It is important to distinguish the three levels of change: attitudes change most easily. Behavior follows at a slower pace. But our deep, unconscious feelings about what is right and wrong require generations to change, if they change at all.
We angrily deny that our own grown-up sexual behavior has anything to do with mother. As declarations of our independence and difference from her, we wear trendy, sexy clothes, talk the latest jargon, and genuinely be¬lieve we are light-years ahead of her. These are superficial changes, and they happen quickly, often overnight. We read a book, see a film, sit next to a brilliant, articulate stranger at dinner, and the next day we abandon the attitude about sex we’ve had all our lives. Suddenly adultery in a “mean¬ingful” relationship doesn’t sound so bad. Our attitude has changed.
It may take a bit longer before we act on our brave new opinion. We have an adulterous affair. But when we wake up in the stranger’s bed after a night of abandoned sex, we feel dirty, guilty. We don’t understand why. We have not taken into account the intractable unconscious.
We get our moral code, our deepest, often unconscious sense of what is right and wrong, from our parents, who got it from their parents. For ex¬ample, when women who think themselves sexually independent and re¬sponsible nonetheless become pregnant, they may be acknowledging their unconscious guilt – that what they did was wrong. They may not have taken into account the third level of change.
In my eagerness to defend masturbation as a healthy, pleasurable, educa¬tional act, I do not mean to suggest that it should take the place of intimacy with another person. Some of the women in this book who talk of mastur¬bating three or four times a day might be labeled compulsive by those who like to label – even if their masturbation is more life enhancing than the five hours a day of television that much of society admits to watching.
Nor do I mean to lay yet another command performance on women who may choose not to masturbate. The operative word is “choice.” Let me put it this way: I can imagine a sexually responsible woman who doesn’t mas¬turbate, but it sounds like the hard way.
Touching ourselves is the fundamental lesson in anatomy; learning what is “down there” makes us intelligent owners, more in control of what is ours. (It is sad but not surprising that many women say they don’t use a diaphragm because they are afraid to touch themselves.) Being able to give ourselves an orgasm is sexual independence; though it’s nice to have a partner, it’s important to know that for sex to take place it isn’t necessary. Giving ourselves an orgasm is the sexual equivalent of being able to pay our own rent.