Thank you for your FoI Request re “Masturbation Notice”.
The notice to which you refer is not an official university notice. It was
a student prank, and regrettably not even an original prank. The notice
appears to be a copycat issue of a similar text which appeared recently at
Durham and Lancaster universities and a number of universities in the
States. A quick check on Google should give you more information about
these incidents should you require it.
A strong clue that the notice is fake is the line “Please go home and
masturbate if you are bored.” As a matter of policy, the University would
never encourage students to go home during term time.
I understand that two copies of the notice were attached, with chewing
gum, to doors of the male toilets in the University of St Andrews Main
Library on or about the afternoon of Sunday November 13^th 2011. The
notices were removed by Library staff shortly afterwards.
Far from having a policy on masturbation or outlawing the practice, as the
bogus notice alleged, the University encourages the study of it,
academically at least. Among the titles in the University Library is
“Solitary Sex : A Cultural History of Masturbation” by Thomas Walter
Laqueur, pub Zone Books, New York, 2003.