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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