by Betty Dodson
PARTNER-ASSISTED MASTURBATION
Some of my very best orgasms have been the result of masturbating while a lover does wonderful things to my body. Sometimes it’s licking or sucking my nipples; other times it’s doing slow in and out penetration with fingers or a dildo. Especially for women with short arms like myself, having a lover work my dildo is highly enjoyable. Or the addition of two extra hands caressing my body all over while I use my vibrator is absolute heaven. The assister gets the visual of his or her partner consumed with the combination of sensations.
On some days when Eric pulls on my robe with his teeth like a little doggie, tugging me toward the bed, he’s irresistible. I stop whatever I’m doing and join him. If I’m not in the mood for intercourse, partner-assisted masturbation is always fun. By the time I’ve reached for the massage oil, he has a hard on. He gets pushed over on his back and I start oiling his cock and balls. While he takes over his penis, I massage and lick his balls or stroke his buttyhole while he masturbates. Being close to the pungent smell of his testicles and watching him shoot a big load gives me more energy than a coffee break.
With my first ongoing woman lover, partner-assisted masturbation helped us through our feelings of tentativeness. We were both new at having sex with women, but we were proficient masturbators. Instead of doing oral sex or strapping on a dildo, which would have been a more advanced form of lesbian sex, we took turns heightening each other’s masturbation. During our five-year relationship, Laura and I ended up doing everything. As it turned out, our favorite form of sexual intimacy was sharing hours of massage and masturbation. The nondemanding sensuous touching of massage and being in charge of creating our own orgasms was healing us from years of feeling we had to please our lovers even if it meant sacrificing our own pleasure.
PARTNER-ASSISTED MASTURBATION. A woman is using her electric vibrator to stimulate her clitoris while her partner heightens her experience of orgasm with some form of erotic vaginal and anal touching or penetration.
The freedom to satisfy individual sexual desires frees men and women to get closer and be more in touch with each other, literally and figuratively. When it comes to affectionate touching, we can never get enough. One friend wishes her husband gave her half the affection that he lavishes on the dog. Another hesitates to hug her husband for fear he will misconstrue her show of affection as an invitation to have sex. Once couples incorporate masturbation into their partner sex and both know they are free to have an orgasm at any time, displays of affection with touching, hugging, and kissing can take on a life of their own.
THE HISTORY OF MASTURBATION
We would be wise to ask ourselves why people are so terrified of masturbation. When we take into account the entirety of humankind’s recorded history, the masturbation taboo is relatively recent. Touching one’s own genitals for sexual gratification has been practiced since the Stone Age. Small clay sculptures of masturbating figures dating from that time show acceptance of this human activity. Greek pottery from the fourth and fifth centuries b.c. depicts both women and men joyfully masturbating, along with graphic images of dildo use.
In ancient Egypt, the most popular creation myth was based on a daily masturbation ritual that took place in the Karnak temples built over four thousand years ago—information long-suppressed by scholars and religious authorities due to the embarrassment it still causes. The following text was taken from a wall at Karnak:
In the beginning there was chaos. Chaos was darkness, the waters of the abyss. The first God, Amon, arose from the waters using nothing but his own strength to give form to his body. Amon existed alone. All was his. Yesterday and tomorrow was his. Alone he took his penis in his hand. He made love to his fist. He made his exquisite joy with his fingers, and from the flame of the fiery blast which he kindled with his hand, the universe was formed.
At dawn every morning, priests and priestesses passed through the processional hallways that linked the three temples, arriving at the last room, the one that held the shrine of Amon Ra. There they reenacted the original creation of divine masturbation to raise the sun god for another glorious day. These ancient Egyptians self-created the source of their own spiritual power on a daily basis with divine masturbation—quite a departure from the majority of religions, which profane the human body and all forms of sexual pleasure.
In ancient Ireland, the Gaelic word for masturbation meant “self-love,” but with the arrival of Christianity it was changed overnight into “self-abuse.” Religious leaders had successfully turned a natural human activity into a sin for which God would punish them. The biblical story of Onan, who spilled his seed upon the ground and was struck dead by God, was interpreted as a warning against masturbation. However, later scholars reinterpreted the story of Onan and concluded that his crime was disobeying God’s order to fulfill his duty by getting his brother’s wife with child. Actually, masturbation is never mentioned in either the Old or New Testaments.
DOUBLE PENETRATION. Here we see a close-up of simultaneous vaginal and anal penetration while the woman uses a small battery-operated vibrator to stimulate her clitoris. Using plenty of massage oil, her partner heightens her pleasure by penetrating her vagina with his finger and then holding still. He then eases the Barbell inside her anus as she squeezes and releases her PC muscle. Once she is relaxed, he gently and slowly begins moving his finger and the Barbell in a counterpoint rhythm.
