated rather than have a new partner turn their nose up and ask ‘did you use this with …’. Though some things make their way into the private me only box for the memories attached as much as function.
finagle, I seem to remember that one of the cultural tensions between British and US forces in the Hitlerian war was that Monty decided the British army needed sex ed and free condoms, and parts of the US military found this just as scandalous as letting coloured enlisted men drink in the same pubs as whites.
Finagle, there’s a lot in your comment but I’m only going to respond to your assumption that she was operating under a duty of medical confidentiality. As I dimly understand it, medical and related-field professionals operated within the US Department of Defense are subject to something called the “military command exemption” to the usual medical confidentiality expectations. The scope of that is a bit fuzzy (to me) but I think in practice there’s very little expectation of medical privacy for troops about matters that a commander would see as affecting military readiness.
I would also point out that although she refers to herself as “doctor” in a few places, our narrator is reticent about listing her actual credentials anywhere on her social media profiles, Linked-In, or therapy-services website. It strikes me as possible that, during that portion of her life, she was employed as a sex educator/communicator for a larger contracting organization within which other medical professionals may have been doing the actual STD testing and responsible for any reporting decisions, even if she did the actual client (commander) notifications as she says. I’m guessing, but my guess fits the crumbs of visible data.
I know there’s a lot, you lit a big fire 😀
I was guessing too about her qualifications or role and giving her the benefit of the doubt. It sounded like she was prescribing, but could just be bigging up her role.
Finagle, no complaints on my part at all, I was/am just operating under limits on my time/attention today, so I picked the one thing I wanted the most to respond to. :-)
And yeah: I’m suspicious about her unspecified credentials, but (a) it’s a bad look for me as an internet dude to jump immediately to “I have an unrelated critique of this internet woman so I’m going to question her credentials” and (b) in general sexologists and sex therapists don’t get much respect and many of them operate very successfully without having specific credentials for that, which may be a complete explanation of why her website is blissfully free of credentials even if she did have prescribing authority for antibiotics in her defense department days.
I can’t imagine not cleaning one–but I can’t imagine how so many guys get it all over everything. However, the only way I’m aware of to actually disinfect one is isopropyl alcohol.