The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex (26 page)

Masturbation Is Healthy

Don’t you wonder why we never see newspaper headlines about the health benefits of masturbation? Every other month you hear of a study proving that a daily glass of wine or a brisk walk through the park is good for the heart. Considering how the media loves sex, it’s surprising that we haven’t seen the headline “Study Shows Daily Masturbation Reduces Stress, Invigorates Heart, and Prolongs Life.” It’s just another example of the taboo shrouding this simple sexual activity, because all of that is true!

Next to running, masturbation is my favorite way to clear my brain.

People have been obsessing for so long over the mythological health risks of masturbation that they don’t stop to think about these health benefits:

• Relieves stress and tension

• Releases endorphins

• Relieves menstrual cramps

• Fights yeast infections by increasing the blood flow into the pelvis

• Exercises and flushes the prostate gland, reducing the risk of prostate infections

• Strengthens pelvic muscles

• Provides a good cardiovascular workout and also burns up calories

We wouldn’t be surprised if masturbation was even good for your complexion! What’s more, this simple act of taking responsibility for your sexual needs is bound to improve sexual self-esteem and self-confidence:

I love masturbating—it makes me feel more sexual and therefore better about myself.

Another advantage of masturbation is that whether you’re young, old, partnered, or single, masturbation allows you to remain sexually active throughout your entire life.

Masturbation Is Popular and Creative Sex

When you masturbate you disprove the myth that heterosexual sex in the missionary position is the most widely practiced sexual activity. Far more people regularly masturbate than engage in sex under that narrow definition.

As you will see later in the chapter, there are hundreds of ways to indulge in this exciting recreation. You can spice up partner sex with masturbation or choreograph a slow self-loving ritual:

I make a double-handed fist and lie on my front on top of my partner with the pressure indirectly on my clit, directly on hers. I move in a familiar rhythmic pattern; the pace picks up and I usually come in less than three minutes. I have nice arm muscles because of it!

I used to be a quick-and-dirty gal, but now I’ve learned to take my time. I like to come home before my housemate gets off work and grab a few various erotica books and flip to all the really hot parts.

I like to get myself as aroused as possible just using one hand on my clit and then at the last moment toss the book aside and insert my left middle finger into my vagina to feel the pulsing. I love that!

The bottom line is that masturbation can work for you almost anywhere, anytime. Whether you’re single or partnered, low on libido or hormones-a-raging, weathering temporary changes to your sex life or dealing with permanent physical limitations, masturbation is a rewarding sexual outlet:

As a pregnant single mom, I got tremendously horny. I had wild dreams about sex with celebrities and former lovers and would wake up and engage in some of the hottest masturbation sessions of my life.

Reasons to Masturbate

As part of Good Vibrations’ celebration of National Masturbation Month in May, we invite our customers to submit their top ten reasons to masturbate. We’ve printed a few of our favorites here.

• You never have to tell yourself, “A little to the left, a little higher, and a whole lot harder.”

• It’s a really good “pick-me-up” in the middle of the day when decaf is all that’s available in the office coffee room.

• Every time you do it you’re part of the world’s largest simultaneous experiment proving that masturbation does not cause blindness.

• What better way to have fun, keep the birth rate down, and reduce stress…all in just minutes a day.

• It’s a great way to sound animated on the phone while the parents are telling you about the latest goings-on in “the old neighborhood.”

• Self-serve is always cheaper.

• It’s less embarrassing if you call out the wrong name.

• Gets you into the mile-high club without too much hassle.

• You’d go insane if you didn’t do it.

• It’s always there when you need it.

Historical Perspectives

Why do we need to give you all these fantastic reasons to masturbate when according to the Kinsey Institute’s statistics, 94 percent of men and at least 70 percent of women already indulge in this marvelous pastime? Because most won’t admit it! Partly this is because we’re inherited a lot of negative misconceptions; we’d like to reveal some of the infamous history that has made masturbation a taboo activity down through the ages.

