Seinfeld was a show about dudes that paved the way for women wanking on TV

Not so long ago, in a darker time, a character having a one-woman party in her pants on TV was so taboo the possibility wasn’t even uttered. Now, we are blessed: in 2019, it’s pretty much standard to see (and hear) women on TV wanking, talking about it, or planning to do it. Everyone from Fleabag to Broad City’s Ilana is at it; as it’s become less of a taboo in our real lives, it’s become represented on-screen to some degree of realism – and it’s perhaps all down to an unlikely trailblazer.

Seinfeld, the mostly male-centric show about the life of a fictional version of Jerry Seinfeld and his friends, turns 30 this week. We have it to thank for many of the tropes, characters, and storylines that make up standard sitcom storytelling today, but we may also have it to thank for the recent deluge of women wanking.

The brainchild of Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld very nearly had no female characters at all until NBC demanded they add one. Thus, Julia Louis-Dreyfus came to play Elaine, the clumsy, tactless best friend and ex-lover of Jerry Seinfeld. Louis-Dreyfus set new goalposts for writers of female characters. She was multifaceted, she had as many storylines as the men, but most importantly of all, she was horny. Unlike her predecessors, her romantic pursuits were not in the hunt for a husband to have babies with, but just because she had a healthy sex drive. Elaine fucked. She fucked men – a lot of men – but she also fucked herself. 

We know this because of one groundbreaking episode: season four’s “The Contest”, in which the characters try to go as long as possible without masturbating. It was groundbreaking, winning several awards, including an Emmy for Larry David for the episode’s masterful skirting around the word “masturbation”. But most notably, and often overlooked, is Elaine’s involvement. When the male characters are planning the contest, Elaine says she wants in: to disbelieving sighs from her male friends. “It's easier for a woman not to do it than a man!” Jerry protests, but they give in, and she puts up $150 to their $100. After bragging that she’s still “Queen of the Castle”, she’s tested by John F. Kennedy Jr. in her gym class, and loses, much to the shock of her friends.

Until then, TV shows led us to believe that women only had sex with men, and even then, they wanted to less. That a woman could get horny of her own account and take it into her own hands, even struggle not to, was brand new on-screen. “That was groundbreaking. Guys talking about masturbation was acceptable. But when a woman enters that dialogue, it's a whole different matter. I felt lucky to be a part of that” said Julia Louis-Dreyfus to The Guardian in 2013.

The effect wasn’t immediate: Friends, the next biggest sitcom after Seinfeld, never quite went there. Sex and the City did, but of course it did. After a pretty dry 90s and 00s on the wanking front, the floodgates have opened in the 2010s, and it’s Elaine who laid the groundwork for that glorious flood. A perfect example is Broad City’s Ilana: in season two, she lies on the floor, slicks on some lipstick, sets up a mirror above herself, and puts on some porn. In season four, she masturbates with a therapist after realising she hasn’t orgasmed since the election. "It's like these girls are horny but not under the male gaze. They're horny, period. Just starting from the vagina, not starting from some man looking at them.” Glazer once told OUT. Masturbation is front and centre of these girls’ lives, and the show even released a line of toys.

That frantic horniness has historically been considered impossible for women, and with men behind the scenes, TV shows have represented that untruth. But as women have taken charge of telling our own stories, that very real, blood-red thirst has come to the surface. In season one of Lena Dunham’s Girls in 2012, Marnie is so overcome with horn for short king Booth Jonathan (Jorma Taccone) telling her that he’s a “man who knows how to do things” that she has to run to the bathroom to knock one out standing up. In Mad Men, Betty Draper gets herself off with a washing machine after meeting a hot door-to-door salesman. Memorably, in the first season of Fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge masturbates to Obama’s speech.

We have more women-led TV shows than ever: that means more women writers, producers, actors, and people on all fronts who aren’t cis white men. Elaine’s moment was groundbreaking, but it was PG; in 2019, we see women wanking in all ways and for all reasons. It’s not a big deal: it just is. Our desperation and hunger is real, but more real is perhaps the more mundane representations. In Insecure, Issa Rae’s character gets annoyed that her batteries are dead so she can’t have a wank. In Broad City again, Abbi schedules in vibrator-time, while in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Rebecca regularly borrows her roommate’s. In Orange is the New Black, wanking daily is just par for the course behind bars. Masturbation is treated as healthy – more than that, the aids often required to reach an end point are normalised.

Masturbation is also an important part of many teen girls’ self-discovery and growth, and in recent years, that adolescent self-exploration has been represented on-screen. In Sex Education this year, a character spends some time getting to know herself just so she can understand what she wants. More controversially, Kiernan Shipka’s character Sally is implied to masturbate in season four of Mad Men. Coming-of-age comedy PEN15, too, recently saw Maya Erskine play a version of herself who literally cannot stop herself from wanking once she learns how. In My Mad Fat Diary in 2013, Rae (Sharon Rooney) gives herself her first ever orgasm. 

Speaking to The Independent, Rae said: “How many times have you seen a boy having a wank? All the time! It’s all they talk about! I thought: 'Let’s do it for the girls.'” 

Women have every capability to be as horny as their male counterparts; perhaps even more so. “The Contest”’s confrontation of that boundless horn, and discussion of male confusion surrounding it, made it groundbreaking. In recent years, with the relentless on-screen wanking, it’s easy to forget that there was a time when female masturbation was hardly so much as muttered IRL, let alone on our screens. But as women seize control over TV shows, they are telling our universal truths; the bloodthirsty wanks, the mundane ones, the exploratory ones, the “just ‘cause” ones. We partly have Elaine, and the team of men who understood her, to thank for that: if Elaine had never lost the bet wanking over “June-Yah” in 1992, before many of us were even born, who knows how long we would have been held back? Sure, her allusions and euphemisms seem pretty twee now, but in the early 90s they were unheard of. Maybe we’d have gotten there in the end, but maybe not: either way, long live the Queen of the Castle.