In response to a recent incendiary essay published by the Milwaukee chapter of the Society for Midwestern Inebriation in defense of the Fleshlight, the Sprout Institute has convened an emergency symposium of top scholars to react, understand, and investigate this ill understood phenomenon.

We encourage all readers to familiarize themselves with the original text:

Drunk Wisconsin

In Defense of Fleshlights

Have you ever been lonely…

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a month ago · 90 likes · 69 comments · Drunk Wisconsin

Silicone Shattering Stifling Standards of Straightness: A queer analysis of the pocket pussy

by Mazz Rosenberg-Shaughnessy

Despite longstanding hetero connotations in both popular culture and the manufacturers’ own marketing, use of the Fleshlight is a radically queer and liberatory act, even beyond the essentially homoerotic nature of all autosexuality.

Consider the actual shape of the Fleshlight. Its yonic opening excepted, the fleshlight is a long, plastic tube, slightly tapered - a phallus. To use a Fleshlight, the masturbator must firmly grasp the tube and direction it with jerking motions. The cold and austere plastic feels foreign, alien in the hand, and the effect is more akin to pleasuring another person’s member than one’s own.

Further, the Fleshlight is an inherently hermaphroditic object, defiant of any societally-enforced sexual standard. As noted above, the shape is phallic, but the purpose is yonic - it is male and female in equal measure. Why then does the Fleshlight shock and horrify? Because its gender-shattering position is too bold, too radical, its threat to heteronormativity too great.

Mazz Rosenberg-Shaughnessy is an adjunct in the Women’s & Gender Studies department of East Northwestern university in Bend, OR.

Shipping Not Included: Male possession of women, on demand

by Fatoumata Traoré Diop

In Men Possessing Women, Dworkin writes of the male self in the vein of Descartes: “I want and I am entitled to have, therefore I am.” It is this sense of entitlement to possession that motivated the Fleshlight’s development. With this horrific device, a male can possess the part of a woman that most matters to him, on demand, whenever he desires, shipping not included. It is literal objectification. The male can even possess a specific woman! In a grotesque display beyond the already low standards of pornographic exploitation, many Fleshlights are marketed as faux-vaginal mirrors of specific so-called “starlets.”

Perhaps it is joyous, that with this invention men may possess a woman without a woman needing to be possessed. But it is not so; a male who seeks la femme complète gains social status and sexual pleasure beyond what the artificial woman part can provide. The Fleshlight is a child’s plaything. A training ground. It reinforces the inherent nature of male desire to possess and control. The males who seek to possess part of a woman today will seek the rest of the woman tomorrow.

Fatoumata Traoré Diop is a fellow at the International Institute of the Global Woman. She lives in Leeds, UK with her husband and four children.

The Reproduction of Reproduction: Capitalist superstructures and the sexual suppression of labor

by Yuri Bulgradović

The Fleshlight, long a favorite preoccupation of Zizek's, is a blatant attempt by bourgeois forces to reify and dismantle social relations within the proletariat.

As Marx notes, the revolutionary potential of the proletariat (as opposed to other laboring classes, such as the rural lumpenproletariat) stems in part from its geographic and social proximity. The proletariat labors together on the factory floor, they live near each other in industrial districts, they date each other, they start families together. Late capitalist superstructures (in the Adornoist formulation), transmitted through media and cultural products, exist to induce false consciousness in the laborer. These superstructures are why the proletariat accepts piecemeal gig work, odd hours, unstable & variable housing, and why they increasingly do not form conventional social relationships, lest they prioritize community over producing ever more labor-value for their employer to steal.

Enter the Fleshlight. Surely men and women in the prehistoric mode of production wished to couple with each other, a natural desire if any such thing exists. But today, such coupling would prevent the 24/7 availability and cog-in-machine model of labor upon which Late Capital has come to rely; such a lifestyle is only sustainable when one is uncoupled and lives with no other priorities than work. The Fleshlight is a balm, an anesthetic, lubricant in the gears of capital. It commodifies a would-be revolutionary desire, the desire to love and be loved.

Yuri Belgradović is a fifth-year master’s student in agricultural economics at Purdue University - Fort Wayne.

Come As You Are: Posthumanism and insemination of the artificial

by Tom Waits (no relation)

The Fleshlight represents the final divorce of the reproductive act from human reproduction and its ultimate ingratiation into a mechanized and Fordist supply chain. What was once wicked in the sight of the god of Abraham now becomes mandatory in the eyes of the almighty machine. Spill your seed, Adam, spill! Spill into test tubes and pleasure tubes, spill with abandon, spill to algorithmically selected material! Your low place in the machine could not support a real woman, Adam, but consume our products and our media, and you will Moneyball her, you will make her up in the aggregate.

And you, young woman, our Eve, provided you are in that vaunted class we grant personhood, you may select. Select your child’s eyes, nose, what genetic diseases they may experience, select only the finest seed from the finest plants. For you all shall be tidy and clean. No man shall sully your life. All those present at your birth shall be paid to be there. Though you do not roll, you shall gather no moss, for we have scraped all such things away. Only bare steel shall remain.

Tom Waits (no relation) is an unhoused schizophrenic known to frequent the steps of the Hatcher Graduate Library at the University of Michigan.