Masturbation in the Bible

In the Western world we often assume that all sexual proscriptions have their basis in the Bible. In fact, the Bible adopts no particular stand on masturbation. However, the story of Onan, which is found in the book of Genesis, is frequently interpreted as an injunction against masturbation. The story relates how Onan’s brother died childless. According to the customs of the time, if a married man died childless, it was the duty of the male next-of-kin to attempt to impregnate the dead man’s wife, to ensure the continuity of the family name and property rights. Any child born this way would be considered the offspring of the deceased. Onan was not inspired by this idea, “…so whenever he slept with his brother’s wife, he spilled his seed on the ground so as not to raise up issue for his brother. What he did was wicked in the Lord’s sight, and the Lord took his life” (Genesis 38:9-10). Onan’s spilling of seed (semen) has been interpreted as either masturbation or coitus interruptus, and just to be on the safe side, the Christian church has condemned both activities for centuries as sins against God.

The Economics of Ejaculation

The taboo against masturbation has its roots in the time-honored religious rejection of any sexual activity that is nonprocreative. It’s bolstered by a widespread tendency to apply an economic metaphor to the “spending” of bodily fluids. The notion that men have a predetermined, fixed allotment of sperm, and that every ejaculation depletes a finite store of this precious fluid, can be found in many cultures. Chinese Taoist sexual practices are based on the notion that female yin energy is inexhaustible, while male yang energy must be hoarded. Therefore, Taoist sexual techniques involve men controlling ejaculation and channeling semen back up to the brain. Aristotle wrote that semen is a valuable nutrient and that the loss of even a little of this nutrient results in exhaustion and weakness. This philosophy lives on in the modern superstition that male athletes shouldn’t weaken themselves by having sex the night before a big game.

The classic tract against masturbation, and one that influenced popular thinking on the subject for over a hundred years, was published by a Swiss doctor, S. A. Tissot, in 1758. His
Onanism: Treatise on the Diseases Produced by Masturbation
argued that the loss of a single ounce of semen was more debilitating than the loss of forty ounces of blood. Following this logic, a man who masturbated consistently gradually depleted his life force, becoming enfeebled, ill, and mentally deranged—ultimately, the madman could masturbate himself to death.

Despite the obvious fact that they do not produce semen, women were not exempt from Tissot’s theory of the destructive forces unleashed by masturbation. Tissot argued that masturbating women developed symptoms ranging from hysteria to lengthened clitorises, and were ultimately driven to uterine fury, “which deprives them at once of modesty and reason and puts them on the level of the lewdest brutes, until a despairing death snatches them away from pain and infamy.”

Nineteenth-Century “Cures”

Tissot’s work was first translated into English in 1832, and during the second half of the nineteenth century Europe and America saw an explosion of treatments designed to curb masturbation in children, men, and women. Doctors designated masturbation as the cause of most ailments that could not otherwise be explained or cured. Masturbation was blamed for mental illness and consumption. In a stunning display of circular logic, masturbation was blamed for the constitutional invalidism of Victorian women (who, had men allowed them to get out of the house and out of their corsets, would doubtless have been in excellent health).

Treatments for preventing masturbation ranged from the pathologically violent to the absurd. Turn-of-the-twentieth-century magazines featured advertisements for penile rings that were spiked on the inside so that any boy who experienced an erection during the course of the night would be woken in pain. Bondage belts, restraints, straitjackets, cauterizing irons, and even clitoridectomy (the surgical excision of the clitoris) were all methods used to dissuade young women from masturbating. These methods lived on into the new century in the more benign form of mittens put on children at bedtime so that they couldn’t easily play with themselves during the night.

