masturbation contests

As a teen Peruvian (future) novelist Mario Vargas Llosa went to a military-style boarding school. Academically it was considered a cut above. It sounds like young Mario did okay there, but it instilled no love in him for the military’s “mechanical hierarchies, [its] authorized violence [or] the at times … cruel and monstrous uses” to which these were put. But what sticks out to me (so to speak) are the literally homosexual acts these (almost certainly mainly heterosexual) boys promulgated. 

On the very first day, after getting into their school uniforms and hearing welcoming (?) speeches from the adults, the new boys are turned over to the older boys for the usual hazing rituals. 

A group of cadets took me and a[nother] boy … to a fourth-year dormitory. They made us go through a ‘right angle’ contest. We had to kick each other in the backside as we doubled over alternately; the one who kicked more slowly than the other was in turn kicked, hard, by the hazers. Afterward, they made us open our trousers fly and take out our penis and masturbate: the one who came first would be let go and the other would stay behind to make our torturers’ beds. But, however hard we tried, fear kept us from getting an erection, and finally, bored by our incompetence, they took us out to the soccer field. They asked me what sport I went in for: ‘Swimming, sir.’ ‘Swim on your back from one end of the athletic field to the other, then, perro.’

As Mario figured out the place, he recognized that, “in order not to have one’s will broken [by the relentless bullying], it was necessary to do daring things, so as to earn the good feeling and respect of the others. I began doing them from the start: from the masturbation contests — the one who ejaculated first or who shot his sperm the farthest — to the famous escapades at night, after lights out.” The biggest “escapade,” Vargas Llosa says, was the escape, “going over the wall,” as being caught leaving the compound without authorization meant you’d be expelled “without appeal.” Mario was a regular escapee, it seems. 

Of course you had to boast about your sexual prowess with women — even if (especially if?) you were a virgin, which most of the boys were, I’m sure. The highest prestige went to (as it comes to us in English) the “mad jock with a big cock,” a title Mario proudly claimed.

In his memoir Mario Vargas Llosa at times expresses sympathy for gay men, and disappointment in others’ homophobia, though he presents himself as very het — besides the “masturbation contests,”  that is, although isn't that somehow hetter than het? It’s not like there’s any love or affection in it.

source:

A Fish in the Water

by Mario Vargas Llosa

translated by Helen Lane

1994. Farrar Straus Giroux, New York