Santa Barbara,
where the mountains meet the sea.
Beautiful beaches,
where the public masturbators meet me
and other women who are there to swim,
relax, and walk.
No, sad man, we don’t want to talk,
or look at you
with your penis on view.
Zip up your pants; we know you’ve got some.
Turn around, then keep on walkin’.
Don’t you have anything better to do?
Then prance around strangers while you’re nude?
The time has come to stop
These…
Public Masturbator Blues

Yes, it’s happened to me. I’ve been stricken with the Public Masturbator Blues three times in my life. The first occurred when my best friend and I were walking home from elementary school, talking about Jeff Leach and how great he was at kickball. In the middle of our conversation, a voice called to us, “Hey, girls!” We looked up to see a smiling man standing on a walkway above us. He was waving at us with one hand and waving something else at us with the other. Both of us, being very nearsighted and without our glasses squinted up at him trying to make out what it was that he was doing. After a minute or so, we figured it out. “Oh My Gosh!!! It’s his weenie!! Gross!!!” I couldn’t believe, as I ran screaming, that that was what they looked like. Could cute Jeff Leach really have one of those things? We immediately decided that we would have nothing to do with them.

Years later, we did change our minds. But, that experience helped me to realize that it’s important to be able to have a choice about how you see men without their clothes on, especially when they are engaged in sexual activity.

The Public Masturbator Blues have struck me two more times. Both incidents happened in Santa Barbara. The first occurred when a friend and I decided to spend a Sunday afternoon at a semi-secluded, but very popular beach. There were a few hours left before sunset and we had decided to walk along the water. Soon, the combined effect of the soft sand graininess against our feet, the sparkling water, and the warm sun, propelled us to lie down and soak it all in. I found myself reveling in that sensual beach feeling; where everything else just falls away except the sound of the waves, the sand cradling my body, the sun on my face…

I noticed him as he stood near the water with the waves rushing over his feet. “God, he must be cold.” I told my friend. It looked like he only had on a sleeveless tee shirt and a pair of very short shorts. He sat down about 30 feet away from us. As the sun began to turn darker shades of red, we decided to head back. Mr. Tee-shirt decided to leave, too, and began walking ahead of us. When we stopped to admire the sunset, so did he.

“He’s waiting for us.” I joked and, unfortunately, he was. Just as we took a few more steps towards him, he turned to face us. He didn’t have anything on underneath his shirt. “Oh no. He’s masturbating.” I groaned. He stared directly at us, stroking himself like there was no tomorrow. “What does he look like? ” I asked. Without my glasses again, I couldn’t see his face clearly, but everything else stood out in bas-relief. “This is one time I’m glad I’m nearsighted.”

“Oh,” my friend grimaced. “he looks like a. …demented Tyger Woods.” She had once told me that if any man exposes himself to you, that you’re supposed to laugh and point. Laugh as if his member was the most hilarious and unbelievably ridiculous thing that you had ever seen. “It disarms them,” she had assured me and a roomful of women at a birthday party. “They don’t expect it. They want you to scream and run, but, if you laugh, they deflate to nothing within seconds due to intense humiliation.”

“Well,” I told her. “Here’s our chance to try out your laughing theory.” I threw back my head and began to laugh and point. “Ah ha ha ha ha HA HA!!” She joined me.

Her tactic backfired. He, too, began to laugh. The scene felt surreal. A gorgeous beach, golden sunset light thrown everywhere, two women jolted out of their relaxing Sunday stroll by a man who looked like golf pro Tyger Woods standing naked amongst the seaweed, masturbating. And all of them laughing out loud.

We stopped laughing. There was no telling how much longer he could go on. “You look really stupid!” my friend couldn’t help calling out as we hurried down the beach in a very alarmed and disgusted state.

The third time the Public Masturbator Blues hit me was about two years ago. Another friend and I were walking on a different beach. It was a winter afternoon. The day after a storm. The beach was littered with all sorts of strange objects; lots of driftwood, pieces of broken porcelain plates, dead lobsters, single shoes, an armed 65-year-old woman in really good shape, and a huge, white, balding masturbator. We’ll get to him later.

