I was walking towards the back of the bus when I noticed a young man fiddling with something furtively in his lap. I presume you can fill in the rest. I turned on my heel, sat down towards the front, read my book and ignored him.

On one, ahem, memorable bus journey, I sat next to a man who wet his pants. Luckily the smell alerted me before the puddle spread across the seat. After an incident like that, a surreptitious self-fondler was no biggie. The top deck was almost empty – a gang of lads, two middle aged women, no children – and he didn’t seem to be looking at anyone in particular.
A Swedish court recently ruled that public masturbation is not illegal. A 65-year-old man who self-pleasured on a public beach was acquitted after the judge ruled that, because he had not targeted a specific person, his actions did not meet the definition of sexual assault.
I’d prefer to catch a bus or stroll along the beach without swathes of strangers self-diddling, but maybe that’s just me. However, the ruling seems fair because there is a huge difference between seeing someone masturbating in public and having them do it while leering at you.
The first time this happened to me was when I was fifteen. There I was, walking home through the suburbs along a quiet residential street in my very unsexy school uniform, when I noticed a car following me slowly. I turned around to see a man with one hand on the steering wheel and the other on his dick. I ran, but he sped up and followed me, until I hit on the bright idea of running down a one-way and lost him. By the time I got home I was shaken and terrified.
Unfortunately that is not the only time it’s happened to me – in South Africa it was a frequent occurrence; indeed every woman I knew, including my friends, my sisters, my mother, had been on the receiving end of this multiple times. You may be interested to know that the perpetrators were overwhelmingly middle-class men in their thirties driving expensive cars – exactly the kind of dude your dad hopes you’ll marry.
By the time I was twenty I’d learnt that most of these guys got their kicks by scaring and upsetting the women they targeted, but they weren’t dangerous.
If I was in a public area, I’d walk up to the car, cock my eyebrow disdainfully or laugh, and nine times out of ten, they’d drive away.
I am pleased to report that this is much less of an issue in Ireland – or at least in Dublin. Perhaps Irishmen have better manners, or perhaps the roads are too busy to make quick getaways possible, but either way, I’m grateful. However it is possible to spot the odd wanker – sometimes in the most unlikely of places.
A few years back the Cork DJ Neil Prendeville was caught committing what was described as a “lewd act” on an Aer Lingus flight. Prendeville apologised, repeatedly, but denied remembering what he had done, blaming the incident on a combination of painkillers and alcohol.
Perhaps this is true, as that’s a toxic combination. Prendeville has discussed his unhealthy relationship with alcohol in the media, and as no one was physically assaulted during the incident, he deserves the benefit of the doubt. Besides which, he is certainly not the only well-known personality to have made that kind of mistake.
Last year, the American actor Fred Willard was arrested for jerking off in an adult movie theatre; a place where you’d think this kind of thing would be, if not encouraged, at least expected and tolerated. That’s what porn is for after all. Willard denied he’d done anything, and although he was not charged, he was ordered to undergo a treatment programme.
Also in 2012, Jason Russell, filmmaker behind Kony 2012, a documentary about child soldiers in Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, was arrested for wandering the streets of San Diego naked and masturbating. His family blamed the incident on “brief reactive psychosis, an acute state brought on by extreme exhaustion, stress and dehydration”, which is a fancy way of saying he’d had a meltdown after the huge amounts of backlash against the film.
While there are thousands of (faked) videos of women caught masturbating in public, for the most part, it is men that get arrested for public acts of self-abuse – but not always. A few years back, an Ohio woman was arrested for driving a car while using a sex toy and watching a film on her computer. That’s some serious multi-tasking! Although she was arrested, Colondra Hamilton wasn’t charged with performing a “lewd” act, but for impaired driving and possession of drug paraphernalia when police found a broken crack pipe in the car.
This begs a number of questions: are women less likely to masturbate in public? Maybe we are better at being sneaky about it? Or are the police less likely to charge female perpetrators?
I suspect cunning comes into it. There are a number of vibrators for women that are designed to look like something else – lipstick, make-up brushes and polished stones to name a few. Since these are the kind of things you could carry in your handbag, chances are these toys are not being used in the privacy of anyone’s bedroom.
Even without toys, female masturbation can be “hands-free.” Any woman with good pelvic floor muscles can bring herself to orgasm by crossing her legs and repeatedly squeezing to put pressure on
the clitoris.
Perhaps women are publicly masturbating in their hundreds – after all, you’re unlikely to wear vibrating underpants when home alone – but unless they start breathing heavily, or pulling one of those is-she-having-a-stroke orgasm faces, no one is any the wiser.
I am a fan of masturbation. It is safe, easy, free, fun, makes it easier for women to orgasm with a partner, and is said to have a slew of health benefits such as combating stress, lowering the risk of heart disease and prostate cancer.
Given all this, maybe masturbation should be included in our daily schedules, like showering and brushing our teeth. But really people, context! Context is everything! Wait until you’re at home, or at very least alone. A gratification delayed is all the sweeter.