In both Europe and America, women healers were wrongfully accused of being witches and were burned at the stake. As witchcraft gradually lost its reputation as the major cause of madness, medical professionals took control by establishing masturbation as the next symptom of insanity. Naturally, these new priests of medical science had the only remedy. Cruel restraining devices, electrical shocks, deadly injections, and male and female circumcision were used to stop children and adults from touching their own genitals for gratification. This next fact belongs in Ripley’s Believe It or Not: It wasn’t until 1972 that the American Medical Association declared masturbation a normal sexual activity.
While politics can be an art or a science and religion a way to develop spiritual principles, more recently both have been used to deal with people in an opportunistic, manipulative, and power-hungry way. Once a person realizes how the prohibition of masturbation has been used as a strategy to control us, it becomes clear why people are sexually repressed. Many Catholics, Jews, Mormons, Protestants, and Muslims still believe masturbation is a sin. Quite a few of these people are sitting in Congress enacting and supporting laws that directly affect our sexual liberties.
The most common complaint at the top of the list for most married couples is incompatible sex drives. If I could pass a law that says all couples must take a sexual compatibility test before marriage, I would do so. It would also have a clause that says young men and women must be sexual with at least half a dozen partners before choosing one to marry. Most young couples today who have been married for about ten years have lived with the fear of contracting AIDS, so they ended up going steady throughout their twenties. There was little opportunity to experiment with different sex partners.
On top of that, children grow up with a sexual double standard for masturbation. Boys are expected to ejaculate as part of a biological need. Meanwhile, young girls are sexually repressed and masturbation is never mentioned or encouraged because girls can have an unwanted pregnancy once they hit puberty. Once a woman gets married, a sex fairy is supposed to come along, wave a magic wand, and turn her into a sexpot, but the lack of masturbation keeps her from having orgasms in partner sex. The only magic wand I’ve come across plugs into an outlet. My advice to men married to women who have little interest in sex is to get a Magic Wand along with my books and read them together. Talk about how to include masturbation in your lives.
As I head into my fourth decade of teaching and advocating the acceptance and advancement of masturbation, many people still think the idea is hysterically funny, and some think it’s downright disgust
ing. Yet more and more people are embracing masturbation for couples. They agree that the repression of masturbation is indeed the bottom line of sexual repression, and that the uninhibited practice of masturbation can often reverse this stifling sexual tyranny. As we become more at home in our sexual bodies, we will enjoy a more lighthearted form of pleasure in our relationships.
Share the good news with all of your close friends: Embracing masturbation is the foundation for mutually orgasmic partner sex. That statement will at least start an interesting conversation, I promise.
SHE WANTS MORE. After an hour of hot partner sex, she is still turned on and wants to come again. He is stroking her genitals while she uses the vibrator to have another orgasm. He’ll probably get another erection and they’ll have another round of penis/vagina intercourse.
9
SEX TOYS
For Couples Who Want to Have Fun
One afternoon in 1965, Grant was getting his scalp massaged by his barber with an electric vibrator when he thought, “This would be great for clitoral stimulation!” That same day he went to a barbershop supply store and bought one. The next evening he introduced me to the Oster vibrator. After applying massage oil to my cunt and warming me up manually, he calmly strapped the vibrator onto the back of his hand. At first I wasn’t sure about having an electric machine in bed with us, but his fingers were doing the vibrating. It was still skin on skin, so I thought it was probably okay. The orgasm I had was absolutely amazing, and I gradually accepted the vibrator as a sexual toy to play with from time to time.
In 1970, I showed a drawing of a woman using the same Oster vibrator as part of my second art exhibition. This resulted in a media blackout by reviewers and ended my relationship with the gallery. Convinced I’d discovered that the bottom line of sexual repression is the repression of masturbation, I decided to temporarily leave the art world to become involved with feminism and women’s sexual liberation. I began writing straightforward articles about the most effective use of electric vibrators and teaching women how to harness all that energy for sexual pleasure in my workshops.
At the first big NOW sexuality conference in 1973, I had the privilege of introducing electric vibrators to feminists for their orgasmic benefits. My lecture overflowed into the hallway. A year later, I published the first feminist book devoted entirely to the subject of self-pleasuring: Liberating Masturbation: A Meditation on Selflove. At that point, I was having difficulty finding electric massagers for my workshops, so I convinced my friend Dell Williams to start a mail-order business at home selling electric vibrators along with my book. The essential ingredients for every workshop was a case of electric vibrators, extension cords, and bottles of massage oil for genital massage and vaginal penetration with our fingers and cucumber dildos.
In 1975, Dell opened the first American erotic boutique for women, called Eve’s Garden. Since then, woman-owned sex stores have cropped up across the United States and Europe. These stores have become safe havens where women can get vibrators, dildos, lubricants, books, videos, and any other information they need to explore their sexuality.
