![]() ![]() Jock McLeish, a mid-aged alcoholic businessman, is in a non-descript hotel room in a non-descript Scottish town. “Most pornography fails by not being dramatic enough. And then he’s left emptied of lust, with no friendly buffer between himself and reality. In this manic, virtuosic scene, Will spends a week in a vortex of image stabilizing, compositing, carpal tunnel flares and increasingly strained orgasms. When he realizes he wants to see a representation of his and Vanya’s sex life onscreen, he turns to editing. Will is no stranger to creatively straining the limits of porn consumption: he’s already learned to create jury-rigged 3D porn by watching two clips side-by-side with his eyes crossed. Will’s girlfriend Vanya is away and he takes the opportunity to revisit his vast, lovingly collated porn collection. “Better than having sex, you could make sex.” She assures Rachel that she’s innocent, and things build into a fully imagined (and very funny) scene of submission, care-giving, and filthiness. Things progress, and Mommy Ana takes complete control. Rachel imagines lying bed with menstrual cramps, “Mommy Ana” soothing her by rubbing her tummy. On day four of the detox she starts fantasizing about her boss Ana. ![]() Rachel, who struggles with disordered eating, has, on the advice of her therapist, started a 90-day “detox” from her cruel, fat-shaming mother. Joe markets his fantasy-a kind of deluxe glory hole-as the ideal solution to workplace sexual harassment in this deeply strange, discomfiting, hilarious novel. But his tendency to embellish marks him for success. The problem is Joe keeps getting bogged down in the details of his fantasy, constructing backstories, imagining complex setpieces. Two: he masturbates imaging his ideal, deeply specific scenario. One: he tries to sell vacuum cleaners, gets invited in for dessert, returns to his rented trailer in a sugar-bloated fugue state. Joe is a sad-sack stuck in two repeating loops. “The problem with this fantasy was that it was hard to get the wall right.” Obviously, I’m not the only one: here are ten novels with scenes that portray masturbation exceptionally well. My interest in both ambivalence and desire-fueled narrative distortion is one reason I wrote a novel, The Seaplane on Final Approach, preoccupied with masturbatory fantasy. Both the character masturbating and the reader reading are made aware-often uncomfortably-of both the locked box of their own minds and the fact that they’re participating in something universal. These scenes are ambivalent, offering evidence of our self-sufficiency and searing need for other people, our capacity for both empathy and objectification. But there are always other desires caught up in the sexual and masturbation becomes an act of boredom, loneliness, depression, love, excitement, fury, sorrow, celebration, grief, insomnia-sometimes all at once. A character negotiates with what they want, and how they want it. At first glance, a masturbation scene is uncluttered: a monologue on a bare stage. ![]()
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