Written
By: Jane Manchester
Browsing
through the site my eye was caught by the following. "No
woman will admit to masturbation."
I
didn't read the rest, but the truth is, except in very exceptional
circumstances, this is correct. I have many female friends with
whom I have very explicit conversations. We have discussed men,
women, sexual positions, compatibility, how to tell your partner
that you want to see some one else as well as him/her, but never,
somehow, how to tell your partner "not tonight dear, I'd
rather masturbate."
And
that is the problem. The great myth of masturbation is that it
is somehow a substitute for sex, and so at worst dirty (if sexual
pleasure is dirty, solitary sexual pleasure must be dirtier--the
emphasis on pleasure I suspect), and at best an indication that
your partner cannot satisfy you or that you are no longer interested
in your partner. The archetypal scene appears at the beginning
of American Beauty: Annette Benning complains bitterly when she
realizes her husband is masturbating that he doesn't think of
her, while , he responds that he is only reacting to frustration
and not getting enough sex.
But
masturbation isn't about this kind of frustration. It isn't about
making do in the absence of a suitable partner. Masturbation is
like stamp collecting or kit building: occasionally nice to share
with an interested and skilled partner, but essentially a solitary
pursuit whose joy is in the privacy of the occupation.
I'm
not sure when I started to masturbate. The difficulty of pinpointing
the moment is made trickier by the general insistence that masturbation
is a sexual pleasure. I definitely started stroking my own body--both
genital and non-genital areas--before the age of eight, but not
much before the age of six (I associate the pleasure with a change
of bedroom at around that age) but although I had some interesting
bondage fantasies around this pleasure they were not explicitly
sexual: blame them on my interest in fantasy. By this time I had
already read Richard Burton's Tales of the Arabian Nights, and
clearly, one is never to young to pick up subtext. I think that
the fantasies had become explicitly sexual (that is, containing
another person) by the time I was about twelve, which is also
the point at which my mother told me about "masturbation"
and may in fact have done so specifically in response to what
she told me. I was horrified. Not that I was doing something dirty,
as my mother seemed to think Our Bodies Ourselves contained bed
time stories, but that something rather pleasurable should, firstly,
have such a really nasty word attached to it, and that secondly
it was to be regarded as a substitute for something else. For
all my mother's liberalism, this turned out to be a moment of
lasting trauma.
I
am one of those women who find it extremely difficult to experience
an orgasm at the hands, tongue or other parts of anyone else.
In fourteen years of being "sexually active" I have
had only two orgasms for which a partner was wholly responsible.
Every other orgasm has been either wholly or partially self induced
and the latter is only possibly with a cooperative partner who
lacks ego. Oh, and please don't suggest I need to reevaluate my
sexuality. I had sex with women only from the age of eighteen
to twenty four, and with both men and women in the years after
that (I have yet to manage both at the same time). I enjoy the
exploration of a loved one's body and his or her exploration of
mine, but it is not, and cannot provide a substitute for masturbation.
Some of that is the orgasm issue, but some of it is not.
For
me, masturbation is a single word for an entire range of acts.
Masturbation can be the slow stroking of my body when I'm reading
a book. I definitely don't want help for this one. Stroking myself
is comforting, being stroked by someone else at this moment is
just distracting and infuriating and feels like my partner trying
to intrude, to assert him or herself as more important than my
book. Believe me, almost nobody is more important than my book.
At
the other extreme masturbation, usually to orgasm, is an absolute
necessity, an itch I just have to scratch. I have a small range
of toys that are rather helpful (I'm not much of a toy person
but I was always taught that a small, select number of accessories
are essential to any girl's wardrobe) but the main problem for
this is privacy. Early in my current relationship I tried to explain
that I just wanted to masturbate, but my partner made it clear
he wanted to join in, even if just by holding my hand. It didn't
work. For him, masturbation is a substitute for when I am not
interested, so he couldn't really fathom the fact that I didn't
want him to be there if it made him excited and gave him the idea
that he could participate, because of course I would want him
to once I got wet wouldn't I? Well, no. So now I only masturbate
this way when he is out of the house. As I leave much earlier
than he in the mornings and get home later at night, this can
leave frustrations building all week.
But
in between those two extremes are all sorts of other pleasures.
The casual stroke of oneself during the day--there's a reason
I'm a stocking person--the need to masturbate to stave of the
boredom of the work one is doing, and the fantasies. And that,
my readers, is another area of serious confusion, and another
reason why I continue to prefer masturbation to be my own little
hobby.
The
problem is that there are all these theories out there that fantasies
tell you what you really want. This means that you need to tell
them to your partner so that s/he can cooperate with you in their
fulfillment. Gah! Is all I can say to that. Fantasies are complex
things and they may tell you a lot about yourself but little of
it is clear cut. When I was sleeping only with women, and before
I ever had sex with a man, I fantasized about fucking. I can just
imagine the sympathy with which my girlfriends would have responded,
although I have since had a lot of fun with women who thought
it a turn on and who were more than willing to experiment.
After
I first fell for two women at the same time, I ran to some neat
little fantasies about threesomes, continued with a similar variation
when I was involved with two different men, and only last year
I had some serious masturbatory material when I managed to get
a crush on my head of department and become close friends with
her husband. This was the sort of crush which left me a gibbering
teenager in her presence and was thus doomed to go nowhere, but
realistically, this is sort of the point. None of the people I
have been involved with would have been comfortable with the other
people I was involved with so threesomes have never been an option.
It's the possibility, not the probability, that seems to be the
turn on. The clearest this has been is in very minor experiments
with bondage: what worked in my head, failed miserably in reality.
But I had let the cat out of the bag and my then partner was very
reluctant to put it back in again. A lot of my fantasies are about
ambivalence and androgyny (the active bisexual kind, not the inactive,
sexually undefined kind) and in many of them I get to fuck, rather
than be fucked which is just fine, but my life partner is a very
conventional sort and trying to share this would be a rapid route
to disaster.
These
days I have a nice range of fantasies which I take out and dust
down when I need a little help, but they are for private use only,
a personal little art gallery of indulgence. The moment I tried
to share them, they would acquire someone else's scribbles and
commentary. Like masturbation, they have nothing whatsoever to
do with sex: sex is a shared fantasy in which the goal is the
most focussed concentration on the other person you can achieve.
This may involve fantasy play for both of you, but it is a fantasy
made-to-measure, not a second hand borrowing from a private stash.
Masturbation is a separate beast from sex all together. While
I find some of the pseudo-feminist "love your vagina"
rhetoric a little nauseating, I do think masturbation is essentially
about my own relationship with my body, and like all relationships,
it needs to nurtured regularly and with dedication.
A little courtship goes a long way.
Back
To International Masturbation Month Index
