Sheffield University students to take module in masturbation

This lecture is far from the usual analysis

Students will be looking closely into masturbation (Richard Bouhet/AFP/Getty)

Students at the University of Sheffield will be studying a module in masturbation, it has been reported.

More than 200 English Literature undergrads will be taking part in the compulsory course “Criticial and Literary Theory”, which includes a study of “pleasure, self-scrutiny and auto-eroticism”.

Featured as part of the study is “The Art of Masturbation”, a lecture led by English tutor Dr Fabienne Collignon.

Speaking to Sheffield’s student news site The Tab, Dr Collignon said: “The lecture will be on Walt Whitman, Rob Halpern and the deconstruction of masturbation. The last week is called pleasure, self-scrutiny and auto-eroticism. I ended up calling it that because there’s an affinity between literary pleasure, critical self-scrutiny and auto-eroticism.”

Recommended texts for the syllabus include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl and Walt Whitman: The Spermatic Imagination by Harold Aspiz.

While some students quoted by The Tab seemed apprehensive about the module, the news should please Goedele Liekens: a former Miss Belgium turned sexologist who recently called for a more explicit style of education in the Channel 4 documentary Sex In Class.