When my mother paid for my expensive college education, I'm pretty sure that the bright future she pictured for me did not include masturbating on the uptown Q train while eating a gyro. Jennifer Landa, MD, author of The Sex Drive Solution for Women, recently suggested women spice up masturbation with a public session only you know about (meaning, you drop a vibrator in your underpants rather than going out in public bottomless). To cover up your orgasm, Landa says to "take a bite of food or sip of a drink at the big moment and exclaim 'oh!' about how good it tastes, er, feels."

My editor assigned me this essential piece of field reporting, because everyone else who writes for Cosmopolitan.com is sane and I am therefore the de facto Earl of Sexual Humiliation.

I decided to make a pit stop in the People's Republic of Hands-Free Diddling on my way uptown to (appropriately) therapy. The train ride from Brooklyn to 57th Street would be long enough for me to make sex to myself and then scamper into a different car like an unshowered deviant.

A tiny vibrator is required for this experiment because, unless you are Dagny Taggart, lurching around on a moving train is not an aphrodisiac. The smallest vibrator in my possession is an Iroha Sakura vibrator from Babeland. About the size of my palm, I shoved it into my underwear before waddling erotically to the train station, grabbing a gyro from a halal cart on the way.

Drake says on his new album, "I just want some head in a comfortable bed, it can all be so simple." Apparently, Drizzy, it can't: On the train, I clandestinely turned the vibrator on, but couldn't figure out a comfortable way to sit because they don't have helpful pamphlets on the ergonomics of public masturbation. Also, I was dripping tzatziki sauce on my skirt. From somewhere else in the car came the whooping cough of a small child, which oddly enough was not doing it for me sexually.

By Union Square, it was working physically, but to have an orgasm you also have to be in The Zone mentally, and I was about eighty miles and one off-road path from The Zone, no matter how hard I tried (Hot guys. This pita bread. Jeffrey Dean Morgan. It smells weird in here. That old woman is staring at me. Hot ex-boyfriend jerking off. Thomas the Tank Engine jerking off. Helllllllppppp).

"THIS IS SO GOOD," I yelled. Nobody looked up, because New York.

At 34th Street, an attractive preppy couple boarded and sat across from me, wind-tousled from playing touch football on the Kennedy compound or whatever. One of my napkins drifted to the floor and I couldn't get up to grab it or else the Sakura would make my underwear sag like an old man's ballsack. They looked at me like I was a littering asshole.

As a cute guy stood to get off at Port Authority, we made eye contact.

I'm halfheartedly masturbating, sort of. Isn't that sexxXXXxy?

asked my face.

I wonder if Crate & Barrel is still open, and why is that brain-damaged woman staring at me? replied his face. And, just for good measure as he walked by: I smell like the outdoors!

I did not have an orgasm. However I finished my gyro, which was actually pretty good, and went to therapy, which went as well as you can probably expect.

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Images via thinkstockphoto

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