"The Contest" was the 51st episode of the NBC sitcom, Seinfeld. The eleventh episode of the fourth season, it aired on November 18, 1992. In the episode, George Costanza tells Jerry Seinfeld, Elaine Benes and Cosmo Kramer that his mother caught him unaware while he was masturbating.

The conversation results in George, Jerry, Elaine and Kramer entering into a contest to determine who can go for the longest period of time without masturbating. The episode was controversial when broadcast because NBC thought that masturbation was not a topic suitable for prime time television. As a result, the word "masturbation" is never used in the episode.

Instead, the subject is described using a series of euphemisms, while the meaning of the subject is still made clear to the audience. The writer of the episode, Larry David, won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Individual Achievement in Writing in a Comedy Series for his work on the episode. One euphemism used in the episode was when a character said they were still "master of my domain" which meant they were still in the contest.

That became a catchphrase in popular culture, although it is not always used to refer to masturbation. The fourth season of Seinfeld has a continuous story arc, in which Jerry and George are writing a television pilot for NBC. In the previous episode, "The Virgin", Jerry had started dating Marla (played by Jane Leeves), a woman who is a virgin.

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