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.

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Pocket Pussy: The Handyman Special

Field-expedient masturbatory aids are not unheard of in male sexual experience. Indeed, this is perhaps an understatement. And just as in any other field of human endeavor, there’s always this one guy who goes all alpha-geek perfectionist.

In the realm of the home-made pocket pussy, that man is called Pafnuty Kingdom Shacknasty (well, he calls himself that) and Always Aroused Girl has found him, hunted him down, and forced him (delicious torments, I’m sure) to write an instructible worthy of Make magazine, complete with color glossy photographs:

Make Your Own Sex-Toy: A Pocket Pussy Polemic Part One
Make Your Own Sex-Toy: A Pocket Pussy Polemic Part Two

Like all true geniuses, PafShack (as I shall call him for short) labored in the wilderness for many years, perfecting his Promethean gift (and convincing himself of its perfection) before returning to share it with his fellow man:

I spent several years, from about 2000 until about 2004, working on the problem in depth, trying out dozens of designs. I tried polyethylene bags, elastomeric fire hose liners, foam rubber wrapped in various kinds of tapes, rubber surgical wraps, condoms, bicycle tire inner tubes, and probably things I’ve completely forgotten about.

I started out knowing nothing about what design parameters I should incorporate, and by sheer natural selection, discovered what worked, what didn’t, and why. I’ll save you the history of the Great Chain of Being and cut right to the chase; namely what I believe to be the design of the Perfect Pocket Pussy. After I demonstrate how to build it, I’ll compare it to what is widely hailed as the best commercial design, which is evidently still the Fleshlight.

First off, I discovered that two very important parameters are porosity and resilience. Foam rubber fulfills both of these needs nicely. Zip on down to the local big box hardware store and buy a length of foam rubber pipe insulation. Note that pipe insulation is also made in polyethylene. You want foam rubber. The difference should be immediately obvious both by looking at it and by touching it. I bought a 6 foot length for $5.77.

There’s more of this, quite a lot more, which you can read for yourself. I’m satisfied to provide a photograph of the finished product:

Just as interesting to me as the technical details, though, was the promise (quoted above) that PafShack would compare his PPP (“Perfect Pocket Pussy”) with the market-leading Fleshlight. I blogged about the Fleshlight almost seven years ago, but I’ve never actually seen one; nor, in that seven years, have I happened to stumble across any really critical review, in which the negative features of the Fleshlight were discussed along with its allegedly positive ones. (There might be a blog post in that fact alone, or even two; perhaps one about the rarely-violated taboos men observe in writing about their own sexuality, and another about the ways in which widespread affiliate marketing generates an ocean of bland one-sided marketing prose about products, mostly puffery that tends to drown out genuinely and useful writing about such products.) In any case, PafShack’s comparison of his PPP with the Fleshlight turns out to be the most useful review of the commercial product that I’ve ever seen:

First off, the Fleshlight is expensive. The base model I bought at the local sex emporium was $65. Compare that to the cost of materials for my version, which would run around $5… [T]he “breech” aperture is very small, resulting in a very “tight” feel. My first outing with the unit using Astroglide resulted in several realizations. First off, you need to be fully erect to even insert your penis into the unit. Not useful if you want to use it to help get you started. If your penis comes out of the unit, it’s hard to get it back in without using your other hand. This is a negative, as your other hand is usually holding a magazine, mouse, or remote. You don’t want lube all over those! The unit is so tight that lube tends to be pumped down, i.e. the Fleshlight acts as a sort of squeegee, or windshield wiper. In my case this resulted in the dreaded Lemon Song Conundrum, which I hadn’t experienced in years with my own designs. I had to constantly keep adding lube to the muzzle to maintain optimum lubrication. It caused pain in my urethra, and in fact resulted in a searing pain on orgasm.

On the upside, the material “Cyberskin” appears to be slightly porous, which is good. But the unit has to have a rigid plastic casing, because the Cyberskin is so intrinsically floppy that it won’t support itself, unless it was made much thicker all along its length. This means that the rigid plastic tube prevents any manipulation of the tube morphology. All you can do with it is manipulate the angle of attack and rate of oscillation. The Fleshlight is heavy. To maintain the tightness of the aperture, and the overall “feel” of the unit, a large mass of Cyberskin is packed into the first few inches of the breech.

I tried to weigh the Fleshlight; it’s beyond the range of my Ohaus student balance. It’s more than a pound and less than a kilogram. In contrast, my own PP weighs just 58 grams! While the Fleshlight is certainly slick, and has no adhesive discontinuities like my own design, it’s also “lifeless” in the sense that no fine manipulation of the shape of the tube can occur. It’s perfectly homogenous; twisting it does nothing, it feels just the same.

I suppose it could be made to suck, if one adjusted the rigid plastic top cap just so, I didn’t even bother to try.

My own PP is also built with a porous material; foam rubber. It’s naturally resilient, like Cyberskin. It’s able to be custom fit to the user. If it ends up feeling too loose, add rubber bands. If it ends up feeling too tight, just keep on using it; being foam rubber, it will tend to compact. The BOPP adds enough stiffness to where the unit will not collapse, yet is vastly less massive, and therefore allows a much greater range of subtle and sensitive control. Your control hand can alter the tube’s shape allowing continuous variation of stimulation. Held at the top, the tube can be closed off, and suction applied at will. Used with a 50-50 mixture of hair conditioner and water results in virtually no Lemon Song Conundrum.

The downside? As with all sex toys, you must wash and dry the thing. The inner surface will degrade over time, due to ordinary usage. The foam will become less resilient.

Yes, I know it’s a boast, but I believe I have developed the greatest male masturbation toy of all time: This is my lasting gift to the betterment of mankind. To masturbate with your hand is to revert to the Neanderthal.

Thanks PafShack for for your years of toil on behalf of all mankind. And thanks to AAG for coaxing the story out of him!

Update: AAG did a more diligent job than most of erasing all trace of her blog and its posts when she departed from the adult internet, so the links that were in this post were broken beyond my ability to repair. If she, or PafShak, or anybody else who for any reason still has an archive of PafShak’s tutorial ever sees this, please by all means drop me a discreet copy to post up in full!

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