Through History with J. Wanker Smith

This is a essay I wrote back in 2014 — a jocular review of how masturbation has shaped the history of humanity. Hope you enjoy it.

_Through History with J. Wesley Smith_, for the majority of you who are too young to remember, was a weekly cartoon by Burr Shafer that appeared in _The Saturday Evening Post_ in the 1950's. Each week it had some satirical take on a well-known historical event to which the character, J. Wesley Smith was inevitably witness. For example, there's one where JWS exhorts his ship-mates with, "The order is full speed ahead -- and you should have heard what Admiral Farragut said about the torpedos!"

I shall now exhort you with _Through History with J. Wanker Smith_.

Going way way back would involve getting into specifics about persons illuminated only in ancient sacred scripture. As that might cause some readers offense, let me say only that Adam was a masturbator. In those dawning days of humanity, while Adam first engaged in what was merely a routine to keep the smooth muscles of his prostate in fit shape, the Lord saw that it was good. And so He breathed upon Adam imbuing what he was doing with the delightful penis tingle and body bubbly we now know as orgasm.

Skip ahead now a few millennia to when Paris first laid eyes on Helen. If only he had had the good sense then to go off by himself and masturbate, ten years of war and strife might have been avoided. But no, he had to kidnap her instead. If Paris had been more like his father -- the peaceful, well balanced, and avid masturbator, King Priam, he would have known the right thing to do.

On the other side of the Aegean, King Agamemnon -- well I can tell you that any father who would murder his own daughter is definitively NOT a masturbator. But of his warriors -- I don't know about Achilles, but his friend, Patrocolus -- definitely a masturbator. So were both Ajax the greater and Ajax the lesser. It is said that Ajax the greater committed suicide after stripping the armor from a warrior he had just slain and finding beneath it the naked body of the queen of the Amazons. But before falling on his sword, he masturbated one last time.

And what about the wandering minstrel who, six centuries later, set this whole legend to verse? Homer was a masturbator. Indeed it was probably Homer who first put words to the legend that Hermes had revealed the secret of masturbation to Pan, who disseminated it (excuse the pun) to the shepherds of the hills.

And the pharaohs of ancient Egypt -- masturbators all. They thought of themselves as gods, and it was the god, Ra-Atum, who created the all life by the act of masturbation. Surely the pharaohs sought to emulate him. Indeed there was an annual fertility rite where Pharaoh himself would publicly masturbate, enriching the Nile with his royal semen.

Back to Greece but in the 5th, 4th, and 3rd centuries BCE. Socrates, Plato, Aristophanes and their colleagues were all masturbators. Many of the artifacts from that era, urns, murals, etc., unabashedly depict masturbation. That the Greeks of that time masturbated without guilt or shame was undoubtedly one of the reasons their culture produced such a wealth of art, literature, and philosophy.

Then there was that gay masturbating leader of warriors from Macedonia, Alexander, who left a trail of his spilled semen all the way to India and back. His teacher, when he was a youth, the esteemed philosopher, Aristotle -- he too was a masturbator.

The emperors Caesar Augustus, Tiberius, and Claudius were all masturbators. So too were the scholars, Cicero and Virgil. The perverted emperors, Nero and Caligula -- they were the ones who didn't masturbate nearly enough. Alas, four centuries later, the Romans lost their way, forgot how to masturbate, and this led to their downfall and six hundred years of dark ages.

Sadly there was not much masturbating during that era, except for the brief appearance of the masturbator, Charlemagne, and, of course, aboard Viking ships.

But no good thing can be kept down forever. William the Conqueror brought light and masturbation back to a backward and impoverished Europe. King Harold had banished masturbation from the British Isles, and look what that got him at the Battle of Hastings.

I could go on and on about the British monarchs. For example, if you had a name like Plantagenet, you'd have to be a masturbator.