American health reformers of the nineteenth century tackled masturbation as part of a larger problem of excessive excitation of the senses. Radical reformers felt that physical excitement of any kind—even the seemingly innocent pleasure of spicy food—was a dangerous drain, robbing one of the energy necessary for productive labor. Sylvester Graham assured young men that they would be capable of self-restraint if they followed a course of cold baths, fresh air, and bland, vegetarian food (such as the whole-grain cracker named after him). John Kellogg treated visitors to his Battle Creek Sanitarium with continence-inspiring cereals, and lectured that masturbation was “the vilest, the basest and the most degrading act that a human being can commit.” Graham and Kellogg were, however, at the extreme end of a continuum of medical literature. By the beginning of the twentieth century, attitudes were beginning to shift to an acceptance of sexuality as a force that needed only to be properly channeled, rather than totally reined in.

Twentieth-Century Acceptance

Sigmund Freud has had a tremendous influence on sexual attitudes in the modern world. On one hand, Freud normalized the varieties of sexual experience with his theory that every human being goes through homosexual, oral, anal, and narcissistic phases during childhood development. And yet, by decreeing penis-in-vagina sexuality to be the ultimate goal of sexual maturation, he effectively dismissed the enjoyment of all other sexual activities as proof of immaturity and inhibited development. The interpretation of masturbation as an immature activity lives on today, as does the equally unfounded Freudian theory that arousal from clitoral stimulation is somehow less mature than arousal from vaginal stimulation.

It was Alfred Kinsey, the trailblazer of sex researchers, who contributed the most to a destigmatization of masturbation. In interviews with thousands of men and women, Kinsey focused on gathering data on the precise sexual activities his subjects were actually engaging in. He was unique for his time, and ours, in treating all sexual activities with equal respect. Kinsey noted that masturbation was the activity most likely to result in orgasm for women, and spoke out against the Freudian notion of masturbation as an immature activity.

Yet even with the statistics to prove the ubiquity, and therefore presumably the “normalcy,” of masturbating, a stigma remains to this day. This isn’t surprising—for, despite the fact that there are countless excellent reasons to masturbate, there are just as many widespread fears and anxieties around doing so.

Why Is Masturbation Still a Four-Letter Word?

While it’s true that some people still believe the masturbation-leads-to-insanity myths just discussed, most are aware that these claims are untrue, serving only as a reminder that science and “morality” make dangerous bedfellows. What, then, is it that keeps masturbation, even today, cloaked in secrecy and denial?

A Tenacious Taboo

In many ways, the taboo against masturbation is the most long-standing and tenacious of sex taboos. We see this every day in our store. Individuals who are comfortable with the idea of buying sex toys to share with their partners become skittish, embarrassed, or downright irritable when it comes to buying a toy for solo use. The notion that masturbation is an immature activity or a second-rate substitute for partner sex has a powerful hold on the popular imagination. “If I were having enough partner sex, or good-enough partner sex,” the myth seems to go, “I wouldn’t need to masturbate.”

Apparently, the pure self-interest implicit in masturbation makes many people uncomfortable. Countless sex manuals acknowledge the universal practice of masturbation, yet it is often presented as a useful tool in the building of a better sex life, rather than as a pleasurable end in itself. It’s certainly true that masturbation provides valuable information about an individual’s sexual responses and preferences, and this information can in turn enhance sex with a partner. However, we question the notion that masturbation is, at best, a necessary means to the exalted end of better partnersex. A lot of people who consider themselves free of sexual hang-ups have simply rewritten the equation “Sex is only good if it involves procreation” to read “Sex is only good if it involves two loving people.” This myth gets exploited, not only by authors of sex books (though they can be the worst) but also by novelists, advice columnists, and screenwriters—think of the sex scene in the last movie you saw.

The philosophy motivating our work and this book is that sexual pleasure, whether arrived at alone or in a crowded room, is a perfectly valid end in itself. After all, it’s delightful to take a bath alone, eat a good meal alone, go for a bike ride alone, listen to music alone. It’s equally delightful to have sex alone. We like to think that there’s not a person alive whose life wouldn’t be greatly enhanced by masturbation.