So let’s suppose Jeffrey Toobin had been caught on camera having sex with a partner instead of touching himself. Would he be the most mocked man in the United States right now?
Of course not. And, putting aside Toobin’s history of bad sexual judgment, that’s what this pseudo-scandal is really about: our collective unease with masturbation. We Americans love to talk — and talk, and talk — about sex. But there’s one topic that remains taboo, and Toobin is paying the price for it.
Unless you live on another planet, you already know the outline of this grim tale. On Monday, the New Yorker suspended Toobin — one of its best-known authors — after he was seen masturbating during a Zoom work call. In an interview with Vice magazine, Toobin said he didn’t realize his video was on.
“I made an embarrassingly stupid mistake,” Toobin admitted. “I thought no one on the Zoom call could see me. I thought I had muted the Zoom video.”
By late Monday, Toobin was the second-most searched subject on the internet in America. Over 2 million people — yes, you read that right — had Googled him. That was four times as many as searched Jeff Bridges (who announced he had lymphoma) or “presidential debate” (insert joke here).
What’s up with that? Part of it is simple schadenfreude: in a country that both worships and envies fame, we love nothing more than bringing celebrities down a peg or two.
But why the resolute focus on this celebrity? The answer has to do with his particular transgression, of course. Toobin previously fathered a child with a mistress, which generated a few gossip columns but was quickly forgotten after that. Yet nobody is likely to forget that he had sex with himself, which has been a big no-no since the advent of the Enlightenment.
That’s when the West invented the autonomous individual, endowed with natural rights. But liberty was dangerous, too: Freed from constraints, the individual could easily descend into corruption and vice.
Masturbation embodied all of those fears. It was solitary, fueled by fantasies that each person invented. And when that started, there was no telling when it would stop.
So it was decried as “self-abuse,” the evil downside of individual freedom. Doctors linked it to epilepsy, impotence and insanity. And they began to advocate for routine male circumcision, which supposedly deterred masturbation. And while the Bible didn’t condemn the practice directly, Christians interpreted the passage about Onan — who “spilled his seed” to avoid impregnating his brother’s wife — to constitute a prohibition on masturbation.
But all of that went out the window with the sexual revolution, right? Wrong. That’s why Bill Clinton was forced to fire his surgeon general, Joycelyn Elders, after she suggested that schools teach about masturbation. After all, she said, it’s “a part of human sexuality.”
It just wasn’t a part that we could acknowledge in polite company. After press accounts incorrectly reported that Elders wanted to teach kids how to masturbate — which is one activity they can certainly learn on their own — she was toast. Dismissing Elders, Clinton declared that her views on masturbation countered his “own convictions.”
Not exactly. Remember that cigar? Of course you do. Among all the sordid details about Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, the masturbation episode is the one that lingers.
And that’s also what everyone is going to remember about Jeffrey Toobin, I’m afraid. But that says more about us than it does about him.
According to a 2016 survey, 95% of men and 81% of women in America have masturbated. Yet in the same poll, over half of respondents said they felt uncomfortable talking about it.
So we joke about it, instead, which relieves our anxieties but reinforces the taboo. Witness the outpouring of juvenile humor over the past two days about “Toobin his own horn,” his “sticky situation,” and so on.
Remember, nobody — literally, nobody — has suggested that Toobin willfully exposed himself to others. You might say that he shouldn’t have been pleasuring himself during a work call, but that’s his business rather than yours. Inadvertently, he let the rest of us know about it. And now we can’t forgive him for it.
News flash: Toobin masturbates. But I’m guessing that you do the same, dear reader. Maybe you should stop feeling weird and guilty about that. Then we can all stop making fun of Jeffrey Toobin.
Zimmerman teaches education and history at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America.”