On our way down to the beach, the woman, (who we at first thought was nuts), called us over to her. She held a jagged piece of glass in one hand. “Girls!! Watch out. Around here there are weird men!” She pointed the glass at the beach and gazed at us sternly. “That’s why,” she beckoned us closer, “I carry this.” With her other hand she pulled on a string around her neck and lifted out a sheathed knife that had been lying between her breasts. My friend and I glanced at each other, both thinking the same thing. “She’s definitely a psycho.”

“This is my first deterrent.” She waved the glass around. “But, if that doesn’t work…” her nostrils flared and she pointed to her chest, “Chop. Chop.”

We left her quickly after promising we’d be careful. “Some people,” we reassured ourselves after she had jogged back up the steps, “bring negative energy into their lives. By carrying all those weapons, no wonder she draws weirdos to her. That knife is a weirdo magnet. We’ve never seen strange men here.”

My friend sighed and shook her head. “You create your own reality. And ours is not like hers.”

As the reader can tell, this was in my smug new-age “I know all of the answers to all of the secrets in the universe stage, and besides that, I control everything in the world with the thoughts in my mind.” But, our new age bubble was about to burst. Armed with only our self-righteous attitudes and a pair of Swiss Army binoculars, we were about to enter her world a lot sooner than we thought.

As we walked along in the cloudy afternoon, I noticed that everything around us was gray. The sky, the water, the sand; even the old woman’s hair blended in as she did another run up the steps. I looked at the cliffs and peered through my binoculars trying to sight some birds and instead noticed a clump of bushes rustling around. “I think there’s something up there.” I said. “It’s got to be pretty big. That whole bush is shaking.” Then a bright object flashed through the binocular lens. “That’s no scrub jay.” I told my friend. “I swear I just saw someone’s butt running through the bushes up on the cliff.”

“No way. “ she said. “There’s no path up there. Besides, it’s freezing out here.”

I focused on some plants that had just started swaying from side to side. “Oh my God, it is. It’s a huge tan butt.”

I handed her the binoculars. I felt conflicting feelings. Part of me marveled at the nude person’s fortitude against the cold and at the strength he or she was exhibiting, literally scaling a crumbling sea cliff. I also felt a little uneasy. What was an unclad person doing up there?

“Ouu, you’re right.” She had sighted it. “It is a butt. That’s creepy. Let’s go back.”

We thought of waving down the 65-year-old power house and warning her about the roving rump, but as she ran up the steps for the tenth time, we figured that she was well armed, in much better shape than we, and far enough away from the running rear for it to pose any problem.

We started off in the other direction and walked for about 20 minutes with no sign of anything amiss. But, when we turned around to go home, there, standing ahead of us in the sand, about 25 feet away, was a naked man. No doubt about it, he was the owner of that tan butt. But, now we had a frontal view. He looked big, bald, and scary and was stopped directly in our path. Plus, he was whacking off and staring into our eyes confrontationally.

Acting on instinct, we both picked up large driftwood sticks and began advancing toward him. It was bad timing on his part. We had rented Thelma and Louise a few nights before. The closer we got to him, the more enraged we became. I was angry at him for turning my walk with a friend into a face-off with someone who felt no fear about showing himself to two people who would never volunteer for such a viewing. His masturbation antics felt so violating that I had to restrain myself from attacking him with my wooden club. I wish I could say that our adrenaline kicked in, that we wrestled him to the ground, and held him hostage until the woman, whom we now saw as our ally, jogged to the police station three miles away. But no, I must be truthful. We just walked by him, disgusted, and shouted expletives at him. He just leered at us and continued on with his dirty deed. I used my new age skills of creative visualization for weeks afterward, imagining bludgeoning him to bits with a piece of driftwood.

Unfortunately, my experiences aren’t that unusual. Many women I know have been through similar ones. At a party recently, some friends and I shared our stories. Some have experienced the Public Masturbator Blues at the beach, like me. Others got the P.M. blues at parks, tennis courts, and nature preserves. We don’t want to see any more public masturbators. We’re not sure what to do, but all of us agree that the time has come to stop these public masturbator blues.

Jill Cloutier is a freelance writer who lives in Santa Barbara, CA. This article is a break from her usual focus on sustainability issues. Email: laughingsantabarbara@hotmail.com.



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