We all do it. And most of us lie about it. We lie to our partners, our friends and ourselves. It’s as if an instinctive sense of shame or embarrassment gets so deep a grip on us that we can barely control the words that come out, even when we know we’re outright lying.
Masturbation is still such a taboo in this culture that people find it hard to be honest. Those who are honest may find that their partners or friends judge them for their honesty. Even sexually progressive people may still express strangely irrational and primitive-minded ideas about masturbation, from the notion that it is bad for your health, says something bad about you or something only weak, flawed men do.
MELANIE’S STORY
Melanie loved masturbating two or three times a day.
Her girlfriend was furious about it.
At 32, Melanie had found the woman of her dreams. They moved in and it got even better. They had all the same interests and ambitions, similar hobbies and lifestyles, even their friends and families got along. Now, she was planning to ask her gf to marry her and make it permanent. There was just one problem needed to talk about.
Since first finding her clitoris, as a pre-teen, she had been a happy, vigorous masturbator. She routinely got herself off in the morning before hopping in the shower and then again to fall asleep. When she had days off, she’d sleep in late or lounge around and get in a nice long solo session with toys. Sometimes she tied herself up and used nipple clamps to make it even hotter for herself.
Women’s capacity to have multiple orgasms and ability to perform repeatedly should be proof enough that women are built for more sex than most men could ever handle.
Until she met her beloved Serena, she never considered this was even a problem. Her handful of former lovers either didn’t know or didn’t care. One of them, in fact, had more toys than she did, and they’d masturbate together.
But Serena said it was weird. The first time, Melanie pulled out some dildos and joked, “my toys or yours?” Serena seemed surprised, if not shocked. Unlike Melanie, Serena had seldom masturbated and didn’t like talking about the subject. Melanie knew Serena had a vibrator — she found it in her end-table one night. But that vibe vanished when Melanie moved in and now her own toys were stashed in a cardboard box at the back of a closet. The only times she got to use them were when Serena was out of the house and she had a few hours to herself.
She had tried to talk about it with Serena, but it always ended up in an argument that led to even bigger arguments. Serena accused her of being “unfaithful in her thoughts” and once told her “I love you but I never agreed to live with a chronic masturbator with a box of jerk-off toys in the closet!” The last big blow-out was when Serena came home unexpectedly early from work and found Melanie with the box on the bed and all the toys thrown around, glistening guiltily. Serena stomped out, yelling, “That’s something men do! Women don’t act like this, Melanie!” Melanie was quick to point out that their own sex life was creative and active and wonderful. It wasn’t like Serena was a prude. Except when it came to Melanie’s enjoyment of masturbation.
The idea that there’s something “only men do” struck me because it shows how deeply entrenched, even in otherwise progressive women, the idea is that men are more sexual than woman by nature. It’s very true that men act more on their sexual impulses for a long set of reasons I won’t get into here. But the science doesn’t show that men are more sexual. If anything, women’s capacity to have multiple orgasms and ability to perform repeatedly without sexually wearing out (as evidenced by a busy sex worker’s schedule and women who enjoy gangbangs) should be proof enough that women are built for more sex than most men could ever handle.
So it never surprises me to meet a woman who is living up to her authentic potentials for orgasm. Melanie wasn’t “like a man.” She was a sexually free, empowered woman who knew what she liked. Serena was the one grappling with shame, a patriarchal view of female sexuality, and inhibitions. Her distaste for masturbation conflicted with her consciously progressive, sex-positive views. Her negative attitude towards masturbation was probably something she learned at a very early age.
Depending on your caretakers and their attitudes, you may get a message early in life that “down there” is forbidden to touch except for the purpose of cleaning and sanitizing. If you were raised by strict parents who are uptight about sex, the lesson can make you close off that side of yourself, drawing an invisible line around that part of their body. If the negative messages were further accompanied by parental anger or fear of punishment here or in the afterlife, it can create a near demonic terror of touching yourself inappropriately by the time you are an adult.
A red flag is if you never masturbate. It is normal for a tiny toddler to prod and poke their genitals, long long before they get the kind of pleasure they will know after puberty, when the hormones kick in. It’s natural curiosity. But people who got yelled at or punished stop being normal. And it harms them as adults. If you never masturbated, you live in a state of ignorance about your proper sexual potentials. You don’t learn what kinds of thoughts and sensations will get you to climax and release. You don’t break down some of the trained inhibitions from childhood and relearn how to be comfortable with your genitals. Your prospect of a sexually fulfilling marriage is pre-limited by shame.
