We Need a Masturbation Reformation!
I am a sex coach, Domme and kink counselor. I spend all of my working moments and quite a bit of my personal life helping people navigate their orientations, kinks and troubles in the bedroom. It shatters my heart to see people in so much pain and so much of it is an easy fix that got conflated into something paralyzing. There is an overarching common factor…shame. For a society steeped in hedonism, it is truly remarkable to me how shame is omnipresent and makes it way into relationships in a most insidious way. I think if we are to make a very real effort to embrace our human sexuality, we need to start at the fundamental act of pleasure, masturbation.
I am a proud Gen Xer…most of the time. I was a hopeful young woman who TRULY believed that my generation was going to change the world. I honestly thought that we would erase racism, misogyny, homophobia and poverty. Boy was I naïve. My heart aches for the youthful optimism. Now older and wiser and admittedly soul crushed by the recent election, I am despite my frustration and sadness, galvanized to make micro differences. I can’t change the world, but I can change how a person relates to their own body in the sexually aroused state.
My methods are simple, yet effective. I rarely meet someone who needs more than a little tweaking to be well on the path of joyful self pleasure. The first thing I do is reframe masturbation into simply, “solo sex”. As a society, we laud partnered sex as the apex sexual experience. In every corner of the zeitgeist there is pressure to fuck someone else, to be good at it, and to do it frequently. To not do so and to simply make yourself orgasm is seen as not only a lesser experience, but worthy of ridicule. I grew up in the time where “don’t touch yourself or you’ll go blind” was already a joke, but a time existed where such offerings of misinformation existed. If we stopped for a moment and considered all things orgasmic to be on an equal playing field, why should self induced ones be considered lesser?
“The next time the desire to pleasure yourself arises, just try giving yourself all of the intentional and loving focused pleasure you would give to a lover.”
To have sex with someone else in it’s purest expression is to communicate intention, desire and a means of connection. Time and tide has seen a commodification of partnered sex, and a spectrum of connection from “making love” to “fucking”. We have partners, lovers, friends with benefits and hookups. Varying degrees of emotional connection exist, and partnered sex in all of it’s various forms have ascribed to it various levels of acceptance and scrutiny. That being said, in many circles where a hookup with a stranger might be judged negatively, it is still often viewed as more positive than masturbation. Better you just fuck someone than have to deal with the shameful last resort of fucking yourself.
Honestly, this really is just bullshit, frankly. From another angle, solo sex is a means of finding that same expression and communication and pleasure, not for the benefit of another, but for the benefit of ourselves. To be fair, many people aren’t really considering the other person when they fuck them, but if we lived in an idealistic world, we would. Solo sex is self care. It is a freedom to carve out space to lay down the sword, so to speak, and take some time to honor our own bodies, explore the fantasies that arouse us, and just feel good, damnit. In an increasingly frenetic world, who can blame us for taking some time to get ourselves off?
When I was 19 I went on a family vacation to Massachusetts and my boyfriend at the time and I peeled away from the group to go explore Provincetown, a lovely gay mecca. In a bookstore I found a book that altered my life. Lesbian Sacred Sexuality by Diane Marechild and Marcelina Martin is an astonishingly beautiful and soulful look at how a number of lesbian couples approached their sex life. Nestled in the stunning black and white photographs is an essay where one woman describes “making love to herself”. I was floored. At the time I was less than two years removed from having lived in what amounted to a cult. At sixteen I was sent to live at a Catholic and Alcoholics Anonymous based teen reform school. Horrors persist in my psyche today. One surefire way to be opened to public ridicule was to masturbate. We had at meal times something called table topics. It was the fucking worst. At the end of every meal, students were invited to raise their hands and call someone up to the front of the room. It would takes pages and pages to adequately describe this disaster of a ritual. It was public shaming at it’s worst, an boy did you get it if you were caught masturbating. We all slept on bunkbeds and it was common to be caught. If you were, you were brought to the front of the room and verbally humiliated. I vowed after this experience that I would never let anyone shame me, or feel shame for experiencing my body’s natural pleasure again. Though I will admit, it took some unpacking. Shame has an incredible ability to persist.
I could go on and on about this, and undoubtedly this will not be my first discussion on this topic. I just needed to get this little bit out there and off my chest. The next time the desire to pleasure yourself arises, just try giving yourself all of the intentional and loving focused pleasure you would give to a lover. Don’t hurry, enjoy your body’s ability to bring such joy to your being. Surrender to the sensation and love yourself, first.
