More Than A Helping Hand: Male Masturbatory Aids and the Construction of Heterosexual Masculinity

Abstract: In this paper, I explore the construction and articulation of heterosexual masculinity through male masturbatory aids, and how these aids manipulate and interact with heterosexual desires, pleasures and intimacies. The first chapter of this paper is given over to historically contextualising attitudes and perceptions of male masturbation and entwining this with a history of masculinity. What follows is three chapters that each examine one male masturbatory aid: The Fleshlight, The TENGA EGG and the Teddy Babe. Each of these aids represents a different level of feminine mimesis, as well as cost, that acts to enhance the male masturbatory experience. These analytical chapters employ a mixed methodological and theoretical approach, drawing on discourse analysis, image analysis and phenomenology to produce new knowledges about these objects and the cultural texts that surround and accompany them. By considering each aid as a ‘boundary object’ I have employed numerous theoretical positions in order to question what the relationship of cis-gendered heterosexual man is to these disembodied/constructed feminine/female object is, and how intimacies, desires and pleasures arise and are affected by them. This thesis uses Raewyn Connell’s understanding of hegemonic masculinity and Marquard Smith’s formulation of heterosexuality as perverse and unacknowledged in order male these two concepts visible for interrogation. Ultimately, this thesis reveals that a multitude of desires, pleasures and intimacies are produced by each of these objects, and a plurality of masculinities are constructed and articulated, that all position the female sexual subject as the other, that must be worked against in order to achieve sexual gratification and climax.