I rock back and forth in my childhood room rewatching every episode of Seinfeld. I furiously latch hook a rug to keep my hands busy. I’ve already knitted seventeen hats, rolled five beeswax candles, made a papier-mache dragon and assembled a tiny ship in a bottle. I’m starting to run out of things to occupy my sexual energy — before my hands will resort to frenzied masturbation instead of frenzied arts and crafts. This is one of the few times Anya Neeze is going to strongly advise you not to seek out physical sexual contact with anyone outside your home unless you own a full hazmat suit or medieval plague doctor costume. There are, of course, the usual means of wanking: a spray from Sam Showerhead, a tickle from Tabitha Toothbrush or a coochie caress from Connie Cucumber. If I had a phallus, perhaps I’d remove the pit from a peach, finger a hole in it and finish inside like a boy spending the summer at his family’s 17th-century Italian villa. But I think we as a collective can transcend our usual masturbation habits in these exceptional circumstances. Most of us have more time, energy and privacy to experiment with autoeroticism. When the world is fucking you, you might as well fuck yourself.
If you’re quarantined with conservative parents as I am, there is a shortage of sex toys readily available around the house. I couldn’t bring home my silver bullet vibrator without my yeehaw father loading it into his assault rifle, so why not mix masturbation with arts and crafts? Make your own fleshlight using a ratio of two grams of cornstarch to one milliliter of water in a tall glass. Mix it thoroughly and microwave it for a minute. Squish a hole in the center and microwave for another thirty seconds. Then you stick a rod slightly smaller than your own penis a bit further than halfway in the white substance and refrigerate it for forty minutes. Remove the stick when it’s done cooling and voilà! You have your own pocket pussy. You can also fill a glove up with sand and place it gently on your arm so it feels like someone likes you.
Our needs in isolation commonly go beyond a detached bit of flesh to insert into ourselves or insert ourselves into. With limited contact with the outside world, we need a whole synthetic person instead of a collection of their detached, plasticized private parts. An XXL dildo rammed into every orifice of our being cannot replace the loving touch of a dominatrix who makes us french toast in the morning. That’s why I made my own boyfriend out of dust and then removed one of his ribs to create a girlfriend. We had so much fun together, naming all the wildlife that had finally returned to an empty Venice. That is, until my new girlfriend snarfed up all of our quarantine snacks and I exiled her into the dangerous dystopia erupting outside our gated community. Who knows what she’s doing now.
An easier way to make a DIY partner is to print one out. I chose to print out the rabbit character from Zootopia. I printed Judy to scale and then mounted the papers on a massive sheet of cardboard so she could stand up in my room and watch over me in my efforts to summit masturbation mountain. After a few days, I realized her main issue was two-dimensionality, not to mention the faint smell of printer ink when we huddled together for warmth at night (my landlord turned off the heat).
I came to the conclusion that perhaps my own body was the best DIY partner during this pandemic. The ultimate Do It Yourself is to literally do yourself.
This began my journey toward autofellatio. I began to incessantly work on my back flexibility by folding myself in half like a floppy taco each morning. This dedication has allowed me to put my head between my legs, but I can’t reach anything resembling a crotch. In high school, one of my good friends was called Cum Baby. He was always excited to demonstrate how he could fellate his own cock during class, so I asked him for tips and did some research into doing cunnilingus on myself. It seems those with a schlong have a girthy advantage when it comes to self-sucking. Even then, very few penis-possessors are able to reach down there. To my disappointment, it seems licking my own cooch is anatomically impossible. So close, yet so far. I did find a gif of a woman appearing to fellate herself, but it’s only for a fleeting moment.
Imagine the power and confidence that would arise from the full oral satisfaction of the self. If everyone possessed such a gift, isolation would be more bearable. We could be our own hands-free fleshlights and vibrators. However, there is a certain mystical aura that comes from eye contact with the person between your thighs, even if they’re not doing a job on par with the one you’d do yourself. Sex isn’t purely physical. There is a vacuum of human intimacy in quarantine that a sexy Zoom DM or a cardboard cutout of a Zootopia character fails to fill. Even Cum Baby, who can complete the elusive virtual ring of narcissism, has a need for relationships. Despite how long the quarantine continues into our future, the deprivation of touch will incite a sexual awakening within us. In a world post-pandemic, we will appreciate intimacy beyond physical pleasure.
Anya Neeze is a student at Cornell University. Boink! runs monthly this semester. Sex on Thursday appears every other Thursday.