Yoel Noorali has a date with a room.
The gap between thought and action is never as narrow as it is for masturbating. Suddenly it’s happening. Suddenly it’s over. Suddenly you’re back at your desk. But if politics has taught us anything, it’s that the machinery of government can stretch even the simplest task across countless hours and subcommittees. After my wife sent me for an nhs fertility test, I had to book a appointment with a gp, then the gp booked a second with me, the gp called asking me to collect a form, the gp referred me to a hospital and the hospital to an administrator, who called a month later to ask whether I’d rather ‘produce’ at home or ‘produce’ at the hospital.
Masturbated by an arm of the state rather than my own, the process had slowed to a kind of interminable NHS-edging. On the phone I exhaled, forced to compare the sadness of travelling three miles to masturbate into a cup with the stress of carrying that cup three miles within 30 minutes. The administrator repeatedly issued that warning: ‘The product must arrive within 30 minutes.’
Finding any department in a hospital takes ten, competing for an Uber, 5. The drive added another twelve. That left three minutes for error. And under that pressure, the mad dash from the cab would’ve felt too slapstick: I pictured myself running, holding the cup from my body like a grenade, maybe falling down, ‘Where’s the fertility clinic? Where is it?!’
I asked the administrator what times were available to ‘produce’ on site, resisting the temptation to add, ‘I usually prefer first thing in the morning or last thing at night.’ She released a deep nhs sigh and started scrolling, out of the winter and past most of the spring. Ever the coquette, the state refused to stop teasing. The only time we could make work for this ejaculation was 10am on a Monday – either I took a morning off work or waited another month.
‘10am?’ I thought afterwards, warming to the idea. ‘What a treat.’
In the end, that Monday followed a friend’s stag do. Fresh from three days of binge drinking in a dilapidated Airbnb somewhere in the West Midlands, I woke up, took three Nurofen, paced around my flat for 40 minutes and decided that my condition – given the number of babies that are conceived drunk – was probably conducive to fertility.
The silence among the seven men in the waiting room I’d only heard once before, at Ground Zero in New York. They were sitting as far apart as possible, all avoiding eye contact with each other and, especially, the receptionist. Some were flicking through the booklet the hospital posts you before the appointment, reading the questions asked frequently enough to feature in the faqs, which include: ‘Can my girlfriend/wife/partner assist me in the production room?’ (no), and ‘Can a member of staff assist me in the production room?’ (no).
‘Sex’, the booklet laments, ‘isn’t allowed on the premises,’ be it with a loved one or the receptionist. However, partners are admitted to the production room to assist in non-intercourse activity for ‘valid medical or religious reasons’, a caveat that has surely led to at least one man arriving in a recently purchased thawb or an unnecessary wheelchair. Whether non-partners are admitted for this non-intercourse isn’t indicated; the booklet’s stone age emphasis on ‘partner’ makes no allowances for swingers or the use of escorts.
The booklet also notes that a member of staff will ‘guide’ men to the production room, where ‘suitable literature’ awaits. Alternatively, there is ‘suitable material’ or wifi to access one’s own ‘suitable material’. All I’d brought was the glass door from a broken cabinet, protruding out of my tote bag. My wife had assigned me a series of tasks for the day, masturbating being merely the first. I’d planned to get the door repaired after my appointment.
That perfectly innocent plan went horribly wrong when the receptionist collected me from my seat, eyes thinning at my bit of door. She looked at me, then the door, me, then the door, clearly ranking it among the strangest ‘material’ she’d seen.
Rising, I tried to smile the misunderstanding away, knowing that any attempt to explain the door would have the exact opposite effect, but the glass was so large, fragile and cumbersome that I needed to hug it to my body, like a wife. The receptionist seemed prepared for me to say, ‘Hi, this is Jenna.’
Demeaned as I was, the receptionist was forced to open the production room with the expression of an embarrassed estate agent. The promised ‘production room’ – a name that made it sound at least big enough for a porn set – was so small it was barely a production booth, capable of containing only a black leather chair facing a flatscreen tv, next to a bin. Not that I’d ever intended to sprawl out, run laps, flap my free arm, produce in a circle, but some suggestion of one other function might have made the space feel less intense, less like an incel’s bedroom.
I don’t know what I’d expected – a four-poster bed? A crackling fireplace? Saxophone? Half of one wall was backlit pink. They’d gone for ‘Amsterdam-lite,’ I guessed, picturing a urologist gesturing as he briefed the interior decorator, but given the difficulty of simulating a sex holiday in a hallway of the nhs, I wished they’d played it safe.
The receptionist opened a hatch set into the back wall. ‘Place your product – in the cup – in this hatch, write the time on the label, close the hatch, lock the hatch, press this button, wait for the light to flash red, then you can go. Okay?’
‘Fantastic,’ I thought, locking the door behind her, ‘they’ve designed the process so no one needs to speak to another human being after producing.’ I jiggled the handle four or five times and looked around to absorb the more alarming details of the decor. A mirror? Who was turning the fan on? What quantity of mistargeted product warranted encasing the tv remote in a plastic sheath?
Nothing in the room felt unintentional. Normally, a pen left on a shelf alludes to no decisions, but in a room built for this purpose, the pen on the shelf felt positioned. The room threw any decision into sharper relief, diffusing the paranoia attached to masturbation across everything. Why this? Why that? Next to the pen lay a set of laminated instructions titled ‘How To Work tv’, illustrated with photos of a hand holding a remote – innocuous enough, were it not for the notable choice of a left hand, one plainly intended to explain to men that they could use the remote while producing.
Too much thought. Next, I noticed the wifi details laminated on the wall, because of that first poor man who had to ask the receptionist for the password. I told myself not to suffer any equivalent embarrassment, not to yank the emergency cord for disabled visitors midway through, not to produce at an unusually slow speed. Dropping into the leather chair, I wanted to surmount my anxiety so that I could produce as fast as medically possible and run. Then, I started to hear men being led into adjacent booths, asking questions like, ‘Is this soundproof?’ I switched on the tv; Bruno Mars appeared, singing in a ten-gallon hat. I scrambled to switch it off, this ghost of my predecessor’s material, noting as I did that among the most recent apps opened were bbc News and Disney+. Finally, I opted for my iPhone, intimidated by the hyper-immersion of the flatscreen.
I closed the hatch. Obviously I couldn’t run through the waiting room, but nor could I stroll out smiling – much less linger. The solution was a brisk walk in a dignified silence, cabinet door under my arm, eyes locked on my phone. Only one indignity remained: reopening the phone in full view of the men waiting, having forgotten to close my ‘material’.
Days later, as I wrote this, I considered expanding the piece into a broader look at state-organised masturbation. I thought back to that chair, to me juggling phone, cup and member in two hands, and traced the chain of salaries that lay behind my ejaculation. What might the gp say; the nurses, urologists, lab technicians, decorators, Keir Starmer, the receptionist? Would she find it creepy, the door fetishist going back to write a feature? More questions needed answering. What’s the longest anyone’s ever stayed in the booth? How much are the cleaners paid? Has anyone died?
But as I sat at my desk thinking more and more – intellectually speaking – about masturbating, I felt compelled to protect that sacred gap between the act and thought, that gap that protects us from the paranoia spiralling. The subject needed to be cut back to its proper, non-governmental size. There is thought, and there is masturbation, and never the twain shall meet. The expanded idea survived one search of Google before I decided I really didn’t want to know.
