Correction: An article in Friday’s Daily incorrectly stated Brittany Bettendorf’s year in school. She is a Weinberg sophomore.
___________________________________________________________________________________
Books and women it’s apparently an exhibitionist’s dream come true.

Two or three times a quarter, female Northwestern students studying at University Library, Evanston Public Library, Borders Books & Music or Barnes & Noble look up to see unknown men masturbating near them. Most of these men do it just for the thrill of being seen, said an NU psychiatry professor.

A female student saw an unknown man masturbating about 10 feet away from her while she was studying in the reference section of the University Library two weeks ago, according to University Police. The student looked away after she first noticed the offender and the offender was gone when she looked back up.

“Usually, what these guys want is to see a woman seeing their genitals,” said Richard Carroll, a professor of psychiatry at NU’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “They may or may not be masturbating (when they expose themselves), but that’s what’s exciting to them. They usually speed away and masturbate later to the fantasy of the exhibition. What’s exciting to them is setting up the scene.”No on-campus public masturbators have been caught, said Asst. Chief Daniel McAleer of UP.

Brittany Bettendorf, a Weinberg junior, said she heard an unknown man masturbating Winter Quarter while she was studying in the north tower of the fifth floor of the library. She said she left because the man’s noises were loud, but she didn’t see who it was.

?It was like a grunting noise and I was like, “That’s not studying,” Bettendorf said. “If I go (to the library) by myself, I don’t go to the fifth floor anymore.”She said she did not report the incident to UP.

Another female student told UP in January that an agitated-looking man about 10 to 12 feet away from her in the south tower of the fifth floor of the library. The female student saw him and asked if she could help him, but he declined, McAleer said. He then turned away from her, and she saw him holding his penis with his right hand.

Carroll, who treats arrested exhibitionists, said a “small number” of men are responsible for such incidents and some expose their genitals in public as often as 70 times a week.

“Part of the (common) attitude is that they expose themselves and that they’re not dangerous, but in fact 15 to 20 percent of exhibitionists have also committed rape and another 15 percent or maybe the same have molested children,” said Carroll, who is also director of the Northwestern Medical Faculty Foundation’s Sex and Marital Therapy Program. “This is not a benign disorder.”

The witness to the second reported incident in 2005 told police that an unknown man was masturbating about five feet away from her while he was standing by a library bookshelf in March, McAleer said.

Two of the three incidents reported on campus in the past five months occurred in the reference section and all three occurred at the library, McAleer said. “I’m sure it has happened at other places,” he said.

But there have been no other reports of public masturbation on campus in the past year, McAleer said. “We do have these types of incidents occur occasionally, but it’s not an everyday or weekly occurrence. It happens a few times a year.”

In January and February, Evanston Police Department arrested an Evanston man twice on charges he exposed himself and masturbated in front of women at Borders and Barnes & Noble, The Daily reported in February.

Reach Helena Oh at [email protected].