RUTH-ELISE’S STORY
Ruth said she’d never had an orgasm.
What she really meant is she never had one with her husband.
In her 50s, Ruth-Elise was seeing me, she said, as a birthday present to her husband. The only shadow over their otherwise wonderful marriage of 30+ years was that she was unable to orgasm. She tried and tried, and a few times she felt she almost got there. But she had never had the kind of orgasms she knew other women had. She was an avid consumer of self-help books and had even attended lectures on the subject.
One time, she bought a highly recommended vibrator and thought it might help. But when she brought it to bed that night and showed it to her husband, he got mad. He said that his penis should be enough for her and he didn’t like the idea of having a machine in bed with them. Ruth-Elise was disappointed by his reaction but on some level she agreed with him too. She was sure all her friends had normal orgasms from making love. She didn’t know why she couldn’t climax. She wouldn’t dream of using the toy by herself. Her husband would be angry, especially if she had an orgasm with a machine instead of him.
Ruth-Elise admitted that she was completely naive about sex before marriage. As a good Catholic girl, she had never masturbated, not before or since marriage. She had no idea if she could have an orgasm that way because masturbation was off the table for her. She couldn’t bring herself to touch herself down there. It was weird and unpleasant. Her husband barely gave her any foreplay and that was fine with her. She just wished she didn’t feel so bored by sex.
There was one thing she had to mention. A few years ago, she joined a local gym with a nice big jacuzzi. She noticed if she sat a certain way in front of it, it gave her such amazing feelings between her legs, that she floated away on waves of ecstasy, taking her to a transcendent place she’d never known before. She stayed in there for a little longer than she should because she was so transfixed by the pleasure, she lost track of the time. She didn’t know if that counted as an orgasm, but she thought maybe that’s what it was. She repeated the experiment a few more times with the same results. But the last time, she noticed another woman at the gym was staring at her funny. She was so embarrassed by it she switched gyms.
Ruth-Elise confessed that she thought vaginas were ugly and smelly. She didn’t understand why men wanted to spend so much time down there, but she accepted that it was a part of God’s plan and would always be a mystery to her.
We aren’t born to be ashamed of our genitals.
We have to be taught to be ashamed of them.
It’s from the early confusion between the front and the back that so much human misery flows. Yes, pee may come out the front, but it is anal bacteria you need to worry about and by the way, the genitals themselves are clean as long as you wash them. The juices from your genitals are benign: they do not contain anything that could harm you. Studies have shown that the opposite is true. Healthy semen is healthy to ingest and female juices have beneficial probiotics. In other words, oral sex is part of the bigger authentic sex package. Sexual juices actually carry an extra biological benefit to those who ingest them.
We aren’t born to be ashamed of our genitals. We have to be taught to be ashamed of them. The lesson is both brutal and necessary. The necessary part is that civilization would not function if humans reached for their genitals as often as they are naturally wired to feel a sexual urge (many times throughout the day). The brutal part is that often, in in teaching kids how to avoid getting bacteria on their hands from pooping, adults also break a kid’s primal connection to the parts that are clean and beautiful and will help them lead complete and personally satisfying lives.
That said, some parents outright teach their kids to treat their genitals as shady strangers who will get them into trouble some day. Instead of allowing them to explore themselves, they set the rules early and cruelly, making sure their kids know as early as possible that masturbation is a shameful act.
KAMAL’S STORY
Kamal was stressed out because he thought he was a sex addict.
At 29, Kamal was very anxious to get married and start a family. He was getting a lot of pressure both from his parents and his girlfriend. But Kamal had a terrible secret to confide. He was a sex addict. He masturbated every day, sometimes twice a day. Once he went on a binge and masturbated four times in one day. He was so disgusted with himself after that, he called in sick and went to a library instead to try and clean his mind by reading magazines. Still, by the time he got to bed that night, he masturbated again.
