By Juliette Tang
Hand jobs. Are people still giving, getting, or even thinking about them? I’m not talking about a few jerks during foreplay either. I’m asking if anyone out there habitually engages in hot and heavy hand love… and goes all the way. Because it seems, in many peoples’ sex lives, that the hand job is to a CD Walkman what the blow job is to an iPod. It was great when you were in junior high, but then something new came around and you sort of forgot about it. I occasionally see used latex gloves discarded on the sidewalk, and we regularly hear about San Francisco law enforcement cracking down on local massage parlors (so obviously someone out there is paying for it) but – like secret societies, group sex, and crack – hand jobs are something you know is out there, though you’re hard pressed to know anyone who regularly participates. I awkwardly asked some of my male friends, both straight and gay, “When was the last time you got a hand job?” and then quickly added, “And not from yourself.” The most common response was, “And… um, came?”
What once seemed so sexy and thrilling in 9th grade has now, in adulthood, become prosaic. But why? Have we really graduated from the hand job? Is it that because those who can simply jerk themselves off would rather engage in other activities when with a partner? Do hand jobs seem dispassionate and sterile? Or is it simply that, for most, no one else really gives a hand job quite as good as one can give oneself?