Well, you probably missed it.It didn’t appear in your Dayrunner’s list of bank holidays.Hallmark neglected to promote it.And while you may have inadvertently celebrated, you probably didn’t mean to.That’s right, folks.I mean National Masturbation Day.

According to my impeccable sources, May 7 marked National Masturbation Day, the climax (if you will forgive the pun) of National Masturbation Month.I don’t know about you, gentle readers, but I observed the date with my usual pomp and circumstance; after all, I haven’t heard booty call for four months.I asked a friend if he had commemorated the occasion by waxing the bone.He replied, “Well, not consciously, but it was a day like any other day, so…yes.”Other acquaintances met my query with rueful smiles and comments like, “At my house, every day is National Masturbation Day.”One even tried to deflect attention from his own cannon polishing by smirking, “National Masturbation Day?Who came up with this one, Bunting?You?”Alas, no.I would have given it more than one lousy day, I can tell you right now.

In order to distract myself from the essentially solitary and depressing nature of the solo mambo enterprise, I conducted some research among fellow handinistas.I sought to compile the most complete possible list of synonyms for masturbation; at the same time, I asked all participants to keep their entries as PG-13 for the sake of my job (after all, the late great Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders got the boot for espousing onanism, and not once did the phrase “bopping the baloney” even cross her lips).My investigation revealed some very interesting trends.

First of all, the offerings poured in when it came to male masturbation.How many entries did I receive for females?Two: “spicing the taco” and “strumming.”This, of course, reflects the unwillingness of most women to admit that they masturbate at all.Come on, ladies, we all had to read Our Bodies, Ourselves for health class — we should all familiarize ourselves with our beautiful bods, touch our beautiful bods without fear or shame, and come up with a whole passel of nicknames for our beautiful bods.Don’t leave it up to men, or they’ll keep pretending there’s a cat down there.

I also discovered that, in matters, of masturbation, men seem to favor images evoking meat, weapons, and strangulation.”Choking the chicken,” for example, brings a rather unpleasant barnyard scenario to mind.”Preparing the hot dog without the bun” doesn’t work either — what about the mustard? and for what, exactly, do you prepare it? to be eaten?Somehow I doubt it.And how about “test-firing the morning missile,” “firing torpedo one,” and “saluting the flag”?Quite patriotic, but also quite ridiculous, unless you can perform these maneuvers on the foredeck of an aircraft carrier with the Blue Angels flying overhead.I can hear the theme from Top Gun now.Not.

Anyway, after careful consideration, I settled on a favorite: “wrestling the bald strong man in the one-ring circus.”(Thanks to Alison W. for this charming addition to the fray.)Detailed, evocative, and yet evasive enough for Dr. Elders to put right on her business card.

Let’s think about that for a moment.Dr. Elders got herself fired for telling kids that masturbation was the safest form of sex they can practice (or something to that effect).Well, duh.Then those kooky Capitol Hill types tweaked out and demanded that Big Daddy give Elders her walking papers.Well, duh squared.What prompted this flurry of righteous indignation?The concept of giving children unequivocal information about sex and sexually transmitted diseases?The mere presence of the word “sex”?

Despite the notorious prudishness of the United States government, I think Dr. Elders was censured for another reason.Those Washington wonks didn’t want anyone to notice that they masturbate all the time; they just do it metaphorically.Watch ten minutes of C-SPAN and tell me that all the droning from behind the podium isn’t an egregious display of verbal wanking.Pork-barrel legislation, budget filibustering, partisan mudslinging — all just legislative versions of the knuckle shuffle.In fact, if there weren’t two parties involved, the comparison would be truly striking.

And if our leaders do it, why shouldn’t everyone else get in on the act?The classes you sat through in college, with the horn-rims arguing about marginalization of voice…mental masturbation.The hideous cybercommunity events, awash in watery-gin-and-tonic blathering about ramping up and intuitive search engines and my-T1-is-bigger-than-yours…mental masturbation.The E! Channel’s Talk Soup…strobe-like, pathetic, mental masturbation.Let’s just call it Hands Across America, okay, because every time Bob Dole calls himself Bob Dole,every time the smarty-pants on the op-ed page refers to Bob Dole calling himself Bob Dole, and every time some Doc-wearing baudhound bozo calls anyone a “Webizen,” you just witnessed the nation zipping one off, so you might as well go watch America’s Funniest Home Videos, because if you have to see the whole country having a tommy tank then you should have the damn Bob Saget voice-over to go with it.

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