An ode to the handjob
The power dynamics, therapeutic effects, and history of the handjob have been neglected for the blowjob
Everyone focuses on fellatio. And indeed, the act of the sacred organ in the mouth of another is something to be relished. Certainly, the blowjob lends itself to some pleasing synonyms: head, gobby, beej, giving skull, blowy, and the ever-favourite knob-job — the list is endless. Histories of the blowjob abound, and the earliest artistic depictions of the gummy are purportedly from Ancient Egypt, albeit with an incestuous, divine slant. Even the giant himself, Christopher Hitchens, busied himself with jokes about the matter and a love letter to the act in Vanity Fair.
But where is the equivalent reverence for the handjob? Hitchens referred to handjobs as genocide, though I may be taking that quote out of context. There are some humorous references to the wristy, such as the brilliant most-certainly-factual account from the Onion which taught me lots about how it came to be. Yet even the Wikipedia page for the five-finger slipper is a mere stub, with far more information dedicated to the surrounding pages, such as the erotic massage or the also-underrated mutual masturbation. Handjobs receive only passing mention on the page for non-penetrative sex.
All of which is profoundly unfair. Although one can make the argument that fellatio is all-round more pleasing, there is a certain intimacy to the handjob which one achieves in no other position. Lying side by side while your lover jerks you off (as the Americans say) forces one into proximity, and your accomplice’s free hand can be used for appropriate hair stroking or choking, depending on what you’re into. Or one can relinquish control completely, spread your legs, and have your tossing half sit crossed-legged in your fork, giving them total power over pace, timbre, atmosphere.
Moving on before this turns into an awkward attempt to rewrite the Kama Sutra. As well as the power aspect, it would be unwise to dismiss the potential therapeutic benefits of a crankjob, too. Why else do certain types of massage parlours exist? It surely isn’t only to please the Western tourists who frequent the countries where they tend to exist; there’s also a long history of the service being provided in order to improve the libido and release stress. Many of these establishments provide full massages and then the necessary happy ending at its conclusion. The difficulties of working this life were depicted in the 2009 documentary Happy Endings? which focused on one ‘spa worker’ and has since become something of a cult documentary. And yet even this simple industry — which turns out to be a popular category of porn, too — is still mired in the swamp of the taboo.
Perhaps our lack of desire to discuss the stroking of the loins is due to the unhealthy history masturbation has had. Masturbation was, for many years in the Western world, seen as a grotesque aberration from the norm. The culprit of this entirely unscientific claim? Religion, of course. If the Victorians weren’t electrocuting you or actually removing testicles to stop you masturbating, they were telling you it would make you weak-minded and overly hairy, and cause you to go blind — all in the name of the Lord. (The latter a myth, by the way, still occasionally believed today.) And as recently as 1994, a Surgeon General of the United States, Joycelyn Elders, was forced to resign from her position for suggesting that masturbation be taught as safe and healthy in schools — the year of my birth. All of which shows not only how far we’ve come in the last quarter century, but how far we still have to go.
And yet, masturbation, much like BJs and lovetugs, has been around since the beginning of time. Since humans figured out they could induce a euphoric feeling just by yanking on the organs they possessed between their legs, they’ve been doing it to themselves and to others. Depictions of both female and male masturbation have been found in prehistoric paintings — art far older than that from the Egyptians — and some older societies such as the Sumerians veritably encouraged exploring one’s own sexuality, a practice the West has only relatively recently managed to adopt.
(N.B. Isn’t it interesting how in Chaucer and Shakespeare there’s plenty of sex, and yet for a couple of centuries up until around the 1960s sex was allegedly almost never talked about, and indeed books could be banned for their depictions of sex? Which perhaps makes it all the more surprising that the vibrator was a household appliance before the vacuum cleaner. Take that, traditional gender roles. Sexual stimulation was regarded as a way of treating the alleged mental illness of ‘hysteria’, a term only applied to women, which included a range of symptoms now attributed to varying mental disorders. Freud helped to destigmatise the symptoms of hysteria by writing that it was a natural emotional state for both women and men.)
Much like any sexual experience, handjobs can go well, they can go badly, or they can simply be underwhelming. An article in Vice from 2016 listed some of the best and worst handjobs a certain focus group had experienced (individually, not together). One wife refers to jerking her husband off so he ‘leaves [her] the fuck alone’. How romantic. A man refers to it as an extremely sensual experience. The author acknowledges that the handjob goes through many iterations during its tenure in someone’s life, from the first teenage pawings to the pull which doesn’t quite count as cheating, apparently, in some relationships with slightly looser boundaries for fidelity than this writer’s. My first handjob was in a bush under a bridge in Staines, for example, and I shall never forget it, not only for its overwhelming satisfaction but also for its understandable speed (that is, of my finishing, not of her technique). But short or long, fast or slow, sensuous or carnal, the British Forearm has a bad rep despite its age-old reputation as a way of getting off without needing to remove the purity ring.
And so, we should respect them more. Fingering, the female counterpart to the handwich, isn’t derided, except by Micky Flanagan. It’s still an entirely acceptable practice, whether to prevent teenage pregnancies as in Flanagan’s ideal, or as a build up to the real deal, or as entirely acceptable foreplay which doesn’t take quite as long or involve as much effort as cunnilingus. Some agree: there are erotic short stories based solely on the idea of handjobs; there are guides on how to give the perfect handjob; there are jokes about them in low-quality American sitcoms that hit the wrong nerve with certain Vanity Fair writers. So perhaps the royal handshake will make a comeback at some point in the near future, and no longer will it be merely within the purview of virgin youngsters and pregnant housewives who can’t be arsed to have sex. One welcomes the day that it takes its rightful place beside the mouthjob as something to be respected — not derided.
