In 2005, for example, Oklahoma district judge Donald Thompson was accused of masturbating at the great bench of justice while hearing murder trials. It’s true, of course, that Toobin’s claims should be treated with scepticism: there’s no accounting, after all, for what humans find to be erotic. Kids, pets, the mess in the kitchen and our intimate lives: all these are an accidental click away from global broadcast. Instead of working in a custom-designed space, we operate from makeshift theatrical sets.

This is a not-implausible claim, and one that underlines the blurring of the private and public as work-from-home becomes a norm.

In essence, the argument goes, the world intruded on Toobin’s bedroom, not the other way around. “I thought I had muted the Zoom video,” he added. Toobin has noted that “he thought he was “not visible on Zoom”. Little attention has been paid to the not-insignificant insights the Toobin affair - if that term can be used to describe an activity involving just one person - gives us about the ways in which COVID is changing, and will change, our world.

The internet has, predictably, responded with delight: writer Ryan Simmons has even set up a game, involving replacing the captions on New Yorker cartoons with variants of “Toobin took his d**k out on a Zoom call”. This week, though, the world of the autoerotic was thrown into the spotlight: Jeffrey Toobin, scholar, author and legal analyst for CNN and The New Yorker, was suspended after he was spotted masturbating on a Zoom event. The pathologist Harald Voß even encountered a case involving melting cheese over a body dressed up in pantyhose and a scuba-diving suit.įor the most part, though, masturbation has lived out a quiet existence over the centuries, on the vanilla end of things human beings do: solitary, mostly quiet, often shamed. Forensic pathologists have painstakingly documented the incredible stories of the martyrs who laid down their lives to explore this final frontier of human experience: suffocation with plastic bags and ropes generous lashes of surgical anaesthetics clamping Christmas lights to the nipples. There is such a thing, science teaches us, as an orgasm to die for.

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