He went on the Internet and learned he was a sex addict. He needed to be cured or he would be unable to marry this girl. She was smart and beautiful and had a very nice job. She deserved the best husband. He feared he would be the worst one she could ever find. He imagined himself ruining his marriage by masturbating so much he couldn’t perform in bed. He imagined her walking in on him some day and saying she wanted a divorce. He couldn’t sleep, because his mind kept going over the same nightmare scenarios again and again: he would not be able to get her pregnant and the doctor would tell them it was because he used up all his sperm masturbating. He would slip back into his habits and she would humiliate him in front of his family. Or his co-workers. On and on it went.
Kamal had worked himself into a mild hysteria over the endless repercussions of solo sex. By the time he finished unloading all his fears, he just stared helplessly at me, in a panic and hoping I had the answer he was looking for, a permanent solution to his need to release himself sexually. No one else knew his secret. He was sure that if anyone ever found out, his whole life would be ruined. He was disconsolate.
More than anything, Kamal needed to learn that he was normal.
It started early. He was afraid the first time semen came out. He told me what his childhood was like. He went to a very conservative boarding school with strict ideas about child-rearing. The idea that genitals were dirty and improper was hammered into him. Boys were punished for any kind of hijinks, and sleep monitors passed through at night to check on the boys’ bunks, making him paranoid that he would get caught if he touched himself. But that’s where his “disease” started. Even then, he couldn’t stop himself and struggled with shame as he tried to hide it from others.
He had saved his virginity for marriage because that’s what his religion taught him. In almost every other part of his life, he was a good man. He was responsible, clean, law-abiding. But when it came to masturbation, it was like a demon possessed him. He could not control himself. He was not fit to marry. He wanted me to cure him of his urge.
More than anything, Kamal needed to learn that he was normal. He had no idea that other men, and some women, masturbated at the same rate. He found it hard to believe that there were no negative medical repercussions from regular masturbation. I don’t think he believed me at first when I described all the many medical benefits of regular orgasm but I made him google that too, and it was a revelation for him. Whatever happened to him when he was young, he clung desperately to myths and misconceptions that were now destroying his life.
I thought then, and still do, that we should teach kids, certainly by their teens, that masturbation is just a natural developmental behavior that goes along with all the other things that change you and prepare you for adulthood. Learning to masturbate helps you to become a more sexually prepared adult. Yet, masturbation is still such a taboo in this culture that people continue to lie and cover it up out of shame.
We masturbate because the human brain was wired to make us crave orgasms
That “instinctive” shame so many people experience wasn’t in-born. It was most likely learned during toilet training, a process which breaks our brain’s original primal connection to the uro-genital-anal tract. That would also explain, from a developmental perspective, why negative emotions about our genitals are often confused and hard to articulate out loud. If we were too young to form language and memory at the time of a trauma, we are left instead with muscle memories and automatic stress responses and other negative emotional reactions instead of honest, fact-based ideas. Those early micro-traumas around our genitals may prevent us from masturbating or make us passively accept other peoples’ judgment of our habits or make us regret what we did afterwards.
Now, why do we masturbate? That’s easier to answer. We masturbate because the human brain was wired to make us crave orgasms. It responds to sex before our conscious mind does. We can’t control our brain’s sexual impulses anymore than we can control the chemical signals it shoots out to our livers.
Your very human brain will drive you to seek release, no matter what lessons you learned. Even if you never directly touch yourself, your brain likely drove you at some point in your life to press against something or rub yourself or, like Ruth-Elise, to have an accidental orgasmic experience. Even if they think masturbation is “for men,” most women have something they use to get off with. Even if they believe that masturbation will ruin their lives, most men will still grab that joystick and play some games.
It isn’t because you are evil. It isn’t because you are bad. It isn’t because you are weak. It is because you were born to need, want and benefit from orgasms. That is why people masturbate and that’s why no one has ever found a cure for it either. It isn’t a disease. It’s one of the most natural behaviors known to humanity. We should all be talking about it. It’s really a genetic super-power when you add up all the science. Shouldn’t we teach that to everyone who has a body?
The bright side is that because shame is a learned behavior, it can be unlearned. You can take a person who was sexually dysfunctional and help them vanquish the demons of negativity that were eating away at them inside. Instead of trying to make people stop masturbating, we should be teaching them to rebuild their original potential for joy from a place of wisdom, self-control and strength.