Several years into singing the praises of electric vibrators, I became aware of the prejudice against women’s using them. Occasionally I would have moments of doubt, wondering if I was getting thousands of women addicted to electric orgasms. And if that was the case, what did it mean? The antivibrator flack came from different sources. First it was women who were hesitant to even try a vibrator for fear it would be the only way they could come. Many of these women were not having orgasms with a partner or with themselves, yet they were concerned about getting hooked on a sex toy. Convinced their orgasms should be the result of a lover’s touch, a tongue, or a penis, they preferred to wait for the right man to show up to get them off.
Another segment of dissenters in the seventies who cautioned me against using electric vibrators were women psychologists doing sex therapy. Most of them were dedicated to the idea that if a woman learned how to masturbate by hand, the man in her life could give her an orgasm manually, thus partially fulfilling the romantic image. Today, sex therapists rarely hesitate to recommend a battery or electric vibrator to help a woman overcome her inability to have an orgasm, so we have made some progress.
The last group to raise hell were men who would go to any length to eliminate all electric vibrators and vibrating dildos. Some believed sex toys were instruments of the devil that would destroy their two favorite sacred cows—motherhood and the family. Others were good old boys who had no intention of competing with a machine that, once it was plugged in, could go on and on indefinitely. The very idea that women might want partner sex to include orgasm meant that men would have to change their selfish ways. No longer could they simply ejaculate inside vaginas, then roll over and go to sleep. They felt threatened by vibrators.
But there were always smart men who saw vibrators as an ally, as something that could relieve them of the responsibility of providing her orgasm either manually or orally. These were the men buying the vibrators and bringing them into bed. They wanted their wives and girlfriends to get more turned on and to be able to enjoy partner sex more fully.
Until Joani Blank, the founder of the sex store Good Vibrations, had an exhibition of antique vibrators in the eighties, I had no idea about their long history. In the late 1800s, medical doctors were treating “hysterical” women by giving them hand jobs as an ongoing part of their practice. Female masturbation was forbidden, and since marital sex was limited to vaginal penetration that rarely produced an orgasm, women’s sexual frustration was labeled “hysteria” and classified as a chronic condition with many symptoms, like bouts of depression, fainting, nervousness, and generally disrupting family harmony (especially her husband’s) with a cantankerous disposition.
To maintain penis/vagina penetration as “normal” sexuality and safeguard men’s sexual self-esteem, these bad-tempered or depressed nonorgasmic women were sent to a doctor to be cured of a “disease.” The doctors would massage a woman’s genitals to orgasm, but they called it relieving her “hysterical paroxysms.” In response to physicians’ needs, the first electric vibrator was invented as a medical device. These machines reduced the time it took to give a woman an orgasm from about one hour to ten minutes, making doctors’ clinical practices far more lucrative. The Technology of Orgasm by Rachel Maines details the history of hysteria and the invention of vibrators.
Eventually women were able to buy electric vibrators for home use even before electric irons and vacuum cleaners were invented. Vibrators were sold through catalogs and advertised in respectable women’s magazines. But when they began appearing in pornographic films in the twenties, they were no longer made available to the general public. In my opinion, it was just men protecting their sexual self-esteem once again. Vibrators were not only a form of competition, but their use questioned society’s definition of “normal sexuality” and was a total upset for Freud’s beloved vaginal orgasm. From then on electric vibrators were primarily sold as massage machines to soothe sore muscles, or to stimulate men’s scalps to keep them from going bald.
Today, sex toys have become a billion-dollar business. Yet there is still prejudice against using a battery-operated or electric machine for more pleasurable orgasms because this kind of sex features the clitoris. Some states have actually outlawed the sale of dildos and vibrators. Imagine the kind of selfish insecurity that exists in a man who can’t bear the thought of his wife’s getting a little sexual pleasure from her clitoris instead of his penis.
As the clitoris makes its way into women’s definition of healthy female sexuality, I’m often asked the appropriate age for a woman to begin using a vibrator. Without any sexual repression, each woman would experience an easy progression of clitoral contact. In early childhood, she would explore her genitals manually and have the clitoris named by the time she was a few years old. Young girls would enjoy self-stimulation the way boys do. Teenage girls would explore having their clitorises touch
ed by someone else’s fingers with an opposite- or same-sex sweetheart. After securing some form of birth control, girls who like boys would begin to have penis/vagina sex. Adding manual clitoral stimulation during intercourse would be natural. In their thirties, some women might want to use a battery-operated or electric vibrator. By their forties, electric vibrators would be a welcome addition for clitoral stimulation.
Unfortunately, this kind of natural progression rarely happens. If a woman has reached her mid- to late twenties with little or no experience of masturbation, I recommend that she jump-start her sexual response with a battery-operated vibrator. If that doesn’t work, by all means use an electric, plug-in vibrator. I see no harm for young women who began masturbating with a vibrator, except it might upset a narrow-minded lover who needs to be the source of her orgasm. Why should it matter what type of clitoral stimulation a woman prefers as long as it works—whether she’s using her hand, a lover’s hand, an electric vibrator, a stream of water in the bathtub, or the spin cycle while leaning up against the washing machine?