I don't know if Elizabeth I was a masturbator, but surely she encouraged it among the male members of her court. And she attended theatre presented by one of the greatest masturbators of all time. Read Shakespeare's' sonnets. Read Romeo's lamentations before he meets Juliet. Read the balcony scene. What do you think Romeo did that night after departing Juliet's window? What do you think Bard Bill did when he laid down his pen after writing that scene?

My favorite of the British kings is Charles II -- a man whose good humor and happy soul is to be admired. And where do you think those qualities came from. Charly was a masturbator. And his contemporary, Isaac Newton, who never married and is not known to ever have had a girlfriend or boyfriend -- the myth is it was the apple falling from the tree that inspired his revelation of gravity. But in reality it was the trajectory of his semen wad splatting onto the ground beneath that tree that drew open nature's veil caused him to perceive that deep truth.

Exit the seventeenth century and enter the eighteenth. In France, Voltaire's advocacy of various freedoms with near certainty included the freedom to masturbate. In its early years of the century in Leipzig, J.S. Bach was masturbating to The Joy of Man's Desiring. Skip ahead to the 1770's. That horny genius, W.A. Mozart, revealed in his letters that he was a virgin up to his wedding day. But both before and after that joyous night with Stanzi, he was a multi-times-each-day masturbator. By 1800 though, Mozart was nine years dead and the toast of Vienna was that gruff, opinionated musician named Beethoven. Can you listen to Moonlight Sonata and not imagine Ludwig masturbating at the piano as he composed it? Two more musicians, one at the beginning of the 1700's, George Friedrich Handel, and the other during the 1800's, Hector Berlioz, both suffered from manic depression. During their productive manic periods, can you doubt that their prostates were not also productive?

I suspect Queen Victoria was not a masturbator. But she loved Prince Albert dearly and tried valiantly to please him. Yet Prince Al remained a lifelong masturbator. The great writers just prior to the Victorian era had laid an expansive foundation for him. Samuel Taylor Coleridge masturbated every chance he got when he wasn't stoned out of his mind on opium. Lord Byron, Percy Shelly, Keats -- these are guys who masturbated incessantly.

And during the Victorian era itself -- that gentle math professor at Oxford, that bashful stutterer, Lewis Carroll, in the privacy of his chambers masturbated nearly every minute he was not either sleeping or writing (and BTW there is no evidence that he ever engaged in inappropriate behavior with Alice or her sisters). And can anybody doubt that Oscar Wilde was a masturbator? I love his quote, "We all live in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." And what about the rest of Europe during that time? Think of that physician in Austria whose very name means joy -- Ziggy Freud. What a masturbator he must have been. And in the United States -- nobody could have assembled words with the beauty and clarity that Abraham Lincoln did without masturbating. Likewise with Mark Twain (who actually wrote about masturbation) and Walt Whitman. What do you think Thoreau was talking about when he wrote, "To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude. We are for the most part more lonely when we go abroad among men than when we stay in our chambers."

And finally that century of both savage death and destruction as well as revolution in science and engineering -- the twentieth. About 20 years ago, the love letters of Albert Einstein were found. They were filled with overt pining, desire, and eroticism. No surprise there. For a mind to delve as deeply into nature's mysteries as his did, he would have had to masturbate often. No doubt that Max Plank, and Neils Bohr were also great masturbators.

And twentieth century writers? Hemingway would never have admitted it, but after standing at his typewriter, barefoot in his underwear for hours each day, he masturbated. And F. Scott Fitzgerald, whenever sufficiently sober, always masturbated.

And what of those of that century whose pride and greed laid waste to all that was decent and to be hoped for, not to mention the lives of countless millions of innocent souls? If only they had masturbated more, perhaps their avarice would have been less and their contentment would have been such as to lead them away from the frightful evils they perpetrated.

So now it is up to us masturbators of the twenty-first century to spread the word and the contentment to all. Masturbate joyously and often. The future of humanity desperately depends on it.

 

You know I first saw the length of your essay and thought wtf? And was going to reply tl;dr.

But I read it and actually enjoyed it. Thanks for posting it. Nice to know one of my favorite pastimes was shared with so many famous men.

Cheers!